Neo Victorian Madness Rediagnosing Nineteenth Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media 1St Ed Edition Sarah E Maier Full Chapter

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing
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Literature and Other Media 1st ed.
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Neo-Victorian
Madness
Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century
Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media
Edited by
Sarah E. Maier
Brenda Ayres
Neo-Victorian Madness
Sarah E. Maier · Brenda Ayres
Editors
Neo-Victorian
Madness
Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness
in Literature and Other Media
Editors
Sarah E. Maier Brenda Ayres
University of New Brunswick Liberty University
Saint John, NB, Canada Lynchburg, VA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-46581-0 ISBN 978-3-030-46582-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert J. Moore who granted us permission to use his painting

Ophelia Surfacing on our cover.
We are so grateful for the pioneering work in neo-Victorianism, start-
ing with David Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff in 2000 who published a
collection of essays, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the
Nineteenth Century. Peter Widdowson in 2006 called it “re-visionary fic-
tion,” Sally Shuttleworth in 2006 labelled it “the retro-Victorian novel,”
Cora Kaplan in 2007 called it “Victoriana” and preferred the term “Neo-
Victorian” and Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn in 2010, liked “Neo-
Victorianism.” Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss published an
invaluable collection in 2014 titled Neo-Victorian Literature and Cul-
ture: Immersions and Revisitations. In that volume, Marie-Luise Kohlke
referred to “neo-Victorian’s shape-shifting” (2) and asserted that we were
currently busy tapping into the “cultural gold rush vein of neo-Victorian
literature” (21). There have been others, too, who have asked why we
are rewriting the Victorian past, but no one has analysed what specifically
neo-Victorian is doing to correct the Victorians’ perceptions about mental
illness. This is what Neo-Victorian Madness has attempted to do.
We want to express our great appreciation for the contributors of this
volume: Marshall Needleman Armintor, Barbara Braid, Rachel M. Friars,
John Murray, Kate Faber Oestreich, Tim Posada, Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw
and Eckart Voigts.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ayres wants to thank the generosity of Penn State’s library that loaned
her hundreds of books and articles in order to do this project.
Aside from always being grateful for the support of Violet & Gido,
Maier would like to acknowledge her indebtedness to several people for
her interest in neo-Victorian madness and the history of hysteria, includ-
ing Juliet McMaster, Elaine Showalter and Naomi Schor; and to Christine
Coleman for teaching her the difference between savoir and connaître.
Contents
1 Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind 1

Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier
Bibliography 20
2 “I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in

Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre 27
Kate Faber Oestreich
Bibliography 46
3 “We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse 49

Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres
Bibliography 69
4 The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen

in Laura Fish’s Strange Music 73
Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw
To Be Guilty Is to Be Mad—Elizabeth 78
Like Mother Like Daughter—Kaydia 84
Not Your Negro—Sheba 89
Bibliography 93
vii
viii CONTENTS
5 “A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s

Survivors’ Club Novels 97
Brenda Ayres
Book 1: The Proposal (2012) 103
Books 2 and 3: The Suitor (2013b) and The Arrangement
(2013a) 107
Books 4 and 5: Escape (2014a) and Only Enchanting
(2014b) 110
Book 6: Only a Promise (2015a) 111
Book 7: Only a Kiss (2015b) 114
Book 8: Only Beloved (2016) 115
Bibliography 117
6 Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and

Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and
Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I 121
Eckart Voigts
Bibliography 141
7 “Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror

and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson
Petal and the White 145
Marshall Needleman Armintor
Houses in Order and “Playing with Dolls”: The
Non-maturation of Agnes Rackham 148
Dear Holy Sister: Divine Eroticism and Shared Identities 152
Retracing the Narratives of Madness: The Journals of Agnes
Rackham 155
The Woman in White and the Singularity of Vision 158
Bibliography 163
8 The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and

Ripper Street 167
Puberty and Menarche 172
Sexual Desire and Nymphomania 174
Childbirth, Puerperal and Lactational Insanity 177
Menopause and Old Maids 178
Mad Women 179
CONTENTS ix
Neo-Victorian Revisions of Female Sexuality 179

Sexual Desire, Nymphomania and Slumming 183
Questionable Pregnancy and Deathly Childbirth 184
Puberty and/as Trauma for Girlchildren 189
Lost/Found Children and Postpartum Despair 190
Threats, Menopause, Grief and Old Maids 191
Woman’s Unmentionable Madness(es) 194
Bibliography 197
9 Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Its Adaptation 203
Barbara Braid
Queerness as Non-normativity and the Madwoman 207
Grace Marks: A Victorian Hysteric 212
A Madwoman’s Queer Identity and Narrative 216
Conclusion: Being Queered by the Madwoman 223
Bibliography 225
10 Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman

and Penny Dreadful 229
Tim Posada
An Old Monster 229
Diagnosing Hysteria 231
Fragile Male Superegos 237
A New Hysterical Woman 241
An Old Curse 246
Bibliography 248
11 The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock 253

John C. Murray
Bibliography 276
12 Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in

Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives 281
Sarah E. Maier
Bibliography 300
Index 303
Notes on Contributors
Marshall Needleman Armintor is Principal Lecturer in English at the

University of North Texas. His research interests are primarily in
twentieth-century British literature and critical theory, especially psycho-
analysis; his book Lacan and the Ghosts of Modernity: Masculinity, Tradi-
tion, and the Anxiety of Influence (Peter Lang) was published in 2004.
He has taught a wide range of courses at UNT since 2003, with topics
ranging from graphic novels, to James Joyce, to Victorian literature and to
videogame narrative. He maintains a blog on theory, neo-Marxism, and
art in the age of late capital at posthegel.com.
Brenda Ayres is the coeditor of this volume and has coedited several
past collections of essays with Sarah E. Maier, the most recent being
Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020); Animals
and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and Reinventing Marie
Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (2019). She edited Victorians and
Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (2019) and Biographical Misrepresenta-
tions of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nine-
teenth Century (2017). Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Woll-
stonecraft (2017) is her latest monograph.
Barbara Braid earned her Ph.D. degree at Opole University, Poland,
and currently holds a position of Assistant Professor and Deputy Head
at the Institute of Literature and New Media in Szczecin University.
Her most recent publications include: “The Frankenstein Meme: Penny
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dreadful and The Frankenstein Chronicles as Adaptations” in Open Cul-

tural Studies 1 (2017) and “A Psychiatrist as a Detective: Laszlo Krei-
zler, Stratham Younger, and Max Liebermann” in: Victorian Detectives
in Contemporary Culture: Beyond Sherlock Holmes, Palgrave Macmillan,
2017. She is currently working a monograph on female insanity motifs in
Victorian and neo-Victorian novels.
Rachel M. Friars is a Ph.D. student at Queen’s University. Her disser-
tation centres on neo-Victorian lesbian narratives and nineteenth-century
lesbianism, with a particular focus on the ways in which female authors
construct a revised sexual history of the Victorian age. Her research areas
include Victorianism, neo-Victorianism, Charlotte Brontë, queer theory,
gender theory and lesbian and trauma studies.
Sarah E. Maier is the coeditor of this volume and Professor of English &
Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick. With Brenda
Ayres she has coedited Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the
Past (2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019)
and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (2019). Most
recently, she has published extensively on the Brontës; edited special issues
on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Neo-Victorian Considerations; Charlotte
Brontë at the Bicentennial; and published articles on biofiction and neo-
Victorian narratives. Her current interests include neo-Victorian Young
Adult Narratives and redheads.
John C. Murray is a professor of English and has served as Co-chair of
the Humanities Division and Coordinator of the Department of English
at Curry College. He teaches courses in British literature and film and
novel. He published Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period (Cam-
bria, 2010), as well as numerous chapters, articles and reviews for Lex-
ington Books, the Journal of Literature and Science, the Journal of Con-
temporary Thought, Nineteenth Century Studies and The British Society for
Literature and Science Book Reviews. He was recently appointed to serve
as assistant book reviews editor for The British Society for Literature and
Science website.
Kate Faber Oestreich is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Car-
olina University in Conway, South Carolina. She and Jennifer Camden
have coauthored a book titled Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digi-
tal’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (2018). She has pub-
lished four articles: “Deviant Celibacy: Renouncing Dinah’s Little Fetish
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
in Adam Bede” in Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of

Heterosexual Desire in Literature, edited by Richard Fantina (McFarland,
2006), “Gothic Remediation: The Castle of Otranto and The Monk” in
The College English Association Critic (2011); “Sue’s Desires: Sexuality
and Reform Fashion in Jude the Obscure” in Victorians Institute Journal
(2013) and “‘Orlando About the Year 1840’: Woolf’s Rebellion Against
Victorian Sexual Repression Through Image and Text” in Nineteenth-
Century Gender Studies (2016).
Tim Posada is Chair of Journalism and New Media at Saddleback Col-
lege. His writings have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture; Pal-
grave Communications and in volumes on film theory, digital media,
comics studies, race and gender in speculative fiction and on the hyste-
ria trope. He contributed a chapter on male hysteria in horror cinema
for Leuven University Press’ forthcoming Performing Hysteria. He is cur-
rently working on a book for Lexington Books/Fortress Academic on de-
pictions of the body, soul and spirit across popular culture. Posada holds a
Ph.D. in cultural studies from Claremont Graduate University, where he
wrote his dissertation on the emerging language of superhero media. He
also serves as film columnist for the Beverly Press.
Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at
the University of Zurich, where she is working on her dissertation on the
intersection of race and sexuality in a British-Caribbean context in both
Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives. She holds an M.A. in English Lit-
erature and a B.A. in English Linguistics and Literature from the Univer-
sity of Zurich. Her other research interests include feminism, gender and
fan fiction.
Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature and Culture at TU
Braunschweig, Germany and former President of CDE (2010–2016). He
is the coeditor of Companion to Adaptation (Routledge 2018), Dystopia,
Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse (WVT, 2015), and a special issue of Adap-
tation on Transmedia Storytelling (OUP, 2013). From 2016 to 2019 he
was co-PI of a research project on “British-Jewish Theatre,” and from
2019 to 2022 he will be co-PI of the research project “Automated cre-
ativity in literature and music” (both funded by Volkswagen Founda-
tion). The author of several research papers on neo-Victorianism, he also
coedited Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate, 2014) and Transforming Cities.
Discourses of Urban Change (Winter, 2018).
List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 At the end of episode one, Agnes appears as an apparition to

Sugar from her bedroom window 159
Fig. 7.2 Near the conclusion of episode three, Agnes urges her
traumatised body to escape 160
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies

of the Mind
In any given university in 1990, clusters of graduate students were dis-

cussing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) alongside The Madwoman in the Attic
(1979) and pondering the parallels between Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha
and Jane as drawn by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and their compos-
ite daguerreotype of oppressed women everywhere (356–62). In Gilbert
and Gubar’s words: “Everywoman in a patriarchal society must meet and
overcome: oppression (at Gateshead), starvation (at Lowood), madness
(at Thornfield), and coldness (at Marsh End)” (339). Gilbert and Gubar
pitched Bertha as Jane’s evil or, to use their term, the “monitory image”
of Jane (361). Perhaps Brontë was simply being “Victorian” in depicting
a Creole as the uncivilised, demonic, sensual woman who must be sup-
pressed and harnessed, a dangerous creature who must be locked up in
the attic of any proper woman’s being, but for those doctoral candidates
who were hot on the trail of postcolonial atrocities, this treatment would
not do.
B. Ayres (B)
Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, USA
S. E. Maier
University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_1
2 B. AYRES AND S. E. MAIER
The scholarship of the nineties was on a feminist cusp of rewriting

great wrongs to women and championing writers like Jean Rhys who
adjusted the cosmos by giving voice to the female, Antoinette Cosway
in Wide Sargasso Sea.1 Rhys’ was a more “authentic” story that had once
been silenced by Brontë, that unwittingly imperialistic coloniser from the
moors even if she herself had been an oppressed woman. Rhys gave voice
to one of the most famous sulbaltern of all literature, Bertha. In Rhys’
account, the Creole woman’s confinement in the attic was not to be con-
strued as the unfortunate trial for the impotent and to-be-pitied Edward
Fairfax Rochester and the hapless impediment to the happiness of one
long-suffering white, British governess, Jane Eyre. Rhys described the
purloin of Antoinette’s name and identity as the beginning of a wom-
an’s forced descent into darkness, a usurping of persona that led to her
insanity, imprisonment and death. Bertha/Antoinette was the casualty
from a collision between cultures in which the man had the power of the
coloniser, and the woman had no power, not only because of her gender
but also because of her race. Never did this attic inmate get to say with
Jane’s hope, happiness and promise of a happy-ever-ending, “Reader, I
married him”; rather, for Antoinette Mason, he married her and stole her
future. If she ever did say it, think it or hope it, savvy modern readers
would only shake their heads and murmur, “Poor subaltern.”
Little did those graduate students think that one day, someone like
Sarah Shoemaker would rewrite the stories of Jane Eyre and Antoinette
Mason Rochester from a sympathetic point of view of the quintessen-
tial patriarcha l bully, Mr. Rochester, which ends (before the epilogue)
with “Reader, she married me,” spoken humbly, gratefully and sincerely
(2017). Those graduate students in the nineties would not have read any-
thing yet that clearly articulated postfeminism as a consideration of gaps,
contradictions and what Amelia Jones would argue to be a “monolithic
entity” (1994, 57) of second-wave feminism. Doubtlessly they would not
have thought about privileged patriarchy as a system that could and did
disfranchise, marginalise and silence a white, British gentleman of prop-
erty and wealth such as Edward Rochester. Neither would they realise
that a new genre of literature was being hatched that would be designated
“neo-Victorian.” They would have still been wrestling with a definition
of Victorianism.2
Inclined to reject any scholarship by men from earlier decades, nev-
ertheless, those students would have appreciated that Jerome Hamilton
Buckley still carried vital currency when he made a statement in 1951
1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIAN MALADIES OF THE MIND 3
that it was impossible to define “Victorian.” He suggested that Victo-

rian explorers work with a term that was even more slippery but could
serve as an approximation, and that is “Victorianism,” foregrounding the
unknowability and variation in post-Victorian understandings of the past
era.
The students might have deferred to that Victorian of Victorians,
Charles Dickens, who attempted to describe his time in what would
become one of the most well-known introductions of any novel:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch
of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything
before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like
the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being
received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(1868 [1859], 1; emphasis added)
A Tale of Two Cities opens in 1775 with this metafictional introduction

in its looking back to another era that can speak to the same problems
that irritated the Victorians. Clearly, paradoxes detected by Dickens in his
own age are captured in Buckley’s definition of Victorians who were
torn by doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They

were crass materialists, wholly absorbed in the present, quite unconcerned
“with abstract verities and eternal values”; but they were also excessively
religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past, and ready to forego
present delights for the vision of a world beyond. Despite their slavish
“conformity,” their purblind respect for convention, they were, we learn,
“rugged individualists,” given to “doing as one likes,” heedless of culture,
careless of a great tradition; they were iconoclasts who worshiped the idols
of authority. They were, besides, at once sentimental humanitarians and
hard-boiled proponents of free enterprise. Politically, they were governed
by narrow insular prejudice, but swayed by dark imperialistic designs. Intel-
lectually and emotionally, they believed in progress, denied original sin, and
affirmed the death of the Devil; yet by temperament they were patently
Manichaeans to whom living was a desperate struggle between the force
of good and the power of darkness. (2–3)3
Another male scholar with currency in the nineties was Gordon

Haight. Since graduate students in America usually teach lower-level
classes, they might have read to their classes from Portable Victorian
Reader (1972) Haight’s own struggle with defining “Victorian”: “The
time is long past when Victorian meant everything prudish, sentimen-
tal, and conventional. Now that we know more about them, we can see
that the surface of respectability the Victorians presented was often only
a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our
own” (xi). Haight knew that the Victorians, in general, were not what
they seemed. To study them invites the utilisation of tools of theory that
operate like those under a magnifying glass: the scalpel, the tweezers, the
file, or maybe more like the pick shovel or, more drastically, the sledge-
hammer or even a jackhammer. To exhume the Victorians then and now
requires digging. Dickens certainly warned us that when it came to the
Victorians, “All that glitters is not gold,” as Shakespeare whispered from
his grave.4 In Our Mutual Friend, readers are thrice removed from see-
ing people as they really are; they are told to view “the company” in “The
great looking-glass above the sideboard” that “reflects Veneering; forty,
wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy—a kind
of sufficiently well-looking veiled prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs.
Veneering; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as
she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitia-
tory, conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself. Reflects
Podsnap” (1884 [1864], 11). Significantly, in the world of the Veneer-
ings, “All things were in a state of high varnish and polish” (6). With the
reflection in the looking-glass and the veneer that covers a multitude of
sins, compounded with the story told through a narrator who is doing the
looking, and with the story being read by a sesquicentennial or so later,
it is no wonder that in this novel no one knows who anyone truly is. The
looking-glass and rear-view mirrors5 necessarily both reflect the readers
even though they seek clarity of the human condition from another time
or place.
Identities and their portent of outcomes were even more mystifying
in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a novel that
Linda Hutcheon described as “historiographic metafiction,” identifying it
as “intensely self-reflexive yet paradoxically also lay[ing] claim to histori-
cal events and personages” (1988, 5). William Stephenson, in the 2007
introduction to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, explains the novel’s lit-
erary strategies as “refusing to maintain a veneer of realist illusion or to
end in a decorous Victorian manner, it challenged the narratives handed

down to it that explained how things ought to be (and how stories ought
to end). At the same time, though, it retained many of the characteristic
features of great nineteenth-century novels” (2007, 13). He points out
the similarities between the problems that the Victorians faced and those
that plagued the 1960s (13–14). The very present narrator of the novel
tells the reader that Sarah was “given the veneer of a woman” and that she
judged people as if they were “fictional characters” in a novel by Sir Wal-
ter Scott or Jane Austen (48). The reader can then expect multiple distor-
tions coming through multiple reflections that lead to multiple, complex,
postmodern possible endings through the narrator, through the charac-
ter, through the character’s perceptions of fictional characters, through
Victorian sensibilities as understood by a man writing in the 1960s and
through the author’s sensitivities about issues in the 1960s, all combined
to question our own perceptions of reality and our Victorian precursors.
According to Christian Gutleben, neo-Victorian narrative “echoes the
ethos of postmodernism” in its reconstitution of the Victorian “historical
period: the different, and sometimes contradictory, visions and versions of
the facts signal and essentially contingent and possibly unattainable con-
ception of historical knowledge” (1994, 140). That is, perhaps, why we
find it so compelling—the multiplicity of possible knowledge outcomes
and alleys of investigation for issues of neo-Victorian representations of
madness.
Thirteen years ago, Peter Widdowson wrote, “It is surely a truism by
now to remark that large swathes of British ‘contemporary fiction’ by a
diverse range of authors … are in fact ‘historical’ novels of one kind or
another” (2006, 491). Historical novels make up the bestselling genre
for contemporary readers, and of those, the Victorian historical novels
sell the most (Heilmann and Llewellyn 27). Widdowson’s term for them
is “re-visionary fiction” (491) with writers not interested in “destroying
myths and illusions about the past,” but rather in “using fiction as history
to explore how the scars of the past persist into the present, how the
past’s presence in the present determines the nature of that present” and
if not that they may be “in fact making displaced and oblique comment
on their own present by ironically counterpointing it with the past” (492).
He theorised that we scholars believe that “canonic texts from the past”
are “central to the construction of ‘our’ consciousness” (491).
The year of 1990, when graduate students began their interest in
neo-Victorianism, whether they realised it or not, was also significant for
the appearance of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Her novel spawned a “verita-

ble deluge of Victorian-centred novels currently being published in the
British Isles,” which Sally Shuttleworth termed “the retro-Victorian nov-
el” (1997, 259). Although crediting Possession as the inaugural novel for
this genre, Shuttleworth focused on a “literary subset,” the natural his-
tory novel such as Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1993) and Graham Swift’s
Ever After (1998), while listing their progenitors as Wide Sargasso Sea
and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The popularity, Shuttle-
worth claimed, corresponded with “the current upsurge of interest in
the Darwinian revolution [as] a displacement of current fears concern-
ing the indivisibility of man and machine onto the no longer threatening
relationship between human and animal life” (259).
Our “modern obsession with things Victorian” continued into the
next century (Kaplan 2007, 1). “Victoriana,” Cora Kaplan asserted, is “a
British postwar vogue that shows no signs of exhaustion” (2); further, she
defined it as the “self-conscious rewriting of historical narratives to high-
light the suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire,
as well as challenges to the conventional understandings of the historical
itself” (3), noting the genre “has become so capacious and lucrative that
it contains many mini-genres, including pastiche, Victorian crime fiction
and mass-market romance” (88).
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn have provided the seminal defini-
tion of this genre of narratives. In their Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians
in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, the two scholars perceive neo-
Victorian literature to be more than historical fiction in encompassing
texts (“literary, filmic, audio/visual”) that “self-consciously engage with the
act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Vic-
torians ” (2010, 4). Part of their neo-Victorian project is to address the
question of how Victorian novels are relevant to the twenty-first century
(3). They assure us that “re-reading and re-writing” the “Victorian experi-
ence” is what neo-Victorian writers do and “is something that defines our
culture as much as it did theirs” (4). They warn against generalising “Vic-
torian” as a “homogenized identity” (2). Indeed, several subgenres have
now been identified as further means to particularise a scholar’s inquiries.
Their treatise identifies “the ontological and epistemological roots of
the now through a historical awareness of then” (4), addressing questions
“relating to the aesthetic, ethical, metafictional, and metacritical param-
eters of their own acts of (readerly/writerly) appropriation” (4). Many
neo-Victorian works offer an “alternative view of the nineteenth cen-

tury for the modern audience” (7). Some of them “correct aspects of the
Victorian age, or the Victorians’ attitudes” (8). Heilmann and Llewellyn
ask if neo-Victorian works are “mimicry or pastiche” (27) and, signifi-
cantly, whether or not these texts succumb to nostalgia. In one way they
are exactly this when one considers that we moderns deal with some of
the same challenges and issues that the novels attempted to address, and
therefore, we “seek a textual salvation in mimicking them as a salve to
our (post)modern conditions” (27). Nevertheless, Ralph Waldo Emer-
son’s famous statement still holds true, that “Each age, it is found, must
write its own books.”6 Neo-Victorian works may be set in the nineteenth
century, but their creators and readers seek remedy for present woes, and
to use a wonderfully Dickensian word, perspicacity.7
The term “neo-Victorian” first appeared in Enoch Arnold Bennett’s
novel, The Twain, the third in a series titled The Clayhanger Family, pub-
lished between 1910 and 1918. The Twain begins with the setting, 1892
in “Bleakridge, residential suburb of Bursley” (1916, 1),8 and immedi-
ately establishes a motif that will weave through the series: rapid change
that contrasted old Victorian culture with “neo-Victorian” preferences.
In 1892 the town was “still most plainly divided into old and new,—
that is to say, into the dull red or dull yellow with stone facings, and the
bright red with terra cotta gimcrackery” (1). Significantly, metaphorically,
Bennett writes, “like incompatible liquids congealed in a pot, the two
components had run into each other and mingled, but never mixed” (1).
Much later, Auntie Hamps, who is very much the “old Victorian” who is
dismayed “that the world would never stand still” (108), visits her niece’s
house where the drawing room is very modern: “It quite ignored all the
old Victorian ideals of furniture; and in ignoring the past, it also ignored
the future. Victorian furniture had always sought after immortality. …But
this new suite thought not of the morrow; it did not even pretend to think
of the morrow. … Whereas the old Victorians lived in the future (in so far
as they truly lived at all), the neo-Victorians lived careless in the present”
(108; emphasis added). Bennett is using “neo-Victorians” to represent
the fin-de-siècle Victorians. However, his sense of “Victorianism” holds
true for contemporary books, film and media set the nineteenth century,
with continued awareness of a “world that is too much for us,” as William
Wordsworth lamented in 1802, along with nostalgia for a “simpler” past,
along with an optimistic zeal for the future with faith in modern inge-
nuity and technology to solve the problems of the present. Therein lies
“the affective dynamics” of writers’, readers’ and viewers’ “compulsive

recycling of Victorian material” (Kaplan 15), on one hand—such as the
stone architecture in Bennett’s Bursley and the “immortal” furniture of
Auntie Hemps’ ideal Victorian drawing room, in contrast to the “terra
cotta gimcrackery” and the rinky-dink fabrication of the neo-Victorian
(Bennett 108)—and on the other hand, a “transformation of the Victo-
rian past” that is “permanently restless and unsettled” (Kaplan 3) that
characterises a rewrite of the Victorian, or simply put: Victorianism ver-
sus neo-Victorianism. To borrow another metaphor from Bennett, the
authors of the essays in Neo-Victorian Madness separate the “incompati-
ble liquids,” of Victorianism and the neo-Victorianism, in their diagnoses
of mental illnesses in the nineteenth century.
It may be worthy to note that the term “mental illness” was not con-
cocted by any alienist (from the French, meaning one who heals the “in-
sane”) or psychologist or psychiatrist (from the Greek, meaning one who
gives medical treatment of the soul) or any other physician. Emily Brontë
invented it in Wuthering Heights, when Nelly argues with Heathcliff about
his insistence upon seeing Catherine Linton, lest it “create a favorable cri-
sis in Catherine’s mental illness” (1858 [1847], 135). Besides document-
ing the historical past and its cultural idiosyncrasies, as is the case here
with Brontë’s insight, literature often engenders history.
None of this discussion explains why we are so fascinated with the Vic-
torians, that we keep reading the works published in the 1800s, rewrite
them, imitate them, write sequels in the twenty-first century and watch
movie after movie about those Victorians. Just how many remakes of Jane
Eyre do we need and for what reason? “Victorian novels helped us evolve
into better people,” so says psychologists interviewed by Ian Sample in
The Guardian (2009). He deduces that Victorian novels not only iterate
“values of Victorian society, they also shaped them,” adding, “Archety-
pal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society
and pitted cooperation and affability against individual’s hunger for power
and dominance” (quoted in Heilmann and Llewellyn 1). Sample seems to
assume that all Victorians held the same values and virtues, and if that is
so, a postmodern readership might simply discard them but still hope to
find answers and appropriation for
overriding concerns of the postmodern era: questions of identity; of the

environment and genetic conditioning; repressed and oppressed modes of
sexuality; criminality and violence; the urban phenomenon; the operations
of law and authority; science and religion; the postcolonial legacies of the
empire. In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenth-century
fiction, often substituting for him/her the unreliable narrator we have rec-
ognized as common to appropriative fiction, postmodern authors find a
useful metafictional method for reflecting on their own creative authorial
impulses. (Sanders 2016, 129)
Victorian angst and mental illness—caused by rapidly changing tech-

nologies, uprootedness, moral relativism, situation ethics, unstable social
ethos, expanding global awareness—have persisted into our current age.
The Victorians did not understand the mental effects of such instability.
Much of what they did suspect or were coming to learn about mental
illness, they felt was improper to discuss. They believed that acceptable
social behaviour was what separated humans from animals. Those individ-
uals who did not act rationally or conform to social norms did not know
how to control the animal within and therefore, deserved to be treated
no better than most animals, and that is to be beaten, restrained, locked
away and kept out of sight lest their moral decline pull down others or
their degeneration be contagious. Those persons with a “pathology of the
mind,” as the British psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley, diagnosed it,9 would
include the mentally ill, the insane, the autistic, the “sexual deviant,” the
depressed, the melancholy, the people with Down syndrome, the rebel-
lious wife and a host of others perceived to be socially marginalised—they
were simply silenced and locked away.
This lack of knowledge, awareness and recognition of mental condi-
tions is one of the reasons that neo-Victorian novelists and filmmakers
have been revisiting the nineteenth century—to correct that lapse. Fol-
lowing their lead, the authors of Neo-Victorian Madness have purposed
to increase literary scholarship by scrutinising neo-Victorian perspectives
in literature, television and film on mental illness. Why is it important
for a contemporary reader or viewer to compare attitudes towards mental
illness written in the nineteenth century to those portrayed in the nine-
teenth century by twenty-first-century writers? Earlier literature teaches
us how not to treat those who diverge from the conventional norm as
well as how to help those men, women and children who are in pain.
By studying Victorian and Neo-Victorian narratives, we are investigating
and untangling the web of depression, addictions, insecurities, anxieties,
neuroses, psychoses and other troubling behaviour and torment that has
ensnared many a modern.
This is a project of urgency. According to the CDC (Centers for Dis-

ease Control and Prevention), “there are 192 drug overdose deaths every
day” in America (“Drug Overdose Deaths” 2019). The problem seems
to be the worst in the United States but not exclusively so when the
World Health Organization reported that in 2015, 450,000 people died
from drug use worldwide (“Management of Substance Abuse” 2018).
In 2017, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention,
there were 1,400,000 suicide attempts, making suicide the “10th leading
cause of death in the US.” The site lists a staggering 47,173 suicides in
2017 (“Suicide Statistics” 2019). “Close to 800,000 people die due to
suicide every year,” the World Health Organization reports, adding that
there is a death by suicide “every 40s.” WHO estimates that for every
death, there are 20 others who attempt suicide (“Mental Health: Sui-
cide Data” 2009). These are just some of the extreme results of mental
illness. Studies reveal that in the United States, nearly half of all adults
will suffer from a mental illness during their lifetime and that 5% of the
American adult population suffer from mental illness each year, to a figure
of 43.8 million people, but only about 41 percent receive “professional
health care or other services” (Kapil 2019). One out of every five people
experiences mental illness in the world or about 970 million with women
outdistancing men (Ritchie and Roser 2018). As of September 2, 2019,
there were 37,866 gun-related incidents in the United States that resulted
in 9987 deaths with over 285 mass shootings (“Gun Violence Archive”
2019), with 22 school shootings (Lou and Walker 2019). The median
age of school shooters between 1982 and 2018 is 21 (Brown and Goodin
2018, 1385). Youth depression in America has increased 8.2% in the last
five years (“The State of Mental Health in America” 2018, 4). America is
not the only mentally disturbed place in the world; the news constantly
reports on genocides and all manner of horrible killings perpetuated by
the mentally ill.
Although not the only source for mental struggles, stress and trauma
are common triggers in the modern world beginning with the Industrial
Revolution. The American sociologist Kai Erikson defines “trauma” as
“a violent event that injures in one sharp stab, while ‘stress’ refers to a
series of events or even to a chronic condition that erodes the spirit more
gradually” (1994, 230). He adds this about “trauma” as distinguished
from “stress”: “trauma can issue from a sustained exposure to battle as
well as from a moment of numbing shock, for a continuing pattern of
abuse as well as from a single searing assault, from a period of severe
attenuation and erosion as well as from a sudden flash of fear” (230).

Christian Gutleben and Julian Wolfreys are more specific in their defini-
tion where “trauma has to be redefined” because it must include “the
effects of the loss of a unified self mirror those of the more conventional
sense of trauma, which likewise produce a radical disjuncture in selfhood,
between the self before and after, with intrusive flashbacks, nightmares
and involuntary body memories resisting any subsequent regained sense
of wholeness and integration” (2010, 42). In a recent survey of America,
60% of all men and 50% of all women between the ages of 15 and 54
have suffered some form and degree of trauma (Vickroy 2015, 7). “Ex-
amining fictionalized trauma scenarios,” Laurie Vickroy suggests in her
Reading Trauma Narratives (2015), “allows the development of insights
into subjective endurance, crisis, and conflict and shows that the defensive
responses of trauma link many types and degrees of wounding, informing
a common humanity” (2). In this collection, we are mindful that suppos-
edly “whereas the disturbed nineteenth-century psyche constituted the
exception … the traumatized subject now assumes the position of the
contemporary norm” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010, 3). The writers of the
chapters in this volume are ethically cognisant and respectful of the repre-
sentation of marginalised, traumatised disruptions into and through some
of the most popular neo-Victorian novels and films with the intention
that such a study will increase awareness about mental illness and pro-
mote well-being.
Useful to such a study are recent considerations of Victorian psychol-
ogy. Following the early, important work on the construction of female
hysteria done in The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter (1985), Jane
Ussher, for one, has written three excellent books: Misogyny or Mental
Illness ? (1991), Managing the Monstrous Feminine (2006) and The Mad-
ness of Women (2011). Very helpful are Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and
Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present
(2007) and the essays from Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby’s Sex and
Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the His-
tory of British and Irish Psychiatry (2004). Neo-Victorian Madness will
look not only at female (mis)treatments but also male, as well as insane
asylums and medical men in general. Two sources relevant to the first are
Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore’s essays in Victorian Crime, Madness
and Sensation (2004) and Valerie Pedlar’s The Most Dreadful Visitation:
Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (2006). The latter topic is contextu-
alised by Kathryn Burtinshaw and John R. F. Burt’s Lunatics , Imbeciles
and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ire-

land (2017). Catharine Coleborne’s medical knowledge is invaluable in
her analysis of literary work that conveys the trauma of colonisation and
immigration (2007 and 2015).
The critical significance of this collection is that it interrogates neo-
Victorian representations of perceived receptions of moral insanity, mental
illness, disturbed psyches and non-normative imaginings. It also addresses
important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility and methods
of restraint and corrupt incarcerations.
Chapter 2, “‘I Am Not an Angel’: Madness and Addiction in Neo-
Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre” is Kate Faber Oestreich’s analysis
of the neo-Victorian transmedia series Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s The
Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013–2014), Margot Livesey’s The Flight of
Gemma Hardy (2012) and April Lindner’s Jane (2010). She underscores
how female characters who suffer from substance use disorders are under-
stood to be mad, revealing anxieties specifically centred on women, sex-
uality and motherhood. These women are scapegoats, releasing the com-
munity from responsibility to protect them due to the perception that
addiction is a form of insanity. This stigma runs deep enough to justify
first neglecting and then murdering female characters who are addicts,
whose deaths enable the romantic consummation of the heteronormative
couple.
While the neo-Victorian madwoman has been extensively criticised,
many scholars tend to analyse her presence in fiction alongside the isola-
tion and silence in which she typically exists. Instead Rachel M. Friars and
Brenda Ayres concentrate on both the neo-Victorian madwoman and her
nurse as physical emblems of “the fundamental alliance between ‘woman’
and ‘madness’” (Showalter 3). Assaying Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002)
and Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester (2017), Chapter 3 concludes that
the female/female bonds and power dynamics established between the
neo-Victorian madwoman and her nurse(s) illustrate the position of the
madwoman as a “failed but heroic rebel” (Showalter 4) through her
refusal to conform to social and patriarchal gender norms and place the
nurse in a conformist, carceral space.
The fourth chapter, “The Daughters of Bertha Mason” by Olivia Tjon-
A-Meeuw, reminds us that the madwoman is a recurring motif in the writ-
ings of Caribbean women, starting in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, but
Rhys is by no means the last to do so. As Kathleen J. Renk points out in
Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts (1999), Bertha Mason reappears
in various texts (1999, 88). According to Renk, “this focus on female and
colonial madness challenges the nineteenth-century discourse that posi-
tioned the madwoman and the colonies as loci of uncontrollable sexuality
equated with a madness that must be controlled by paternal surveillance
and governance” (89). In her neo-Victorian text Strange Music, Laura
Fish combines the two approaches. In a story that includes two Afro-
Caribbean women, the text disputes the nineteenth-century notion that
madness is somehow inherent to black women in the tropics (Renk 93).
Instead, the text supports Renk’s claim that Caribbean madwomen are
“grounded in the earthy pain of racial and sexual exploitation” (93). The
trauma of white paternal power, exerted in a way that it only could have
been on the bodies of black women, is the cause of madness rather than
the cure.
By altering “the past to suit current purposes” neo-Victorian nov-
els act as “cultural doppelgängers of the Victorian Age” that both
“mimic and challenge the discourses of the nineteenth century” (Boehm-
Schnitker and Gruss 2014, 2). In their Neo-Victorian Literature and Cul-
ture: Immersions and Revisitations (2014), Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and
Susanne Gruss insist that the term, “neo-Victorian” must include contem-
porary popular works that might not satisfy any academic status as “high
brow,” and should include those books that are set in the Regency period,
as were Austen’s books.10 In fact, instead of the term “neo-Victorian,”
Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss prefer the term “neo-Victorianism” (3).
Marie-Luise Kohlke agrees with their theory of what and how con-
temporary Victorian tales deserve theoretical exploration; she deems it an
“academic pitfall to deal with canonisation with debate of high and low
culture exclusivity and inclusivity” (2014, 3). The Neo-Victorian needs
to be “suitably elastic,” she says to represent the “shape-shifting” and
“protean” reconstruction of the Victorian past in contemporary fiction
(27). The canon is only one issue in selecting works to consider; there
is a “problem with time and geography,” she says (27). Is “Victorian”
restricted to just the British, especially given the fact that at the height
of the British empire, its territory consisted of 13,700,000 square miles
(Bowman 1922, 14) and 412 million people, ten times the population of
Britain itself (Angus 2001, 97)? The United States, no longer a British
colony, still uses the term “Victorian” to describe a style of its archi-
tecture and other arts. Aligning herself with Herbert J. Gans who calls
for a “cultural democracy and cultural pluralism” (1999, xi), Kohlke sug-
gests that the “neo-Victorian” encompasses “texts that highlight the nine-
teenth century as the advent of modern-day globalization, migration, and
networks of cultural exchange, via increasingly interdependent economies
and markets—literary, mercantile, criminal—subverting the very possibil-
ity of categorical cut-offs for the Neo-Victorian novel at arbitrary national
borders, which even in imperial Britain’s case, were already permeable and
often in flux” (28). Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss add to this argument
that the Victorians themselves had a mirror perspective of themselves, as
Dickens illustrated in A Tale of Two Cities, of looking to the recent (and
sometimes distant) past to compare themselves with then and now (5–6).
Neo-Victorianism should include popular works, neo-Austen and multi-
media (3).
Likewise, then, it is appropriate to include at least one chapter in Neo-
Victorian Madness on neo-Regency works. Mary Balogh may be consid-
ered “too popular” to be on the academic radar, but she has published
more than 60 novels and 30 novellas and has appeared more than 35
times on The New York Times Best Sellers list. She was first inspired by
the novels of Jane Austen and then by Georgette Heyer. With her first
publication of The Black Moth in 1921, Heyer has been credited as the
inventor of the historical romance and one of its subgenres, the Regency
Romance (Regis 2003, 125–26). A. S. Byatt was so impressed with Hey-
er’s work that she wrote one article asking why she is so good (1992,
239) and extolling her works as “An Honourable Escape” (1992). She
also wrote an article titled “Georgette Heyer is a Better Novelist Than
You Think” (2001).
Similarly, Brenda Ayres values the work of Mary Balogh, in Chapter 5,
“A Necessary Madness,” in particular, Balogh’s literary therapy of post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the Victorians typically
romanticised war, Balogh’s bestselling novels, which are set mostly in the
early nineteenth century, did not. Beginning in 2013, Balogh produced
eight books that comprise the Survivors’ Club series and probe nearly
every aspect imaginable of war-related PTSD. Without sentimentality,
Balogh divulges the topsy-turviness and untidiness of war’s aftermath on
commissioned officers from the Napoleonic War. Furthermore, her plots
offer resolution, healing and hope, not only for her characters but also
for her readers who may be suffering from PTSD or who knows some-
one afflicted by PTSD. Even though Balogh foregrounds PTSD caused
by the Peninsular Wars, she concurrently draws parallels between it and
other forms of PTSD caused by behaviour and events that were also for-
bidden subjects to be discussed during the nineteenth century, such as
spousal abuse, abandonment of a child by an alcoholic parent, Down syn-
drome, bankruptcy through gambling, psychological damage from social
and familial rejection, rape, spousal infidelity, miscarriages, death of a
spouse, death of a child, homosexuality and the inability of women to
follow their dreams and hearts or to have a means to provide financially
for themselves and children. Although such themes do appear in Victo-
rian novels, they are not treated with the psychological insight and the
possibility of recovery apparent in Balogh’s novels.
Eckart Voigts bridges madness as it was depicted in the nineteenth
century with a contemporary understanding of mental illness. Chapter 6,
“Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, ‘Unwomen,’ and Femmes Fatales :
Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I,” opens
with a reminder that as Gothic horror stories proliferated in the Victo-
rian era, mad and unreliable narration became a standard device—from
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Robert Browning’s “mad”
dramatic monologues in “My Last Duchess” or “Porphyria’s Lover”
(Rohwer-Happe 2011) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-
paper.” Somewhat over-represented, madness has also been a staple of
neo-Victorian narratives, whose “refashioning of the Victorian madness
topos” (Kirchknopf 2008, 71) regularly features hysterical women and
mad scientists. Even Wide Sargasso Sea seeks to redress the literary fate of
the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre by reassigning narrative agency.
While a frequently gendered revision of lunacy is thus a core concern in
neo-Victorian narratives, Chapter 6 discusses questions of its reliability.
Starting from the assumption that the unreliable narrator fulfils essential
functions in Gothic and neo-Victorian tales of repression, memory and
identity (Smith 2013, 188), Voigts argues that assignations of “madness”
frequently seek to clarify the contemporary attitude vis-à-vis the Victo-
rian Gothic scenarios. This chapter addresses questions of unreliability
and insanity in texts such as Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk (2012)
and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I (2011).
In Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), mental
extremity takes on multiple forms in such figures as the extended cast
of neo-Victorian types railing against grinding urban poverty. Chapter 7,
“‘Dear Holy Sister’: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious
Ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White” by Mar-
shall Armintor, examines the layers of anxiety and insanity in both Faber’s
novel and Munden and Coxon’s adaptation, tied to the procreative and
sexed body and the struggles of the female subjects in the Rackham
orbit to seize and stabilise the narrative over those bodies. Faber’s men-
tal extremity takes on multiple forms in such figures as the extended cast
of neo-Victorian types railing against grinding urban poverty. The many
intertextual references woven into the book and also films (The Exorcist,
Clarissa and The Woman in White) underline the struggle to make sense
of the mania of life in the London of the 1870s. Even though each of
the women in this novel are destined for some kind of narrative oblivion
(whether through desertion, watery graves, or the threat of the asylum),
each overcomes their confinement and trauma through madness.
Tensions between the Victorian and neo-Victorian emerge in the space
between the sensationalism of ideologies in the nineteenth century and
the modern understanding of people and concepts in the twenty-first cen-
tury. At no point is this tension better realised than between the salacious
incarnation of the “mad person” and the hard reality of mental illness.
Elaine Showalter posits that the fictional nineteenth-century madwoman
is representative of the “author’s double” or “the incarceration of her
own anxiety and rage” (1994, 4), and is, in fact, an “unconscious form of
feminist protest” (5); however, in the context of the neo-Victorian novel,
when not only madwomen but all women have “taken up residence in the
front room” (52) of social, political and ideological discourses around
sexuality and gender, one might ask how unconscious does this “femi-
nist protest” remain, and what does the neo-Victorian madwoman and
her relationships represent in a temporal period where rage is no longer
unconscious?
In the nineteenth century, the most common diagnosis of women’s
“maladies” was called “female hysteria.” As for functions of the woman’s
reproductive system, it simply was not proper to discuss such things. In
general the many euphemisms boil down to “the unmentionables.”11 In
Chapter 8, “The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman,” Brenda
Ayres tracks the attitudes of the Victorians during the nineteenth century
to menstruation, puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum depression,
sexual desire and menopause. Sarah E. Maier then analyses how Ripper
Street , the BBC UK/Amazon series that ran for five seasons from and 37
episodes from December 30, 2012, to October 12, 2016, infuses con-
temporary awareness and sensitivities in contrast to Victorian ignorance of
women’s bodies and their minds. More significantly, Chapter 8 empha-
sises that Victorian perceptions of women and their sexual apparati and
functions might have been defined by the best medical minds of the day,
but in truth they were driven by patriarchal political ideologies meant to
keep men in power in both the private and public spheres. Neo-Victorian
narratives expose that agenda, rebel against it and give voice to what really
was behind all that insanity experienced by our Victorian mothers and
sisters.
The Victorian madwoman (and especially a hysterical woman) has been
a feminist icon in feminist criticism, but as noted by Marta Caminero-
Santangelo in The Madwoman Cannot Speak (1998), female madness
constitutes an inherent paradox: The subversiveness of a madwoman is
paired with her inability to express herself, her lack of language and retreat
into the world of fantasy. This paradoxical failure of the madwoman as a
rebellious ideal maybe, with the use of queer theory in line with Judith
Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), transformed into a sign
of refusal to conform. This “embodiment of failure,” the madwoman’s
lack of (coherent) language may instead represent the rejection of the
logocentrism and coherence of the heterosexual matrix, as Barbara Braid
argues in Chapter 9, “Queering the Madwoman.” Atwood’s Alias Grace
(1997) is a neo-Victorian biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century
murderess. Grace’s “inability to speak”—fragmentation, instability and
incompleteness of her narrative—is what makes it queer; its queerness
is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp.
Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent
account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also
discusses the television adaptation of the to examine alternative techniques
used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoher-
ence of the self, and to examine if Grace Marks of the television show is
also, indeed, a (queer) madwoman. Like Judith Butler’s drag queen/king,
who destabilises the assumptions of “true,” coherent gender identity via
imitation, parody and excess (2004, 52), a madwoman performs a simi-
lar role, undercutting the possibility of a self in general and a gender self
in particular, working to “displace all certainty and especially to displace
norms of identity” (Beasley 2005, 102).
Finding a kindred spirit in a closeted gay by the name of Dorian Gray,
Vanessa Ives fractures the Freud ian depiction of Victorian women as
frivolous, unintelligent and in need of more masculine traits. In the Show-
time television series Penny Dreadful, Tim Posada in Chapter 10 perceives
a woman who is not powerful because she acts more like a man—a com-
mon convention in action films that merely make women just as violent
and crass as male protagonists—but because she is a self-actualised woman

aware of, but not guided by, Victorian-era London’s social classes. The
central argument here is that Vanessa functions as a victim-hero who tran-
scends both horror norms and the Victorian affinity for deeming unique
women hysterical. Chapter 10, “‘Old Monsters, Old Curses’: The New
Hysterical Woman in Penny Dreadful ” draws upon nineteenth-century
nascent research on hysteria including the historical role of Jean-Martin
Charcot’s exhibitions of female hysterics during the Victorian era and the
eventual connection to horror cinema noted by Angela M. Smith (2011).
Women are not the only mentally ill individuals in either the nine-
teenth or the twentieth-first century. In Chapter 11, “The Glamorisation
of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock,” John Murray inspects the character
of Jim Moriarty and his influence on the BBC’s series Sherlock (2010–
2017). Moriarty creates subversive mythology to resist hierarchical struc-
ture and synchronise knowledge, power and agency. In so doing, he tra-
verses thresholds of the spatial and ideological. The series transforms lin-
ear and sequential plotting by allowing the character to disconnect from
the storyline and reconnect at any nodal point, without offering view-
ers many clues to his representation and portrayal. Moriarty becomes a
multipurpose tool for challenging television’s ontological standards and
for directing viewers’ exploration through a participatory model of tele-
vision. Even in defeat, the character of Moriarty survives, evolves and is
transformed by the fears and anxieties of viewers.
In the 1835 A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the
Mind, James Cowles Prichard defines “moral insanity” as “madness con-
sisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclina-
tions, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without
any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reason-
ing faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucination”
(1837 [1835], 16). Problematically, Prichard makes many assumptions
regarding gender, convention(s), morality and nature, and typically, the
Victorians silenced those who supposedly suffered from moral insanity.
Sarah E. Maier’s Chapter 12, “Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Mad-
ness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives,” finds challenges to
such attitudes in such neo-Victorian narratives as Wendy Wallace’s The
Painted Bridge (2012) and Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (1996).
These neo-Victorian narratives seek to deny any nostalgic or veiled rep-
resentation of madness; instead, they demonstrate how individual differ-
ence—or inclination, habit, nature and/or imagination—is often turned
into a weapon to traumatise and silence persons who do not adhere to

social expectations but see life “otherwise.” Maier’s chapter argues that
neo-Victorian narratives of madness critiques the Victorian context in
which one may demonstrate intellect, rational behaviour and no outward
signs of illness but still be deemed socially unfit. Particularly, the neu-
rotic lunatic is victimised if appearing to hold ideas that violate decorum,
whether it be in resistance to treatments, spectral visions, unconventional
belief systems or exposure of mob mentalities. The misdiagnoses in these
narratives expose how imagination is derogated as madness. They offer
a corrective: creativity and/or what might be termed excessive intellec-
tualism or misguided self-authority over one’s own person are not mad-
ness but rather a refusal to submit to loss of emotional and psychological
agency.
Thus, the chapters in this collection study Neo-Victorian fascinations
with Victorian madness in light of past and present ideas of the figura-
tion of the “mad.” They highlight the self-conscious re-visions, legacies
and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those
persons presumed mad including how we may/may not replicate them in
present-day representations, all the while assuring modern readers that the
way Victorians regarded and treated “maladies of the mind” tells us more
about their political agenda, gender biases, hegemonic control, social nor-
malisation and cultural history—all of which, really, are forms of another
sort of Victorian madness.
Notes
1. The 1990s have become known as the third wave of feminism. See Davies
(2018). The fourth wave would begin with the second decade of the
twenty-first century and has sometimes been labelled postfeminism(s). See
Rivers (2017).
2. Brenda Ayres knew this to be true because she was a doctoral candidate
in 1990.
3. Buckley cites all these claims from a variety of scholarly works published
between 1918 and 1945. They must have been the sources that informed
his own understanding of Victoriana. See his notes 2 through 10 on 249–
50.
4. Dickens makes this point with this quote in his article titled “Steppers”
(1884, 31).
5. See Simon Joyce (2007).
6. Emerson said this in a speech, “The American Scholar,” made on August

31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College.
7. In truth, we were unable to find that Dickens used either “perspicacity”
or “perspicacious” in any of his novels. However, a web search finds over
a hundred critics who lauded Dickens for his “perspicacity” and in par-
ticular the perspicacity exhibited by his characters, such as Liam Clarke’s
attribution to Mrs. Gump: “A woman of perspicacity, she spread herself
wide in the service of others and was thus needful of some comfort [gin]
to do so” (2008, 77). In Death by Dickens, a collection of neo-Dickens
short stories, Bill Crider writes, “Mr. Pickwick had no doubts about the
perspicacity of his servant [(Sam)]” (2004, 46). Even those who wrote
about Dickens were considered perspicacious; a reviewer for The Quar-
terly Review said so about biographer John Forster (1872, 147).
8. A fictional town, but no doubt representing Burslem, it is a part of the
city of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. Burslem is listed in the Domesday
book as a small farming hamlet, but in the 1890s, was an industrial district
known for its potteries, mines and working canal barges. It was the home
of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood in the eighteenth century.
9. See his The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867).
10. Ayres’ Chapter 5 discusses the ongoing debate about high versus low
culture in classifying literature.
11. The Victorians were not alone in their reticence to discuss such things.
One website claims that there are over 5000 slang terms for “menstrua-
tion.” See O’Connor (2016).
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CHAPTER 2
“I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction

in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre
Kate Faber Oestreich
Scores of authors, directors and digital producers have adapted, revised

and modernised Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel, Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography (1847). As Antonija Primorac notes, neo-Victorianism is
“a powerful trend in contemporary Anglophone media” pointing to the
“continuous production of adaptations and appropriations of Victorian
literature and culture” (2017, 452). These ubiquitous transformations of
Jane Eyre reveal transtexual1 parallels between nineteenth- and twenty-
first-century life, including the ways in which women with substance use
disorders are understood to be mad—so mad, in fact, that the communi-
ty’s future happiness depends on the addicted female character’s death.2
In Sean and Sinead Persaud’s web series Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder
Mystery Dinner Party, the character “Charlotte Brontë” colludes in a
scheme to murder a slew of authors in order to cover up that her sis-
ter killed Jane Austen for threatening to expose their brother Branwell’s
misdeeds. At first glance, this version of Brontë seems absurdly inac-
curate for the sake of comedy. She is too sardonic, too vindictive and
K. F. Oestreich (B)
Department of English, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, USA
© The Author(s) 2020 27

S. E. Maier and B. Ayres (eds.), Neo-Victorian Madness,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_2
28 K. F. OESTREICH
too violent. Yet this Brontë—who proudly and gleefully murders Fyo-
dor Dostoevsky with an axe to the skull, poisons two police officers and
plunges a butcher knife into Lenore’s abdomen—is in some ways a plausi-
ble parody (2016, ch. 11). The Persauds overemphasise aspects of Bron-
të’s personality—resentment, anger, desire for vengeance—that she down-
played, repressed and tried to annihilate. In the real Brontë’s correspon-
dence, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Ellen
Nussey’s “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë” (1871), she appears to
be an admixture of nineteenth-century English feminine and unfeminine
traits: devout yet irreverent, vivacious yet introverted; kind yet moody;
trustworthy yet questioning; dutiful daughter, sister and friend yet not
particularly fond of her pupils.3 Brontë transposes many of these charac-
teristics onto Jane Eyre’s titular character, as well as her own plain fea-
tures, short stature, occupations and affection for a married man. Jane
Eyre additionally reveals Brontë’s self-serving side: when, for instance,
Jane fails to feel compassion for Bertha’s plight, barely containing her
pleasure when she hears that Bertha is “dead as the stones on which
her brains and blood were scattered” (2016 [1847], 381). Jane candidly
recounts Rochester’s description of Bertha as a “madwoman and a drunk-
ard! … a bad, mad, and embruted partner!” (262). Like Thomas Leitch’s
“triangular notion of intertextuality” (2012, 95), the hypertexts exam-
ined within this chapter incorporate not only their hypotext’s but also
other hypertexts’ narratives, such as Jean Rhys’s prequel Wide Sargasso
Sea (1966) in which Antoinette cum Bertha, like her mother, is driven
to insanity: “They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. … no
kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. … In
the end—mad” (1966, 94). Antoinette seeks refuge from her husband’s
emotional abuse by drinking cup after cup of rum, a snare that grants tem-
porary relief but traps her in a cyclic prison of desiring repeated doses.4
After Rochester sees Antoinette “dead drunk on bad rum,” he declares,
“she’s a wreck. I scarcely recognized her” (93), implying that Antoinette’s
drunkenness makes her subhuman. Christophine immediately recognises
Rochester’s plan to “pretend she is mad. … The doctors say what you
tell them to say” (1966, 96), providing a patina of medical care so that
Bertha’s community is relinquished from superintending her well-being.
Bertha is a scapegoat, not only for Brontë but also for modern authors
that perceive the insanity of substance abuse disorders sufficient justifica-
tion to murder the addict in order to salvage the romantic, heteronorma-
tive couple.
2 “I AM NOT AN ANGEL”: MADNESS AND ADDICTION … 29
Despite the many liberties Rhys’s prequel and subsequent Jane Eyre
hypertexts take with their hypotext’s narrative, the Bertha figure per-
sistently haunts these tales, illustrating that Jane needs Bertha, needs a
mad addict, to legitimise Jane’s claim to superiority. Margot Livesey’s The
Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012b, hereafter FGH ), April Lindner’s Jane
(2010) and Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s web series The Autobiography
of Jane Eyre (2013–2014, hereafter AJE) appropriate portions of their
hypotext Jane Eyre in order to reinterpret and re-vision concepts of self-
hood and addiction by highlighting the madness associated with a range
of addicting substances, from champagne to whisky, pills to heroin. These
hypertexts reveal that popular ideology surrounding substance use disor-
ders has constants: worries about intoxication, especially among women;
confusion over willpower versus addiction and the perception that addic-
tion is, ipso facto, insanity. Despite their greater openness than the orig-
inal text about substance use disorders, modern appropriations of Jane
Eyre do not view the “Bertha” character any more sympathetically than
did Brontë. Furthermore, the female characters whose addictions lead to
diagnoses of insanity reveal modern cultural anxieties about women, sex-
uality, marriage and motherhood.
Brontë’s brother Branwell’s addictions and nineteenth-century beliefs
on la addiction as madness provide context in which to examine the above
intra- and intermedial transformations. Brontë’s family history illustrates
that living with an addict is emotionally, physically and psychologically
exhausting. By 1845 Branwell’s addictions had progressed to the point
that he suffered from seizures and delirium tremens, stole from the fam-
ily, “required extrication from a burning bed he himself set alight” and
feared for his own sanity (Marchbanks 2010, 58–59). Brontë confided to
her friend Ellen Nussey that “no sufferings are so awful as those brought
on by dissipation—alas! I see the truth of this observation daily proved”
(Smith 2010, 441–42). Although the Brontë family felt it their duty to
care for Branwell at home, Brontë seethed under her perception that
Branwell was weak-willed, choosing to continue consuming addictive sub-
stances. The week after Branwell’s death due to “chronic bronchitis and
marasmus,” most surely exacerbated by his addiction to alcohol and opi-
ates, Brontë wrote to W. S. Williams5 that “I do not weep from a sense of
bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no
dear companion lost—… I had aspirations and ambitions for him once—
long ago—they have perished mournfully—nothing remains of him but
a memory of errors and sufferings” (Smith 120). Living with Branwell’s
30 K. F. OESTREICH
alcohol and opium addictions left Brontë bereft of compassion for her
brother, instead clinging to her resentments and mourning her dreams
for him that he had failed to fulfil.
Brontë’s chagrin over Branwell’s dependence mirrors Victorian Era
frustrations with England’s long history of excessive drinking. Leaders
in the medical field knew even in the late sixteenth century that alco-
hol addiction is “a progressive disease characterised by a loss of control
over drinking, the cure for which is total abstinence” (Nicholls 2009,
65), yet alcohol was widely consumed and wickedly profitable, so it
remained legally available and regulated in only a slipshod manner. After
King William III introduced to England a Dutch spirit, “Geneva,” which
was eventually shortened to gin, the foreign beverage was quickly vili-
fied as the cause of English subjects’ inability to consume responsibly.6
The 1736 Gin Act—which attempted to rid England of the “disease of
drunkenness” by effectively prohibiting the production and distribution
of gin—paradoxically created the “Gin Craze” of the early 1740 s, during
which gin became associated with poverty, crime and insanity (36–37,
44–45). The press leveraged gin’s popularity to stoke fears that lower-
class women’s drunkenness prevented them from fulfilling their true call-
ing to reproduce and nurture, thereby ruining both England’s moral fibre
and future (41).7 Long after the Gin Craze passed, the prevailing notion
remained that beer was a healthy, English drink (Skelly 2011, 56; Nicholls
34–48).8 But the 1830 Beer Act created an “explosion” in public drink-
ing establishments (Nicholls 91–92), fostering the perception that both
gin and beer were poisonous to health and home. This act, therefore,
cemented the growing divide between capitalists that appreciated alco-
hol’s economic market value and temperance advocates that deplored the
commercialisation of useless, addictive substances. In 1843 dipsomania
entered the lexicon as “A morbid and insatiable craving for alcohol, often
of a paroxysmal character … persistent drunkenness” (OED), helping to
cement linguistically that alcohol addiction is a physiological disease that
manifests as insane behaviour.9
It was during this time, between August 25, 1846, and August 24,
1847, that Brontë was writing Jane Eyre. Jane first mentions beer soon
after she arrives at Thornfield, when she discloses having seen Grace
“come out of her room … and shortly return, generally (oh, romantic
reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth!) bearing a pot of porter”
(Brontë 101). “Generally” suggests that Grace frequently partakes of
porter. Although Jane gossips her disapproval, she neither investigates
why Grace has the beverage nor attempts to dissuade her from imbib-
ing. The day after Jane believes Grace has set Mr. Rochester’s bed on
fire, Jane is “absolutely dumfounded” at Grace’s “miraculous self–pos-
session and most inscrutable hypocrisy” when Grace asks calmly for “my
pint of porter” (141). Although beer was widely consumed, porter had
come to be associated with the working classes; with fears of adulter-
ation by “dangerous drugs” or “toxic additives,” including opium; and
with Ireland, in part since Guinness had industrialised production in the
early nineteenth century (Sumner 2008, 300). Grace’s porter, therefore,
would have struck Jane as a low-class, foreign beverage that was insanely
too potent for a woman to be consuming.
Jane imputes that Grace is an alcoholic by freely spreading others’
unsubstantiated reports that she consumes gin to excess. After Rochester
is forced to reveal he employs Grace to guard Bertha, he confides, “Grace
has, on the whole, proved a good keeper; though, owing partly to a fault
of her own, of which it appears nothing can cure her and which is inci-
dent to her harassing profession, her vigilance has been more than once
lulled and baffled” (Brontë 277), perhaps relying on the stereotype of gin-
addicted nurses popularised by Charles Dickens’s Sairey Gamp in Martin
Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). Similarly, the host at the Rochester Arms Inn
confides to Jane that Grace is “an able woman in her line, and very trust-
worthy, but for one fault … she kept a private bottle of gin by her” (380;
emphasis in original). The host, who most surely never entered Thornfield
hall’s third floor, recites details that closely mimic Rochester’s account,
revealing he is recirculating Rochester’s tale which Jane then unquestion-
ingly repeats as fact. The host criticises Grace for taking “now and then …
a drop over–much” and falling “fast asleep after the gin and water” (380),
insinuating that without the gin, there would not have been an opportu-
nity for “the mad lady, who was as cunning as a witch, would take the keys
out of her [Grace’s] pocket … and go roaming about the house, doing
any wild mischief that came into her head” (380). As Bertha’s sole care-
taker, Grace spent all but “one hour in the twenty-four” (149) guarding
her; therefore, Bertha would have had six to nine hours every day dur-
ing which to wreak havoc while Grace slept. Since Bertha’s episodes were
not repeated nightly, a more likely conclusion would be that Grace’s cups
of porter and store of gin were intended for Bertha and that occasion-
ally Grace accidentally provided Bertha with a “drop over-much” (380),
igniting Bertha’s rage, which Bertha acted upon after Grace had fallen
asleep.
32 K. F. OESTREICH
Prejudice towards older, unmarried female workers taints Jane’s per-

ceptions of Grace, helping Jane to conclude that Grace is criminal, bizarre,
even alcoholic—which the Rochester Arms Inn host asserts is “a fault
common to a deal of them nurses and matrons” (380)—all without first-
hand confirmation and despite visual evidence to the contrary. For exam-
ple, Jane continues to believe Grace is an alcoholic who had lighted
Rochester’s bed even though Jane sees Grace the next morning “thread[]
her needle with a steady hand” (140). By contrast, Bertha’s eyes are
the very picture of an alcoholic’s—bloodshot “red balls” (263)—and she
exhibits a hedonistic behaviour of an addict. Julia Skelly argues that there
was “the long–held belief that women’s drunkenness was morally more
reprehensible than men’s” and “secretive” (57, 59). Due to these prej-
udices, women were reticent to drink in public and surreptitious about
their drinking in private, but they did drink. Jane Eyre reveals that alco-
hol addiction is not just an external threat found in men’s dram houses
but internal, hiding in the women’s domestic sphere. Strikingly, descrip-
tions of public taverns in the mid-nineteenth century bring to mind
Bertha’s room on the third floor of Thornfield in their desire for “con-
cealment” with doors that closed automatically and dark windows so that
outsiders cannot see the occupants inside (51). Without visual confirma-
tion, the rumours surrounding Grace’s alcohol use are just that, rumours
that adhere to the dominant lay ideology that working women’s—and
especially nurses’—weak wills leave them prone to making choices that
threaten public safety.
Ominously, though, the steady stream of alcohol provided by the
kitchen and delivered by Grace hints that Rochester condones Bertha’s
consumption. As Bertha’s sole caretaker and guard, it would not have
been unusual for Grace to administer porter and gin as either beverage
or medicine; Victorian doctors often prescribed alcohol, even though it
was known to contribute to addiction, especially in women (Porter 1985,
387). In The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in Eng-
land (2009), James Nicholls posits that eighteenth-century doctors like
George Cheyne began to believe there was a “physiological reason why
intoxicating drinks might be detrimental to mental health” because they
“collapsed the division between body and mind” and that “intoxicating
drinks were ‘sensible causes’ of ‘madness and lunacy’” (61); therefore,
intoxication was seen as a “voluntary madness.”
Brontë’s rage over her family’s (and England’s) inability to effectively
treat alcoholism manifests by the end of Jane Eyre in the methodical
execution of all alcoholics whose deaths ensure their finances are bet-
ter utilised by temperate citizens. First, John Reed’s death, whose “life
has been very wild” and who “ruined his health” before “kill[ing] him-
self” (Brontë 199–200), capitalises on the association between alcoholism
and suicide that had been established since the 1790s (Goldney and
Schioldann 2000, 182). Jane’s speechless acceptance that her archen-
emy will be denied a Christian burial and his property forfeited to the
crown (Laragy 2013, 733) may signal her belief in divine retribution.
Second, as Alexandra Valint persuasively argues in “Madeira and Jane
Eyre’s Colonial Inheritance,” John Eyre dies from the “disease” of “de-
cline” or alcoholism (2017, 329). Jane represses that her uncle’s fortune
results from Madeira wine’s addictive qualities, celebrating her inheri-
tance, which signals her financial and emotional salvation and enables
her to marry Rochester on more equitable financial ground. The third
and final alcohol-related death is Bertha’s, at her own hand. In the nine-
teenth century, Bertha’s suicide would have verified Rochester’s claim that
she was insane (Laragy 735), indeed, she represents the cyclical reason-
ing behind Victorian’s understanding of insanity: addiction to alcohol is
a sign of insanity; persons who abuse alcohol are more prone to com-
mit suicide; and suicide proves one is insane. Brontë’s “murderous” rage
against alcoholics is the key to the denouement of Jane’s romantic quest:
John Eyre’s, John Reed’s and Bertha’s deaths bequeath to Jane family
ties, financial security, love, respect and revenge.
In honour of Bertha, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar entitled their
groundbreaking feminist examination of Victorian literature, The Mad-
woman in the Attic. In it, they argue that Brontë describes “female real-
ities” of the nineteenth-century: “confinement … rage even to madness”
(2000 [1979], 336) and note that the larger structure of Jane Eyre relies
repeatedly on enclosure and then “attempts to escape through … mad-
ness” (341). The character’s responses to Bertha’s madness in Jane Eyre
makes manifest Brontë’s attempt to transcend her own impotent fear, rage
and resentment over a life tainted by the irrationality of her brother Bran-
well’s addictions. This lack of empathy or sense of responsibility for per-
sons suffering from substance use disorders permeates modernised appro-
priations of Jane Eyre. FGH, Jane and AJE were all written in the 2010s
and have a feminist literary perspective; highlight a Bertha-figure with a
substance use disorder and are set in current/former British colony. Many
other modernisations of Jane Eyre also meet several of these criteria but
not all, such as Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001), Lorrie Moore’s
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she wished to get out, and Wynyard helped her to the bank, on
which she collapsed, inarticulate and gasping.
“It’s a good thing Aunt Bella was not with us,” said Aurea, and her
voice sounded faint; “this time she really would have died! What
happened?” turning to Owen.
“The brake rod broke, miss—the old car is rotten,” he added
viciously.
“Old car!” repeated Susan, who, though her nerves were in a badly
shattered condition, had at last found utterance.
“Very old and crazy—and you never know what she is going to do
next, or what trick she will play you—and you ladies have been
giving her a good deal of work lately.”
“If you had lost your head, Owen!” exclaimed Miss Susan.
“I hope I don’t often do that, miss,” he answered steadily.
“If you had not had splendid nerve, we would all have been killed;
why, we just shaved that wagon by a hair’s-breadth—that would
have been a smash! We were going so fast.”
He made no reply, but moved away to examine the machine.
“Of course it would have been death, Aurea, and I don’t want to go
like that!”
“I should hope not, Susie.”
“I don’t think I shall be afraid when it comes—I shall feel like a child
whose nurse has called it away to go to sleep; but I’d prefer to go
quietly, and not like some crushed insect.”
Wynyard, as he worked at the car, could not help overhearing
snatches of the conversation between aunt and niece; the latter said
—
“The other day I was watching a flock of sheep in the meadows; the
shepherd was with them, and they were all collected about him so
trustfully. By his side was a man in a long blue linen coat. I said to
myself, ‘There is death among them; poor innocents, they don’t know
it.’ That’s like death and us—we never know who he has marked, or
which of the flock is chosen.”
“He nearly chose us to-day—but he changed his mind.”
Aurea nodded, and then she went on—
“As to that odious motor, every one says Aunt Bella was shamefully
taken in; but she would not listen to advice, she would buy it—she
liked the photo. The car is medieval, and, what’s more, it’s unlucky,—
it’s malignant! and you remember when we met the runaway horse
and cart near Brodfield; I was sitting outside, and I declare it seemed
to struggle to get into the middle of the road, and meet them! you
remember what Goethe said about the demoniac power of inanimate
things?”
“Now, my dear child, that’s nonsense!” expostulated Miss Susan. “I
had a poor education, and I’ve never read a line of Goethe’s; if he
wrote such rubbish, I had no loss!”
“Well, you will allow that the car did its very best to destroy us to-day!
And Mrs. Ramsay told me a man she knew recognised it by its
number—and that it once ran over and killed a girl on a bicycle, and
the people sent it to auction, where some one bought it for a song,
passed it on to Aunt Bella, and here it is!”
“The car will be all right now, Miss Susan,” announced the chauffeur,
touching his cap; “there are no more hills, we are on the flat, and I
can take you home safely; but I’m afraid she will have to go to
Brodfield again to-morrow.”
“Owen, do you believe in a motor being unlucky?” she asked, rising
as she spoke.
“I can’t say I do, miss; I don’t know much about them.”
“What do you mean?—not know about motors!”
“Oh,” correcting himself, “I mean with respect to their characters,
miss; it’s said that there are unlucky engines, and unlucky ships, and
submarines—at least they have a bad name. I can’t say that this car
and I have ever, what you may call, taken to one another.”
And with this remark, he tucked in Aurea’s smart white skirt, closed
the door, mounted to his place, and proceeded steadily homewards.
CHAPTER XIX
OWEN THE MATCHMAKER
Undoubtedly it was hard on Wynyard that, at a time when his own

love-affair was absorbing his soul and thoughts, he should be
burthened with the anxieties of another—in fact, with two others—
those of Tom Hogben and Dilly Topham.
For some weeks Tom had been unlike himself, silent, dispirited, and
almost morose, giving his mother short answers or none; yet,
undoubtedly, it is galling to be accused of a bilious attack when it is
your heart that is affected.
Mrs. Hogben was dismayed. What had come over her boy? Her
lodger, too, was concerned, for Tom, hitherto sober, now brought
with him at times a very strong suggestion of raw whisky! At last he
was received into his confidence—the communication took place
over an after-dinner pipe in the Manor grounds.
During the dog-days, the atmosphere of Mrs. Hogben’s little kitchen
was almost insupportable—such was the reek of soap-suds, soda,
and the ironing blanket; and Wynyard suggested that he and Tom
should carry their dinner, and eat it in the old summer-house on the
Manor bowling-green.
“We’ll be out of your road,” he added craftily, “and save ourselves the
tramp here at midday.”
At first Tom did not see precisely eye-to-eye with his comrade; he
liked his victuals “conformable”—and to be within easy reach of the
loaf, pickle jar, and—though this was not stated—the Drum!
But after one trial he succumbed. There was no denying it was rare
and cool in the old thatched tea-house, and his mother, who was
thankful to get rid of “two big chaps a-crowding her up—so awkward
at her busiest laundry season,”—provided substantial fare in the
shape of cold meat and potatoes, home-made bread, and cheese—
and, for Tom, the mordant pickles such as his soul loved. The pair,
sitting at their meal, presented a curious contrast, although both in
rough working clothes, and their shirt-sleeves.
The chauffeur, erect, well-groomed, eating his bread and cheese
with the same relish, and refinement as if he were at mess.
The gardener, exhibiting a four days old beard, and somewhat earthy
hands, as he slouched over the rustic table, bolting his food with the
voracity of a hungry dog.
They were both, in their several ways, handsome specimens of
British manhood. Hogben, for all his clownish manners, had good old
blood in his veins; he could, had he known the fact, have traced and
established his pedigree back to King Henry the Sixth!
Wynyard’s progenitors had never been submerged; their names
were emblazoned in history—a forebear had distinguished himself in
the tilting ring, and achieved glory at Agincourt.
Possibly, in days long past, the ancestors of these two men had
fought side by side as knight and squire—who knows?
Having disposed of his last enormous mouthful, closed his clasp-
knife, and produced his pipe, Hogben threw himself back on the
seat, and said—
“Look here, mate, I want a bit of a talk with ’ee.”
“Talk away, Tom,” he replied, as he struck a match. “You have fifteen
minutes and a clear course.”
“Oh, five will do me. As fer the course, it bain’t clear, and that’s the
truth. It’s like this, Jack, I’m in a mort o’ trouble along o’ Dilly
Topham.”
Wynyard nodded, the news had not taken him by surprise.
“An’ you, being eddicated, and having seen London and life—and no
doubt well experienced with young females—might give me a hand.”
Wynyard nodded again—Tom was undoubtedly about to make a
clean breast of it. So he lit his cigarette, and prepared to listen.
“Dilly and I was children together—I’m five year older nor she—and
my mother, being a widder, I had to start to work when I was ten,
with a milk round—and indeed long afore—so my schoolin’ wasn’t
much, as ye may know! ’Owever, Dilly and I was always goin’ to be
married for fun; and she grew up a main pretty girl, and then it was
agreed on in earnest. Well, now she gives me the go-by! Most days
she won’t look near me, and she never comes ’ere; she’s got a gold
bangle from some other chap, and when I ask about it, she gives me
a regular doing, and says I’m to mind me own business! What do ye
say to that? It’s the insurance fellow, I’ll go bail, from Brodfield; if I
catch him—I’ll—I’ll bash ’is ’ead in—so I will—’im and ’is legs! What
am I to do—I ask you as a friend?”
“Well, Tom, I’m not as experienced as you suppose,” said Wynyard,
after a thoughtful pause, “but, if I were in your shoes, I’ll tell you just
exactly my plan of operations.”
“Ay, let’s have ’em right away.”
“First of all I’d have my hair cut, and trim myself about a bit.”
“What! an old blossom like me?”
“Yes; shave that fringe of yours altogether, and wear your hair like
mine,” running his hand over his cropped head. “I declare, I could not
live with a mop like yours! And you may not know it, Tom, but you
are an awfully good-looking fellow.”
“Eh—am I?” with slow complacency. “They do say so of Ottinge folk;
they are mostly of fine old blood, come down in the world—and the
only thing that’s stuck is the features—especially the nose.”
“I can’t tell you anything about that, but I’m certain of one thing—you
must give up whisky.”
“Ay”—reddening—“must I so?”
“Don’t let it get a hold, or it may never leave you.”
“Ay, but sometimes when I’m down, the devil ’e comes, and ’e says,
‘You go and ’ave a drink, Tom, it will do you good’; and ’e keeps on
a-whisperin’ ‘Go and ’ave a drink, Tom, go and ’ave a drink, Tom,’
and so I goes at last, and ’as three or four!”
“Tell the devil to shut up, and do you go to the barber.”
“’E’s away this week thatching,” was the amazing reply.
“Well, when he comes back get shaved, and you won’t know
yourself! Then I’d like to give you one of my old coats, and a tie, and
a few collars—we are about the same size—and Miss Dilly won’t
recognise you; and after that, mind you take no notice of her; but
share your hymn-book with Nellie Hann—ask her out walking of an
evening, and I bet you anything you like, you will have Miss Dilly
after you like a shot!”
“Well, mate, I’ll do it,” said Tom moodily; “but it’s a tricky business
walkin’ with another girl—she might take notions—and if it falls out
badly with Dilly, I’ll drown myself, but thank you all the same.”
After a long and brooding silence, Tom struggled to his feet and
scratched his head—
“If ye understood what it was to be set on a girl—you would know
what a misery I feel; but you are not built that way, as any one can
see—and now I must go back to my job, or I’ll have the old lady on to
me. She stands in the landing window, a-watching like a cat at a
mouse-hole. It’s not so much the work—as that she likes to see us a-
slaving. Well, I’ll take yer advice, and I am much obliged to ye.” And,
shouldering his spade, Tom lurched away, with long uneven strides.
“Now, what did you do that for?” Wynyard asked himself. “You silly
idiot! giving advice and putting your finger in other people’s pies.
Why should you meddle?”
No answer being forthcoming from the recesses of his inner
consciousness, he rose and stretched himself, and presently
returned to his struggle with a contrary old lawn-mower.
By chance, the very next evening, on the road to Brodfield, Wynyard
came upon Dilly and the insurance agent; they were evidently about
to part, and were exchanging emphatic last words. He accosted
them in a cheery, off-hand manner, and after a few trivial remarks
about the weather, and the heat, said—
“As I suppose you are going back, Miss Topham, we might as well
walk together. May I have the honour of your company?”
Dilly beamed and giggled, the agent glowered and muttered
inarticulately; but he was a little in awe of the chauffeur chap, with
his quiet manners, steady eye, and indefinable suggestion of a
reserve force never exerted—and with a snort and a “So long, Miss
Dilly!” he mounted his bike, and sped homewards.
Dilly was both amazed and enchanted. So, after all, she had made
an impression on this quiet, good-looking Owen chap! and for him,
did he wish to “walk out with her,” she was ready—to speak the
brutal, naked truth—to throw over both Ernest Sands and Tom
Hogben.
“I’m glad to have met you like this,” he said, as they proceeded side
by side.
“Oh yes,” she responded eagerly, “so am I—awfully glad!”
“Because I want to have a word about Tom.”
“Oh—Tom,” with inexpressible scorn, “I’ve just about done with Tom!”
“Done for him, you mean! You’re breaking his heart; he’s a topping
good chap, I know, for I live in the house with him.”
Here, indeed, was a bitter disappointment for Miss Dilly. So the
smart chauffeur was merely talking to her as a friend of Tom’s!
“I say,” he continued, “do you think it’s playing the game to be
carrying on with this other chap, if you are engaged to Tom?”
“Who says so?” she demanded sharply.
“He does—Ottinge does.”
“Laws! A lot of jangling old women! Much I care what they say!” and
she tossed her head violently.
“You need not tell me that.”
“Why?” she snapped.
“Because you meet a young man you are not engaged to, and walk
miles with him through the lanes after sundown.”
“Well, I’m sure! Why mayn’t I have a friend if I choose?”
“It is entirely a matter of opinion; if I were in Tom’s shoes, Miss Dilly,
and knew of this evening’s outing, I’d give you the chuck at once,
and have nothing more to do with you.”
“Oh—you!”—insolently—“they say you’re a sort of half gentleman as
has got into some trouble. Why don’t you mind your own affairs?
Come now!”
“Tom is my friend and my affair.”
“Bah! a working man and a gentleman—friends! Go on!” and she
stared at him defiantly.
“Yes, he is; and I won’t stand by and see his life spoiled, if I can help
it.”
“Well, then,” and she burst into sudden tears, “it’s his mother as is
spoiling it—not me.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Wasn’t we pledged four year ago, and I took his ring, and there’s
Maggie Tuke engaged years after me, and nicely set up in her own
house now, with a gramaphone and a big glass—yes, and Nellie
Watkin too; and I’ve got to wait and wait till Mrs. Hogben pleases.
She won’t give up Tom, so there it is! Oh, of course she’s all butter
and sugar to a good lodger like you, but she’s as hard as a turnpike,
and she’s waiting on till my grandmother comes forward—and that
she’ll never do. Why, she grudges me a bit of chocolate, let alone a
fortin’.”
“Oh, so that’s it, is it?”
“Yes, that’s it, since you must know; and I tell you I’m not going on
playing this ’ere waiting game no longer—I’m about fed up, as they
say; I’m twenty-six, and I’ve told Ernest as I’m going to break it off
with Hogben.”
“Come now, which do you like the best?” asked Wynyard, amazed at
his own impertinence, “Tom or Ernest?”
“Why, Tom, of course, but what’s the good?”
“Look here, will you promise not to hate me—and will you let me see
what I can do?”
For a moment she gazed at him with an air of profound mistrust; at
last she muttered in a peevish voice—
“Yes, you can’t make things no worse, anyway—and that’s certain
sure.”
This was not a very gracious permission, but Miss Topham wiped her
eyes and held out her hand; at the moment, by most provoking bad
luck, the Rector and his daughter dashed by in a dog-cart, and the
former, recognising him, called back a cheery “Good-night, Owen!”
“Is it possible that the fellow has cut out Tom Hogben, and is making
up to Dilly Topham?” he said to his daughter.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered stiffly.
“I should not have thought she was his sort; but one never can tell!
At any rate, she was crying and holding his hand—there must be an
understanding between them, eh?”
But Aurea made no reply; apparently she was engrossed in watching
a long train of rooks flying quickly homewards—drifting across the
rose-tinted sky—and had not heard the question. Her father glanced
at her; her pretty lips were very tightly compressed, one would
almost suppose that something had annoyed Aurea!
That evening, when Tom was at the Drum, Wynyard had a serious
conversation with Mrs. Hogben—a really straight and private talk,
respecting her son and his love-affair. “If Leila were to see me now!”
he said to himself, “trying to engineer this job, how she would laugh!”
To his landlady he pointed out that one was not always young, and
that Tom and Dilly had been engaged four years. (He had a vague
idea that Tom’s wages and Tom’s company all to herself, were
considerable factors in his mother’s reluctance to name the wedding-
day.)
And for once Wynyard was positively eloquent! He put down his
pipe, and spoke. He pleaded as he had never in his life pleaded for
himself—he felt amazed by his own arguments! Mrs. Hogben was
thunder-struck; generally, the fellow had not a word to throw to a
dog, and now to hear him talk!
“Think, Mrs. Hogben,” he urged, “what is Tom to wait for? He has his
twenty-five shillings a week and this house—it’s his, I understand,”
and he paused. “If Dilly gives him up who will blame her? She has
waited—and for what?” Another dramatic pause. “You are waiting for
Mrs. Topham to die. She is likely to hold on another ten or twenty
years. You say this is a healthy place—and she may even see you
out; it’s a way old people have—they get the living habit, and hold on
in spite of no end of illnesses. And I tell you plainly that if Dilly throws
over Tom—as she threatens—Tom will go to the bad; and then
perhaps you will be sorry and blame yourself when it’s too late.”
By this time Mrs. Hogben was in tears.
“And so I’m to turn out, am I?—out of the house I was in ever since I
married and the house where my poor husband died of ‘roses on the
liver’” (cirrhosis) “and let that giddy girl in on all my good china and
linen,” she sobbed stertorously.
“No, not by any means—there’s room for all! I shall not always be
here, you know. Well, Mrs. Hogben,” rising, “I hope you will forgive
me for intruding into your family affairs, but just think over what I
have said to you; you know I mean well, and I’m Tom’s friend,” and
with this declaration her lodger bade her good-night, and climbed up
the creaking stairs into his crooked chamber.
The immediate result of the chauffeur’s interference was the
transformation of Tom into a smart, clean-shaven young man—who
openly neglected his lady-love, actually escorted her hated rival from
evening church, and remained to share the family supper of pig’s
cheek and pickles. Owen’s prescription had a marvellous effect; for,
three weeks after this too notorious entertainment, it was officially
given out at the Drum that Tom and Dilly Topham were to be wed at
Christmas—and to make their home with Sally Hogben. On hearing
this, so to speak, postscript, various maids and matrons were
pleased to be sarcastic respecting the two Mrs. Hogbens, and
wished them both “joy.”
CHAPTER XX
SUDDEN DEATH
There had been an outbreak of festivities in the neighbourhood of

lethargic Ottinge; the climax of these was a grand ball given by Mrs.
Woolcock at Westmere, to celebrate her youngest daughter’s
engagement to Lord Lowestoff. Every one who was any one—and
indeed not a few nobodies—were bidden as guests; Mrs. Woolcock
liked to see her rooms crammed to suffocation. No expense was
spared—the arrangements were made on a lavish scale. On this
occasion the extra waiters and other luxuries were imported from
London by special train, and a carefully selected house-party
provided the bride-elect with a ready-made court that intervened
between the future peeress and the vulgar herd. Dancing took place
in the great drawing-room (in old days it was called the White
Saloon), and through its wide, open windows humble spectators—
such as coachmen and chauffeurs—were at liberty to look on, to
wonder, and to criticise.
The Misses Parrett and their niece were present. Miss Parrett—who
had nerved herself for the ordeal with a glass and a half of port—had
motored to Westmere through the darkness, with great, flaring lamps
—a truly heart-shaking experience! but she was determined to
exhibit her new velvet gown and her new diamonds. Her satisfaction
with her own appearance was such that, before she embarked on
her venture into the night and the motor, her household were
summoned to a private view—precisely as if she were a young
beauty or a bride!
The old lady, who bore an absurd resemblance to a black velvet
penwiper, enjoyed the ball immensely, and took a number of mental
photographs; she also “took the wall” of various obnoxious people
who had dared to patronise her in her days of poverty. Her particular
satellites, stout widows and anxious-looking spinsters, rallied around
her, ardently admiring her toilette, and listened patiently to her boring
recollections of the balls she had attended years ago; but, in point of
fact, they were more keenly interested in the ball of to-night and their
prospects respecting escorts to the supper-table.
Much as she was engrossed in herself and her own importance,
Miss Parrett could not help noticing that her niece was singled out for
special attention by Bertie Woolcock. This, though a genuine
satisfaction to her, was no pleasure to her chauffeur, who, from a
coign of vantage on the lawn, commanded a capital view of the gay
scene—the illuminated room, the constant circulation of black and
white, and sometimes coloured, figures. Among these Miss Morven
was pre-eminent—the undisputed beauty of the evening—wearing a
filmy white gown, with a sparkling ornament glittering in her dark
hair; she looked radiantly lovely and radiantly happy, as she floated
lightly by.
The chauffeur’s watchful eyes noted that she had (quite
unnecessarily) bestowed three waltzes on that blundering elephant,
Bertie Woolcock; how red and hot he looked—more as if he were
threshing than dancing! What would he not give for just a couple of
turns with the belle of the ball! The band was “Iffs” and the floor
seemed to be ripping! Well, there was nothing for it but to wait as an
outsider, and to hold on to his patience with both hands.
After the great ball—its glories, shortcomings, surprises, and failures
—had died away into a nine days’ wonder, there were several cricket
matches, and Ottinge discovered, to its supreme elation, that they
had a notable man in Miss Parrett’s chauffeur! (This became evident
when the local eleven assembled for their evening practice in the
Manor fields.) The fame of Owen’s batting actually brought old
Thunder on the scene; for he, too, had been a fine cricketer, long
before gout had seized upon him and he had subsided into carpet
slippers.
“Ottinge v. Westmere” was a two days’ match, and the last day at the
park included a garden-party, arranged, as Mrs. Woolcock
murderously expressed it, “to kill off all the neighbours!”
“I say, Miss Morven,” said Bertie Woolcock, greeting her and her
father on their very late arrival. “We are catching it hot now, though
Ottinge was nearly out at three o’clock; that chauffeur fellow of your
aunts’ has made sixty runs for his side. I hope you sympathise with
us—we shall lose the match.”
“No, no indeed, Ottinge for ever!” she replied. “Where is the
chauffeur?” glancing round.
“Out in the field now.”
For some time she did not discover him, standing, a good way off,
bareheaded, and in well-fitting flannels. He looked every inch a
gentleman! What a contrast to poor Bertie, who seemed, in
comparison, a great slouching yokel.
“He’s a good-looking chap, isn’t he?” said the Rector, with the
complacency of a man who is alluding to one of his own
parishioners.
“Yes,” admitted young Woolcock in a grudging tone, “I suppose he is
—a ladies’ beauty! One hears such a lot of sultry stories, in these
days, about women being mashed on their chauffeurs, and runaway
matches. For my part, I call a chauffeur a rank idler—a chap who sits
all day, looks as solemn as an undertaker, and gets spoiled by the
ladies.” Then to Aurea, “Now, come over to the tent, Miss Morven,
my mother has kept a place for you.”
The match proved close and exciting. Westmere had a strong team,
and Aurea looked on with intense interest; the Park was in, and out
in the field were Dr. Boas, Hogben, Jones, Owen, and others. Time
went on, the last man was in, and making runs—the fate of the
match hung in the balance, when it was brought to an end by a
capital catch; Owen had not merely to run at top speed, but to stoop
suddenly to catch the ball—a fine effort—which was loudly and
deservedly applauded.
“He knows all about it,” remarked a man who was standing beside
Aurea. “He is a public school boy, I’ll bet my hat. What is he doing in
Ottinge? A chauffeur! Good Lord! Some young swell in disgrace with
his family.”
Miss Morven mentally endorsed this speech; but actually she
shrugged her shoulders.
Miss Susan beamed at the victory—Owen’s triumphs were hers. She
felt as proud of his cricket and his songs at the Parish Hall Concerts
as if he had been her own flesh and blood—other elderly spinsters
have been known to take young men into the recesses of their empty
and innocent hearts.
When the match was over, she kept her eye on the hero of the
occasion, and, seeing him getting into his coat and preparing to
depart, she beckoned eagerly, and then hurried towards him with
outstretched hands.
“Congratulate you, Owen! I do feel so proud of you!”
“Thank you, miss. I’m going to fetch the car—it’s getting late.”
“Can you tell me the time?”
He pulled out his watch from his breast-pocket, and hastily touched
—as luck would have it—the wrong spring; the back flew open, and
a small photograph, no bigger than a finger-nail, fell upon the grass.
In a second Owen had put his foot upon it, swooped, and snatched it
up. Whether from stooping or otherwise, his colour was higher than
usual, as he boldly confronted Miss Susan, whose face had become
unusually grave—for, unless her eyes deceived her (and she had
capital sight) the treasure was a photograph of her niece Aurea, cut
out of a group of “First Aid” recently taken at the Rectory! She had
recognised it in one lightning glance!
However, the chauffeur met her eyes imperturbably, as he replaced
the little scrap, opened the face of his watch, and announced, with
staggering self-possession—
“Half-past six, Miss Susan.”
Miss Susan turned hastily away, her maiden mind in a violent
commotion. So Owen, the chauffeur, carried Aurea’s photograph
about with him in his watch! What did it mean? Well, of course, it
could only mean one thing, he was—and who could wonder—in love
with the girl! Yes, and the conviction gave Miss Susan a violent
shock; she was scandalised, she was pleased, and she was not
pleased—a peculiar and contrary state of mind. She determined to
keep the amazing revelation to herself. Aurea must not be told on
any account—it might put disturbing ideas into her head—it would
not be proper; and for one whole week Miss Susan contained her
mighty secret, which secret disagreed with her both mentally and
physically. She was short and snappy—a new phase of her
character—ate little, avoided the garden, and mainly subsisted on
tea. At the end of seven long days she found her endurance had
reached its limits, and, sitting with her back to the dim light of the
Rectory drawing-room, Susan Parrett solemnly divulged to her niece
the tale of her significant discovery.
Was she shocked? Did she turn red and white? No, indeed; Aurea
received the astonishing information with a peal of laughter.
“Oh, my dearest Susie, what a tale! Why, it was no more my
photograph than yours! Am I the only young woman that is known to
Owen, the chauffeur?”
This clever girl was so insistent and so amused that she actually
persuaded her deluded aunt that her eyes had deceived her, and
she had made a ridiculous and silly mistake—yet all the time the
girl’s own heart sang to the tune that the story was true.
This silent chauffeur was a gentleman who had been in the Service,
and he carried her picture inside his watch. These two facts were of
profound interest to Aurea Morven, and she turned them over in her
mind many, many times a day; the result being, that she held herself
as much as possible aloof from her aunts’ employé. When she did
avail herself of the car, it was never to sit, as heretofore, outside by
the driver, but within the stuffy interior. She shrank from coming into
contact with a man who was seldom, to tell the honest truth, out of
her thoughts. To garden-parties and tennis tournaments she now
hailed her father, instead of accompanying Susan; and together they
drove in the Rectory dog-cart—this arrangement entailing not a few
excuses and pleadings, that were not too firmly based on the truth—
and the poor forsaken car remained in the coach-house, or took Miss
Parrett out for a brief and agonising airing.
In consequence of all this, the car’s driver had more time than ever
on his hands! The summer days are long, and, when off duty, he saw
a good deal of the Ramsays. The captain seemed of late to have
sunk into a further depth of mental lethargy, and to have lost much of
his affectionate interest in his old schoolfellow, Owen Wynyard.
“I am giving up the dogs for the present,” announced Mrs. Ramsay
one morning at the kennels, as he brought back three leg-weary
companions. “I find I must not continue what absorbs so much of my
time and carries me from home—though you are so good, and have
undertaken the three worst characters—they’re just as wild as
goats.”
“But I like them,” he declared; “they are capital company, and give
me an object for my tramps—these two fox-terriers and the little
beagle and I are great chums. We have done a fine round this
morning—they have had the time of their lives! Just look at them!”
and she looked and smiled at their bespattered legs, lolling tongues,
and happy eyes.
“Oh, I am sure of that,” she replied; “for they are three town dogs!
However, I must send the poor fellows away, all the same. I want to
be with Jim altogether, and without his knowing it. You see, he will
never allow me to walk with him; and he always fancies he is being
watched, and looks behind him every now and then. All the same, I
mean to follow him.”
Wynyard listened in silence. Mrs. Ramsay was, in his opinion, little
short of a saint; for years and years she had devoted her own
individual life to this unhappy madman. It was for him she slaved to
increase their small income, trading in plants and cuttings, and
keeping other people’s dogs. With the money she earned she made
Ivy House homelike and comfortable. The captain’s food, drink,
tobacco, and surroundings were of a class that the exterior of the
place did not seem to warrant, and were accepted by him as a
matter of course. Nothing could induce him to believe that their
income was less than a thousand a year; he had no recollection of
his money losses. But this long-drawn-out effort and strain was
beginning to tell on his wife. There were many white strands in her
thick black hair, many lines in her face; she had grown thin and
haggard, her beautiful Irish eyes were sunken, and wore an
expression of tragic anxiety. She alone knew what she dreaded, and
at last she put her fears into words—not to old friends like the
Parson, or Susan Parrett, but to this recent acquaintance, this young
Wynyard, who knew so much already.
“Tell me, Owen, don’t you think that Jim looks rather strange of late?”
she asked him, in a low voice.
“No—much as usual.”
“He sleeps so badly, and has no appetite, and seems horribly
depressed. Oh, I feel miserable about him!” and she buried her face
in her thin hands.
“I wish I could do something, Mrs. Ramsay. Would you like me to
stop here at night—you know you’ve only to say the word,” he urged,
in a boyish tone that was irresistible.
“Oh no, no, no; but it’s awfully good of you to offer. It’s not at night,
but when he is out by himself that is so trying. I do follow as much as
I dare. You see,” now lowering her voice, “once this mental
breakdown of his took the form of suicide”—and here her voice sank
to a whisper—“he tried to hang himself in Claringbold’s barn; but I
caught him just in time, and it never got out. That was years ago;
and afterwards he made a wonderful recovery. Now, it seems to me
more like a decay of will-power and memory, with occasional
outbreaks of violence—I can manage him then—but it’s the dying of
the mind!” and she gave a little sob.
“If I may speak plainly, Mrs. Ramsay, I really think you should get an
experienced man to look after him at once. I know nothing of mental
disease, but I’m sure it’s not right for you to be alone here with him,
and just two maids and old Mary.”
“You mean for me to get a keeper? No; I couldn’t do it; and think of
what people would suppose.”
Poor innocent lady! Did she imagine for a moment that all Ottinge did
not know for a fact that her husband was insane?
“You might let them suppose he had come to help with the dogs,” he
suggested, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Of course—of course—what a splendid idea!”
“And you will send for him to-morrow, won’t you? Or would you like
me to wire or write to-night? I know some one in London who would
see about this.”
(Leila would have been considerably astonished if her brother’s first
commission from Ottinge was to dispatch a keeper for a male
lunatic!)
“I must consult Dr. Boas. Thank you very much. I won’t do anything
in a hurry.”
“Won’t you? Why not? I think you should see Dr. Boas at once.”
“Well, then, I will to-morrow. Jim complains of his head—he often
does, but now he says the pain is like a saw, and he can’t stand it.
Then he imagines he is back in the Service, and expecting to be
warned for parade or a court martial, and talks very strangely. Dr.
Boas has gone away to a funeral, and won’t be back till to-night, and
then I must confess Jim doesn’t like him; he likes no one but you,
and some of the dogs—and me, of course,” she added, with a sickly
smile.
“Shall I come in this evening?”
“Oh, do; you are a kind fellow! Even if he never speaks now, sure I
know he loves to see you sitting there. Ah, here he is, and I must go
and coax him to eat some dinner!”
To his visitor’s surprise, Captain Ramsay was unusually animated
and talkative that night, and mentioned many little details about his
father, and recalled certain daredevil deeds, acts of generosity, and
even nascent love-affairs.
“I say, Owen, you remember the pretty girl up at Simla—the dark-
eyed one you were so mad about—and how you swore you’d run
away with her, and marry her in spite of her father, the General, and
the whole family? Oh, of course I know—what a duffer I am! You

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Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing

Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in

ISBN 978-3-030-46581-0 ISBN 978-3-030-46582-7 (eBook)

Cover credit: “Ophelia Surfacing” copyright Robert J. Moore

Thanks to Robert J. Moore who granted us permission to use his painting

1 Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind 1

2 “I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction in

3 “We Should Go Mad”: The Madwoman and Her Nurse 49

4 The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen

5 “A Necessary Madness”: PTSD in Mary Balogh’s

6 Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen,” and

7 “Dear Holy Sister”: Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror

8 The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman and

Neo-Victorian Revisions of Female Sexuality 179

9 Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in

10 Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman

11 The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC’s Sherlock 253

12 Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in

Marshall Needleman Armintor is Principal Lecturer in English at the

Dreadful and The Frankenstein Chronicles as Adaptations” in Open Cul-

in Adam Bede” in Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of

Fig. 7.1 At the end of episode one, Agnes appears as an apparition to

Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies

Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

In any given university in 1990, clusters of graduate students were dis-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

The scholarship of the nineties was on a feminist cusp of rewriting

that it was impossible to define “Victorian.” He suggested that Victo-

A Tale of Two Cities opens in 1775 with this metafictional introduction

torn by doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They

Another male scholar with currency in the nineties was Gordon

end in a decorous Victorian manner, it challenged the narratives handed

the appearance of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Her novel spawned a “verita-

neo-Victorian works offer an “alternative view of the nineteenth cen-

“the affective dynamics” of writers’, readers’ and viewers’ “compulsive

overriding concerns of the postmodern era: questions of identity; of the

Victorian angst and mental illness—caused by rapidly changing tech-

This is a project of urgency. According to the CDC (Centers for Dis-

attenuation and erosion as well as from a sudden flash of fear” (230).

and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ire-

and crass as male protagonists—but because she is a self-actualised woman

into a weapon to traumatise and silence persons who do not adhere to

6. Emerson said this in a speech, “The American Scholar,” made on August

Bennett, Enoch Arnold. These Twain. London: Methuen, 1916.

Community Management of Opioid Overdose. World Health Organization, 2015.

Jones, Amelia. “Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of

Penny Dreadful. Directed by Damon Thomas et al. Showtime Television Series,

“The State of Mental Health in America 2018.” Mental Health Amer-

“I Am Not an Angel”: Madness and Addiction

Kate Faber Oestreich

Scores of authors, directors and digital producers have adapted, revised

© The Author(s) 2020 27

Prejudice towards older, unmarried female workers taints Jane’s per-

Undoubtedly it was hard on Wynyard that, at a time when his own

There had been an outbreak of festivities in the neighbourhood of

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