The Top 10 Blog Posts from the Secret Victorianist

I can hardly believe it, but I’ve now been running this blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture for over a decade! The blog has changed a lot over the years as I’ve made the move from London to New York City, my interests have evolved, and I’ve become a published author myself. 

So, in a belated anniversary celebration, I decided to look back through the archives to revisit my top 10 performing posts of all time. 

1. Are YOU an Elizabeth Bennet?

I started my blog with a bang and a LOT of enthusiasm, publishing 13 posts in the first month alone (nowadays my goal of two a month is more achievable). This post, a tongue-in-cheek look at whether I would cut it as an Austen heroine, was one of them. Pride and Prejudice (1813) remains such a cultural touchstone I’m not surprised this article still sees traffic every day—I mean, the 1995 BBC adaptation even got a shout-out in the recent Barbie movie!

2. Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’: An Exercise in Analyzing Poetry

You’ll see a lot of poetry-focused posts in this top 10 list, which was initially surprising to me. When I write about poetry my promotional posts don’t gain a lot of traction on social media, but when it comes to search engine traffic, those articles rise to the top. My hypothesis is that students are stumbling across my blog when looking for homework help analyzing poems like Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil.’ I can only hope they’re enjoying my write ups, and not just plagiarizing my analysis!

3. Introducing Victorian Poetry to Children

More poetry, but this time with a #KidLit twist. In this blog post I share some more accessible Victorian poems to get children excited about reading verse from the period. 

4. The Best and Worst Tropes in Historical Fiction

This 2018 post is focused on my personal opinions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to historical fiction tropes (and spoiler alert: I’ve already changed my stance on a few of these issues!). I’d be fascinated in hearing other readers’ views on this topic and what makes a historical novel great to them. 

5. ‘This Genealogical Passion’: Hardy, Incest and Degeneration

The high bounce rates I see from this page suggest that maybe an academic blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture isn’t quite what people are looking for when they Googled “incest” (!), but despite this I selfishly wish more people would read Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (serialized 1892), one of the strangest Victorian novels out there.

6. Review: Against Nature (À Rebours), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

I’ve written quite a lot about nineteenth-century French literature over the years, but this review of the premier text of the French Decadent movement is far and away the best performing.

7. A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft

In 2013-2015 I published a series of posts making a nineteenth-century connection to every single letter of the alphabet (yes, some were easier to think up than others!). While the Victorian period isn’t the one we most associate with witchcraft, this post has been a perennial top performer, especially as we approach Halloween. Here, I focus on the accusations of witchcraft leveled against the character of Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). I also link to my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella, Lois the Witch (1861).

8. A Victorian Alphabet: K is for ‘The Kraken’ (Tennyson, 1830)

More poetry and more Tennyson! In this post I take apart every line of this short and powerful poem about a creature from the deeps. 

9. Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

As a blogger focused on nineteenth-century literature and culture, I often have to contend with people’s preconceptions and misconceptions about what Victorians were like. In this early blog post I tackle the misinformation.

10. A Dickensian Masterclass in Repetition

This is the only writing craft post to make the top 10 and I’m not surprised it’s about lessons we can learn from the master of Victorian literature himself—Charles Dickens. While I do references Dickens’s most famously repetitious passages—the openings of Bleak House (serialized 1852-1853) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859)—it’s his lesser-read 1848 novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain that I do a close reading of here.

What would you like to see me write about next as the blog goes into its second decade? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Interested in getting regular updates from my blog and on my fiction? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Review: The Grey Woman, Elizabeth Gaskell (1861)

One of the coolest experiences I’ve had since the release of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, was when I was asked to write an introduction to Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) for a beautiful edition from Canadian publisher Plumleaf Press. The book is part of a trio of lesser-read classics by nineteenth-century women writers in the Plumleaf Vintage series, all with introductions penned by women historical novelists publishing today. 

Along with Anne Bronte’s masterpiece, there’s also Lady Susan by Jane Austen (1794), with a foreword by Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society (2020). And—I was surprised and delighted to find—completing the set is an Elizabeth Gaskell short story/novella I hadn’t read previously, The Grey Woman (1861). 

Molly Greeley, whose The Clergyman’s Wife (2019) I’ve reviewed on this blog, is the introduction writer for this slight but impactful Gothic tale. Expect to find many of the tropes of the genre—a frame narrative insisting on the veracity of the story; a strange house, filled with secrets; and a vulnerable young bride, whose husband is not all he seems. 

But this isn’t just a ripping yarn, or a familiar Victorian fable about the dangers of rushing into a marriage that appears too good to be true. Of most interest to me in the text was the friendship between our protagonist, Anne, and her lady’s companion, Amante. There are clear lesbian overtones to their relationship—from Amante’s name to her cross-dressing to (spoiler alert) a section where the two are cohabiting and even coparenting. The biggest disappointment of the piece is the “off-stage” conclusion of Amante’s story, though many readers will conclude what Gaskell only suggests—that Anne turns grey less from fear of her murderous husband than from grief at the loss of her female lover.

If you’re studying Gaskell and gender or looking for nineteenth-century fiction with a LGBTQ+ subtext, The Grey Woman is well-worth adding to your reading list. And for general readers? If you’re laboring under any misconception that Victorians all blushed at the sight of table legs, this novella is an entertaining antidote.

Which lesser-known nineteenth-century novel would you like me to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

VIDEO: Bronte's Mistress: A Talk at The Gaskell Society

 

'Brontë's Mistress - a talk by Finola Austin from Gaskell Society on Vimeo.

Review: Cousin Phillis, Elizabeth Gaskell (1864)

After months of blog posts dedicated to Neo-Victorian fiction and the publication of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, I’m back with a review of an actual nineteenth-century novel, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1864 Cousin Phillis.

This short and sweet work of Victorian realism ends abruptly (it was published in four parts, and Gaskell had apparently planned for parts five and six), but is otherwise a shining example of nineteenth-century domestic storytelling. The novel would make a great addition to student essays on Gaskell’s better-known works.

The plot is simple and undramatic. Engineer Edward Holdsworth meets Phillis Holman, the much-loved only daughter of a clergyman/farmer and his wife. But, while the young man is taken with her beauty, goodness and intelligence, he’s careless with her heart. 

More interesting is the perspective Gaskell chooses to tell the story from. Paul Manning, Phillis’s cousin and Holdsworth’s subordinate at the railway company, is our primary narrator. 

Paul’s own emotional life is never centred. He’s briefly attracted to Phillis, but soon sees her as a sister, since she is a couple of inches taller than him and better at reading Latin (!). When he meets the woman who will be his wife, he only dedicates one sentence to this momentous event. 

Paul struck me as something of a nineteenth-century Nick Carraway. And Gaskell’s skill is apparent in how she develops his character to make this short work into a bildungsroman through the lightest of touches. Paul’s error in repeating Holdsworth’s idle talk to Phillis is believable, naïve, and achingly human. The book may be quiet compared to the high drama of, say, Mary Barton (1848), but that doesn’t that its characters feel any less.

I’d love to watch the TV adaptation from 1982, but so far haven’t found anywhere to stream this particular costume drama online. 

Overall, if you love mid-nineteenth-century prose, Cousin Phillis is a worthwhile investment, even if, unlike for the century’s more famous unfinished novels, modern writers aren’t flocking to anticipate what Mrs Gaskell’s ending might have been.

Do you have a suggestion for which Victorian novel I should read, review or write about next? Let know here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you want updates on my writing and my own novel Bronte’s Mistress, sign up to my email newsletter below. 

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Neo-Victorian Voices: The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, Syrie James (2009)

With my own Bronte-inspired novel, Bronte’s Mistress, coming out in just (!) three months (August 2020) from Atria Books, I was so excited to read the next novel in my Neo-Victorian Voices series—Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte (2009).

The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, Syrie James (2009)

James’s novel may be titled a diary, but it reads more like a memoir—a novelisation of Charlotte Bronte’s life as she herself might have written it. Charlotte’s relationship with her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, is at the heart of the novel’s dramatic arc, but all the most compelling stories that make up the Bronte myth are here—from the early losses of two sisters and a mother that marred the Bronte siblings’ childhoods, to Charlotte’s time in Brussels, which formed the inspiration for much of her published work.

James does a wonderful job of interweaving fact and conjecture, and in bringing the Bronte household in Haworth to life. She always makes us aware of the limited space within the parsonage and the resulting difficulties of keeping anything secret between the adult siblings.

Reverend Bronte, the Brontes’ father, doesn’t come out of the story well. Otherwise, most characters are painted in accordance with Elizabeth Gaskell’s sensational Bronte biography, which makes a lot of sense, given her relationship was primarily with Charlotte. Emily loves the moors and is most comfortable with her dog, eschewing all other company. Anne is shy and religious. Branwell is a raving drunk, despite the promise of his youth.

It’s Charlotte herself whom, appropriately, we come to understand on a deeper level. I loved how James created a character with the perfect blend of outward awkwardness and internal passion. The book’s central romance raised a fascinating question: how could any real love even hope to compete with Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester in Charlotte’s eyes?

I think the novel would serve as a wonderful introduction to the lives of the Brontes, since the story cleaves so closely to the historical record. For those well versed in the Brontes’ works, the joy of reading the book comes in playing “spotting the sources” for the ideas, and sometimes passages, inspired by the sisters’ famous novels—and, of course, in getting access to Charlotte’s secrets as never before.

Which novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next in my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Plus, big news, if you’re signed up to my email newsletter already, or if you sign up this month (May 2020) using the link below, you’ll be in with a shot of winning one of two advance reader copies of Bronte’s Mistress, prior to its publication! My novel gives voice to Lydia Robinson, the older, married woman, who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, and offers a new perspective on English literature’s most famous family. Sign up below!

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The Poor Clare (1856), A Novella by Elizabeth Gaskell

I don’t usually include spoilers in my reviews, but The Poor Clare is obscure enough that in today’s post I’ll be throwing caution to the wind.

The work is a long short story/short novella by Elizabeth Gaskell, who’s better known for novel-length works including North and South (1854) and Mary Barton (1848), and for her biography of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which inspired my own forthcoming novel, Brontë’s Mistress.

The Poor Clare first appeared in serialised form in Household Words, a publication edited by Charles Dickens. Perhaps as a result of this, it alternates between feeling rushed and sorely in need of editing. There are no paragraph breaks, for instance, except in dialogue, and the development of the plot is uneven.

The story is narrated by an unnamed lawyer, who finds himself involved in ‘extraordinary events’ of a decidedly uncanny flavour. Employed to track down the rightful heir to a sizeable estate, he tracks down a strange old Irish woman, Bridget Fitzgerald, whose fervour for Catholicism is matched with a proclivity for meddling with magic. Bridget’s beautiful daughter, Mary, has disappeared years before, leading to her mother’s unhappiness and isolation. But now her child—if she had one—is next in line for this windfall inheritance.

What starts out like a mystery soon turns to a ghost story. Our lawyer tracks down the child, Lucy, more through luck than strategy, and promptly falls in love with her. But there’s a hitch. Lucy is suffering under a peculiar curse. She has a demonic double, which is hell bent on dogging her steps, ruining her reputation and driving men from her life. What’s more, it transpires that it was her own grandmother, Bridget, who unwittingly cursed her.

Gaskell writes Gothic well. Examples:

‘I was sitting with my back to the window, but I felt a shadow pass between the sun’s warmth and me, and a strange shudder ran through my frame.’

‘In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of a body it belonged.’

The tone felt most similar to Behind a Mask, an 1866 story by Louisa May Alcott, writing as A.M. Barnard, which I reviewed back in 2013. And the doubling motif is suggestive of earlier (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)) and later (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)) Gothic, as well as sensation fiction tropes. Notably, Laura, the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which appeared three years later, also suffers due to her near resemblance with another.

The Poor Clare takes an unexpected turn when our characters end up in war-torn Antwerp (only Bridget’s service to strict religious order, the Poor Clares, will be enough, it seems, to undo the curse). It’s tempting to imagine that Gaskell was inspired by the Brontës to depict a Belgian setting.

All in, although set earlier, Gaskell’s The Poor Clare is delightfully Victorian, with lots to recommend it despite its flaws. Short enough to read in one sitting, it could also serve as a great introduction for teens to Gothic fiction or as a quick-to-digest comparison text for students focusing on some of the more canonical novels in the genre.

Which lesser-known Victorian novels/novellas/stories would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here or on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And keep up with every facet of my life (reading, writing, work and life in NYC) via Instagram.

Announcement: My novel is being published!

I’ve been blogging as the Secret Victorianist since 2013, sharing my love of all things nineteenth-century literature and culture. This month I’m delighted to share that a historical novel of my own (set in the Victorian period—of course!) has been acquired by Atria Books, part of Simon & Schuster, for publication in 2020.

Lydia Robinson

What’s the novel about?

Titled Brontë’s Mistress, my novel is based on the true, heretofore untold story of Lydia Robinson and her affair with Branwell Brontë. The novel gives voice to the courageous, flawed, complex woman slandered in Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) as the ‘wicked’ elder seductress who corrupted the Brontë brother, driving him to an early grave and bringing downfall on the entire Brontë family.

When can I read it?

Stay tuned for the exact date the novel will be available for order and pre-order. But it’ll be in 2020.

How can I get MY novel published?

Every writing career is different, but I’ll be sharing blog posts over the next year about my own writing and publication journey. Topics will include conducting research for historical fiction, writing tools, finding a literary agent and more. If you have any burning questions or topics you’d love me to cover please tweet me @SVictorianist.

What about your normal content?

Don’t worry! It’s business as usual. I’ll still be reviewing other twenty-first-century-written/nineteenth-century-set historical novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering art exhibitions and theatrical productions related to the period and blogging on the wide array of topics I’ve been writing on for the last six years. If you have feedback about the ratio of writing-related to non-writing-related content, please let me know.

Are you excited?

I am so happy to be able to share this part of my life with you, and my novel itself next year. Reading the experiences of other writers has been invaluable to me as I’ve written my novel and gone through the submissions process. I hope I can be helpful to you too.

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The Best and Worst Tropes in Historical Fiction

As part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series I’ve been reading a fair few novels set in the nineteenth century but written in the twenty-first. And in the process I’ve formed a lot of opinions about the tropes I love and those I don’t love as much when it comes to the historical novel.

Today it’s time to share my highly subjective list:


1. The protagonist ahead of her time 
This one’s a no from me. This character is prone to crying, “why can’t women vote?” She abandons her corset, making sure the reader knows she sees it as a sign of oppression. And she feels the wrongs of the world around her very keenly—is concerned about child labour, slavery, the plight of the poor.

Of course there were suffragettes and abolitionists in the nineteenth-century—many of whom would make wonderful characters in a novel. What I object to, and what makes this character so insufferable, is that she’s always on the right side of history and that her views are always too neatly aligned with contemporary norms. Writers, take note—give us nuance and characters that challenge as well as mirror our current values.


2. The dual narrative
This one’s controversial but I’ve rarely read a novel that switches between a modern and historical storyline where both halves are equally engaging and exciting. All too often the contemporary protagonist serves only to model the desired reader response to the imbed narrative, or as a near constant reminder that the older story is in the past, distancing us emotionally from the novel.

I read historical fiction to be immersed in a time period that’s not my own. If you really want to give some modern context consider a framing device instead.


3. Faceless servants
Servants, with some notable exceptions, get little page time in Victorian novels but that doesn’t mean that twenty-first-century novels need to follow this form. There’s so much drama to be had from the close proximity that servants and masters lived in—it’s a waste to write yet another faceless or stereotyped maid.


4. The marriage plot (with sex)
Now onto the tropes I love. One of the reasons we still read Austen, Gaskell and the Brontes is because of the perennial appeal of the marriage plot. And guess what? In neo-Victorian novels we don’t just have haughty heroes, dramatic proposals, unexpected elopements. We have all that plus sex scenes.

Historical fiction gives us the chance to learn the stories that were never told before—of nineteenth-century lesbian lovers, of the porn industry in the early days of photography. And, since works from the period are out of copyright, we can essentially enjoy steamy fan fiction in published form.


5. Literary cameos
Most writers of historical fiction are in dialogue with writers from the period they’re depicting and sometimes these literary icons turn up in character form.

This one’s a winning formula for me. Who doesn’t want to go back in time and meet Jane Austen? Or get to know Stephen Crane?


6. Genre mash ups
The novel was still young in the nineteenth-century. But today there is a host of developed genres with popular followings and tropes of their own. So bring on the historical novels with fantasy and sci-fi elements—clockwork octopuses, magical circus tents and all.


Do you agree with my list? I’d love to know what tropes you love (and hate to see) in historical novels. Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Quiz: Match the subtitle to the Victorian novel

You know the title. But do you know the subtitle?

The Birth of the Brontë Legend: Reading Gaskell reading Charlotte

Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, two years after its subject’s death, is the kind of text that today seems more often to be quoted than read.

At any rate this is certainly true amongst the undergraduate population. As an English Literature student I had some idea of those aspects of Charlotte’s life that Gaskell emphasised (Charlotte’s closeness to her siblings, her sense of duty, and her mental strength compared with her physical weakness) and those aspects that the biographer chose to downplay (Charlotte’s relationships with Belgian schoolteacher M. Heger and her publisher George Smith, for instance, or the identification of Jane Eyre’s Lowood with the Clergy Daughters’ School, where Maria and Elizabeth Brontë died).

But reading The Life now, after years steeped in Brontë-lore (e.g. other biographies all of which took Gaskell as their starting point, exhibitions such as the Morgan’s wonderful bicentenary celebration), is a fascinating experience. Gaskell set out to memorialise her friend and fellow novelist, but what she set in motion was a cult-like fascination with, not just Charlotte’s novels, but the personality behind them, the family that lead to them, and the very land that now bears the name of ‘Brontë country’.

The Brontë Parsonage today

Here are a few aspects of the biography that stood out most to me as having had a profound effect on the afterlife of the Brontë ‘myth’:

1. ‘Explaining’ the Brontës through reference to their environment and isolation

Gaskell begins the biography with a detailed description of Keighley, Haworth and the surrounding countryside, emphasising the neighbourhood’s bleakness and relative isolation.

A representative paragraph:

All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be.

Throughout The Life, she emphasises the uniqueness of the Brontë children’s upbringing in such an environment, painting the moors as the perfect backdrop for literary inspiration – something many later interpreters of the family’s lives have followed her in. She also establishes a connection between Emily in particular and the moorland, another commonplace in the Brontë fable. Here, she quotes from one of Charlotte’s letters:

My sister Emily loved the moors.  Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; —out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside, her mind could make an Eden.  She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty.

Cut off from civilisation, set apart from their peers and raised in the wild, the siblings are described as strangely old before their time:

The hieroglyphics of childhood were an unknown language to them, Gaskell writes.

2. The romanticisation of the Brontës’ early deaths

Linked to this is the romanticisation of the siblings’ deaths, so close together and so tragically young. Gaskell ends the first chapter of the biography by quoting the inscription on the Haworth church tablet in full (the tablet that existed then but was later replaced) and we are never allowed to forget the imminent threat of illness, the fragility of the family as a whole:

Now Emily was far away in Haworth—where she or any other loved one, might die, before Charlotte, with her utmost speed, could reach them, as experience, in her aunt’s case, had taught her. 

This depiction of the Brontës as close to death, even from infancy, and crushingly aware of their own mortality is relatively commonplace, but we’d do well, I think, to consider the normality of fatal illnesses in society at this time. The Brontës might have been especially unlucky, but they were not unique in the number of tragedies they underwent. In Gaskell’s rendering Charlotte’s approach to death is most striking in its pragmatism and religious conviction.

3. The emergence of Branwell as a shadowy and intriguing figure

Finally, Gaskell’s excessive praise of Branwell, despite his ‘faults’ and ‘vices’, set the tone for decades of speculation about the Brontë brother.

He was very clever, no doubt; perhaps to begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family. The sisters hardly recognised their own, or each others’ powers, but they knew his.  

The boy who should have been a genius, an artist, or the greatest novelist of all has been a strange addition to the story of three female writers of extraordinary talent. Gaskell was trying to prove Charlotte’s femininity, to praise her sisterly pride in her brother. Instead, she spawned various conspiracy theories.

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