Neo-Victorian Voices: New Nineteenth-Century-Set Novels

My last few fiction reads have been set in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, so today I’m doing something a little different as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series: sharing a list of recently released and soon-to-be-released nineteenth-century-set novels I’m interested in reading. 

Hocus Pocus, Brinda Charry (expected August 2026)

India-born, US-based novelist Charry brings us a global nineteenth-century setting in her tale of an 1800s magician. I’m looking forward to seeing how she transports us to India, London, and Boston in 1816.

The Red Sacrament, Sara Hinkley (published July 2026)

A clan of vampires performing onstage in nineteenth-century Paris? I’m sold. And I hope Hinkley has brought her aesthetic sensibilities as a costume designer to her debut novel!

Land, Maggie O’Farrell (published June 2026)

Bestselling historical novelist O’Farrell turns to the period following the Irish Famine in her latest novel, which opens with a father and son mapping Ireland for the British.

Daughters of the Sun and Moon, Lisa See (published June 2026)

I very much enjoyed Lisa See’s 2005 Snow Flower and The Secret Fan, which I reviewed for this blog back in 2018, so I’m intrigued to read her tale of three Chinese women who arrive in Los Angeles in 1870.

The Foursome, Christina Baker Kline (published May 2026)

Kline draws from her own family history to tell the story of Sarah and Adelaide Yates, sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina, who married Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins from Siam.

 A Perfect Hand, Ayelet Waldman (published May 2026)

A lady’s maid tries to manipulate her employer into marriage to win her own happily ever after—this romantic romp sounds really fun!

Let me know if any of these novels are also on your TBR and what else I should add to my list. Want to keep up with my reviews of these novels and more? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter or stay in touch via Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Arctic Fury, Greer Macallister (2020)

The novels I’ve reviewed as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on books written in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth, have run the gamut in terms of “historical accuracy”. Some writers were inspired by a real person’s biography, as I was in my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress. Others continued or expanded the stories of nineteenth-century fictional characters or imagined entirely original stories within historic settings. In her latest novel, The Arctic Fury, Greer Macallister dreams up an all-female expedition to the Arctic in search of the lost Franklin expedition. Did this really happen? No. Does it make for an entertaining story? You bet.

Virginia Reeve is employed by Franklin’s wife, under mysterious circumstances, to lead an all-female party in search of the missing men, but only some of the women return. She finds herself on trial for the murder of one of those who followed her North. The novel progresses in a dual timeline as we learn if Virginia will face conviction and potentially punishment by death, as well as what really happened on the women’s hazardous journey.

I appreciated the novel’s great pacing and Macallister’s ability to keep the trial storyline and the flashbacks equally engaging. I also loved how many of the women were inspired by real historical figures. An all-woman team mightn’t have gone to the Arctic in the 1800s, but there were plenty of intrepid female explorers, cartographers and mountaineers, whose exploits find new life in these pages. 

Macallister also makes the brave choice to give every member of the expedition her own point of view section, though Virginia is without doubt our main character. This means we get to hear a diverse array of voices and helps us form emotional connections with what could have been an unwieldy cast.

While a protagonist withholding information from us is a personal bugbear, the revelations of the ending are well done. This is a book that will appeal to those who love courtroom drama, as much as those intrigued by a story of women battling the elements.

Which recently published, nineteenth century set novel would you like me to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

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Review: A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells (1889)

William Dean Howells’s 1889 A Hazard of New Fortunes is the sort of nineteenth-century novel that remembers it has a plot halfway through. 

The early chapters read like a time capsule of 1880s New York City, as Bostonian Basil March and his wife Isabel search for an apartment and explore what the metropolis has to offer, following his appointment as editor of a new periodical. Howells’s satire feels humorous, rather than biting, and there’s much that a twenty-first-century inhabitant of the city will find familiar. 

By later chapters, however, the novel seems transformed into something entirely different. The cast of characters, who felt like caricatures at the book’s opening, seem drawn towards a terribly realistic tragedy, which pulls off the writerly feat of being “surprising but inevitable.” Satire evolves into social commentary that doesn’t let readers off the hook. Where would our loyalties lie in the clash of outlooks personified by the uncultured capitalist Dryfoos and the idealistic socialist Lindau? And can the “reasonable” March (and by extension the reader) find a tenable position in the middle?

Class is not the only social question to come under scrutiny. Howells gives us beautiful, young female characters who defy their conventional roles in nineteenth-century society, and the novels that depict it. Alma Leighton begins the book as a young woman playing games with a man to wound him for neglecting her, but by the end of the novel her dedication to her art over matrimony is no ruse. Margaret Vance’s love is centered on her charitable works—something her family struggles to understand. 

Howells’s commentary on race also has a modern tinge. He doesn’t shy away from depicting the casual racism of the Northern characters, who, for instance, fetishize having Black doormen, even as they try to distance themselves from the Southern characters, including one who, more than twenty years on from abolition, is still advocating for reform, not destruction, of the “institution.”

The novel A Hazard of New Fortunes most reminded me of was E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), though the former’s structural flaws mean it’s remembered more for its multiple chapters on New York real estate woes than for its insight into the human condition. If you’re a fan of nineteenth-century realism with a love for New York, you’ll enjoy Hazard as much as I did. But, if only one of these things holds true, don’t forget—this is a novel of two halves.

What nineteenth-century novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to read and review next? Let me know. You can always contact me on Instagram or Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. My own (nineteenth-century set) novel, Bronte’s Mistress, is available in hardcover, paperback, e-book or audiobook, right now. And for monthly updates on my writing and my blog, sign up for my email newsletter below.

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Neo-Victorian Voices: The Witch of Willow Hall, Hester Fox (2018)

Whichever book I reviewed next as part of Neo-Victorian Voices series had a tough act to follow, since I’d rated The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer so highly. This time I went to the more commercial end of the spectrum with Hester Fox’s recent debut, The Witch of Willow Hall, set in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

The Witch of Willow Hall, Hester Fox (2018)

Our main character, Lydia Montrose, is a Boston-born witch who doesn’t know it, a descendent of one executed in Salem two centuries before. The novel also features a fair number of ghosts/spirits—hostile and friendly—and supernatural happenings, as well as family secrets that would still shock today.

But overall it feels like a book for lovers of Austenian romance, rather than horror fans. There is sister rivalry and a central marriage plot, and gowns and a ball are key topics of conversation.

Hester Fox

It’s all solid, silly, historical fiction fun. The novel is in first person, present tense, giving it a YA feel, and, while the setting is an unusual one and anachronisms are generally avoided (except in some of the modern sounding dialogue), Fox didn’t teach me much about 1820s New England.

The pacing and plotting are good and Lydia is a well-developed heroine, with love interests who have personalities of their own. I wanted her sister Catherine to show a little more depth by the ending. The siblings’ relationships are a high point of the novel but I was looking for a little complexity about the rights and wrongs of Lydia and Catherine’s points of view.

If you like your costume dramas with a shadow of darkness, this may well be a good winter read for you.

Which twenty-first century written, nineteenth-century set, novels would you like the Secret Victorianist to read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: French Pastels—Treasures from the Vault at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Dandelions against tangled grass, the soft folds of a ballerina’s tutu, a farmyard quilted with snow—these are just some of the scenes nineteenth-century French painters bring to life in a Boston exhibition dedicated to a medium known for its difficulty to preserve, as well as its evocative sensory effects.

Dandelions, Jean-Francois Millet (1867-8)

Many of the Museum of Fine Art’s pastels are delicate and rarely seen on display but, even more than Impressionist paintings, they capture a moment in time and in French art history.

Monet used them to record a fleeting sunset and Degas to immortalise dancers at work (you can even see the former outline of limbs he’s corrected, ghostly appendages suggesting dynamic movement and the challenges of conveying this through a static image).

Dancers Resting, Edgar Degas (1881-5)

Works by Pissaro, Cassat, Manet and Renoir are also on display, as well as pastels by Millet, whose darker scenes demonstrate the versatility of the technique. In common parlance ‘pastel’ suggests a light and inoffensive colour-way, yet depth and texture are what’s all important in the works of these artists.

Farmyard by Moonlight, Jean-Francois Millet (1868)

The exhibition only encompasses two small rooms but the quality of the works more than makes up for the small size. It may be another decade before you have the chance to see these pastels in person again, so, if you’re in Boston, visit while you can.

Cottages in the Snow, Johan Frederik Thaulow (1891)

Which exhibitions focused on the nineteenth-century would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

University Greek Plays, in America

A couple of weeks ago the Secret Victorianist attended a production of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, staged by the students of Barnard College here in New York City. It was my second ‘Greek Play’, as I was also at Oxford’s most recent Greek Play in 2014—a production of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers. And, during my Masters, I had also spent time investigating the homosocial and publishing culture around the 1900 Cambridge Greek Play—Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—(a subject I’ve blogged about before).

The Harvard Greek Play in 1906

My night at Barnard however made me wonder about the history of the Greek Play in America. Were American universities slower to join in the nineteenth-century renaissance of performances in Ancient Greek than their British counterparts? The programme told me Barnard’s Greek Play was an annual event, but only one dating back to 1977. I wanted to do some more digging to find out.

What I found was a fascinating journal article from the Classical Journal, published October 1910. D.D. Hains’s ‘Greek Plays in America’ is a topline summary of American institutions’ performances of classical plays in ancient languages, and translation, and shows the speed with which these universities took to the tradition being established in Britain.

Oxford’s first Greek Play was an Agamemnon given in 1880, which was later repeated in Eton, Harrow and London. Cambridge’s inaugural Greek Play, Ajax, came two years later in 1882.

But Harvard University in fact nearly pipped Oxbridge to the post. A production of Antigone was originally planned to celebrate the opening of the Sanders’ Theatre in 1876, but was ultimately abandoned. And so Harvard’s first Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus, was actually performed in May 1881. The venture was an immediate success. The five performances drew audiences totaling 6,000 and a professional company took the production, in translation, to New York and Boston for an additional two weeks.

The University of Toronto's Antigone (1882)

I was also surprised to find that the second university Greek Play on the American continent was Canadian. Toronto University staged Antigone in 1882 and, again, in 1894.

The University of Pennsylvania can lay claim to the first Greek comedy, the Acharnians, in 1886, while Smith College was the first with a female cast, producing Sophocles’ Electra in 1889.

Haines estimates 101 performances based on Ancient Greek drama at 47 American institutions between 1881 and 1910, with around half as many in Latin from a slightly reduced pool of universities. His conclusion that ‘the increasing number of such performances augurs happily for the future of the classics in our schools and colleges’ might have been slightly optimistic, but the tradition does live on at schools like Barnard, even as the popularity of a classical education has waned.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist blog about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.