Neo-Victorianism on Screen:

Postfeminism and Contemporary

Adaptations of Victorian Women 1st
Edition Antonija Primorac (Auth.)
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION
AND VISUAL CULTURE

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary
Adaptations of Victorian Women

Antonija Primorac
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Department of English
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode
of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is
its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations,
and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as
videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and
nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute
to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one,
form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts
that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other
pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres,
appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series espe-
cially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between
adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome pro-
posals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance
of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual ­culture.

Editorial Board
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Turkey
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, Australian National University, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud, France

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14654
 Antonija Primorac

Neo-Victorianism
on Screen
Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations
of Victorian Women
Antonija Primorac
Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences
University of Split
Split, Croatia

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-64558-2 ISBN 978-3-319-64559-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949208

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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 Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making, and I would therefore like to
thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their patience and sup-
port. The seeds were sown at the 2nd Annual Association of Adaptation
Studies conference held in 2007 at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta,
USA, where a panel on nineteenth century on film brought a wide-
eyed and somewhat opinionated PhD candidate together with inspira-
tional academics pursuing research on adaptation studies. It was the start
of many a conversation on the shape-shifting beast that is adaptation,
leading eventually to fruitful work collaborations, university exchange
programmes and the organisation of an international conference, Neo-
Victorian Networks, held in Amsterdam in 2012. Had that cross-­Atlantic
trip not been possible, my life would certainly have taken a different
turn, so I am immensely grateful to the Croatian Ministry of Science for
its generous funding programme for young researchers’ international
conference attendance (sadly no longer available).
I would like to thank the US Department of State for awarding
me the Fulbright scholarship that enabled me to spend a year at New
York University’s English Department in 2008–2009 where, with the
­generous help of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and John Maynard, I started
to develop my initial musings on film adaptations of Henry James’
novels. I was also fortunate enough to be awarded the Fulbright Alumni
Grant that went towards academic journal subscriptions n ­ecessary
for a continuation of research at my home institution. The resulting
PhD, written in Croatian and defended at Zagreb University’s English

v
vi Acknowledgements

Department, was supervised by Borislav Knežević, to whom I am

indebted for his guidance and support. I would also like to thank the
head of my PhD committee, Nikica Gilić, for his constructive comments
and encouragement.
A huge thank you goes to Eve Patten whose invitation in early 2013
to use the library facilities at Trinity College Dublin was a turning
point that made the idea of this particular book project plausible. The
Visiting Fellowship at TCD enabled the much needed access to valuable
resources and helped me to develop some already published articles into
a full-blown book written in English.
The completion of this project would not have been possible without
the non-stipendiary Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of English
Studies, University of London from July to September 2013. The
lengthy stay in London was made possible thanks to the generosity
and hospitality of Wendy Bracewell and Robert Shoemaker, Andrew
Asibong, Zoran Milutinović and Alan Kennedy, to whom I offer my
deepest thanks. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Faculty
of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, for the short-term
research trip grants that made holding the Visiting Fellowships at IES
and TCD financially feasible.
While in Split, my research often relied on the comradeship of
­colleagues at universities abroad with better access to databases and j­ournal
subscriptions. Thank you Erik Steinskog, Ana Franjić, Christine Ferguson,
Emily Elizabeth Direen, Joyce Goggin, Tara MacDonald, Monika Pietrzak-
Franger, Ivan Lupić, Lejla Kučukalić, Linda Warley, Sarah Artt and Eckart
Voigts—without you the completion of this book would have been
­well-nigh impossible.
I am indebted to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb
and Karina Jakupsdottir, for their continuing support and assistance.
A special thank you goes to my husband Aidan for patiently reading
through the different drafts and offering his insightful editorial advice—
all this despite his heartfelt dislike for costume drama (and heritage
cinema in particular).
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, Slavka and
Ljubo, and my sister Jaka for their unwavering faith in me and my work.
Od srca hvala.
A version of the chapter on the adaptations of Irene Adler was pre-
viously published as ‘The Naked Truth: The Postfeminist Afterlives of
 Acknowledgements vii

Irene Adler’ (2013) and is here revisited with the kind permission of the
general editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke. A shorter
version of the chapter entitled ‘In the Grip of the Corset’ was published
in the inaugural issue of Film, Fashion & Consumption as ‘Corsets, Cages
and Embowered Women in Contemporary Victoriana on Film’, and is
rewritten here with the journal’s approval. A smaller part of the chap-
ter on the representations of colonial space and gender roles was previ-
ously published by Palgrave Macmillan as ‘Cultural Nostalgia, Orientalist
Ideology and Heritage Film’ in The Politics of Adaptation: Media
Convergence and Ideology (2015) edited by Dan Hassler-Forest and
Pascal Nicklas.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture 1

2 Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock

Holmes Stories: The Case of Irene Adler 27

3 Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space

and Cultural Nostalgia in Neo-Victorianism on Screen 55

4 In the Grip of the Corset: Women as Caged Birds

in Contemporary Victoriana on Screen 97

5 Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations:

Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation
and Appropriation 133

6 Conclusion: No Country for Old Women 177

Index 191

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Caught between two worlds: woman as exotic spectacle

in Ripper Street’s Season 2, Episode 1, ‘Pure
as the Driven’ (detail). BBC 84
Fig. 4.1 Victoria being tight-laced in Tim Burton’s
The Corpse Bride (2005), Warner Bros. Pictures 100
Fig. 4.2 a, b The corseted centre of the film. Stills from
The Portrait of a Lady (1996), dir. Jane Campion.
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment 105
Fig. 4.3 Nicole Kidman as Satine performing ‘Diamonds
are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Moulin Rouge! (2001), Bazmark
Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox 112
Fig. 4.4 Caged birds. Joanna singing ‘Green Finch and Linnet
Bird’ in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007), DreamWorks
Pictures 114
Fig. 4.5 Crinoline as shelter: Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).
Australian Film Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman
Productions 116
Fig. 4.6 Dressed up for the part of a Victorian wife. Jane
Campion’s The Piano (1993). Australian Film
Commission/CiBy 2000/Jan Chapman Productions 117
Fig. 5.1 Hosing down the sins of the body. Still from ‘Closer
than Sisters’ (2014 Series One Episode 5), Penny Dreadful.
Sky Atlantic/Showtime 152

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Neo-Victorianism on Screen

and Postfeminist Media Culture

In his Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland

introduces two related concepts: ‘legislated nostalgia’, which he uses
to describe a phenomenon whereby ‘a body of people… [is] force[d]
to have memories they do not actually possess’, and the ‘Now Denial: To
tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only
time that may ever be interesting again is the future’ (Coupland 1991,
p. 41). Published in 1991, Coupland’s book captures the fragmented,
self-consciously retro ennui of the early 1990s in the West with uncanny
precision. This postmodern, self-conscious backward gaze has found
prominent expression since the early 1990s in a proliferation of ­historical
fiction set in the Victorian past and in screen adaptations of Victorian
literature and culture. Whether they have sought to retrieve the certain-
ties of the pre-modernist narrative and its attendant social structures or if
they aimed to challenge received ideas about the past through a critical
rewriting and re-visioning of the Victorians, what all these adaptations
and appropriations of the Victorian era have in common is a desire to
retrieve and re-present the past by translating it into a vocabulary under-
standable and relatable to contemporary audiences. The representations
of the long nineteenth century that have been brought to life on the big
and small screens alike can be read as variants of Coupland’s ‘legislated
nostalgia’ and examples of the ‘now denial’: as cultural products created
for, and often consumed as anachronistic cultural memories by, audiences
in the Anglosphere, and which, more often than not, end up disseminat-
ing their versions of legislated nostalgia on a global scale.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Primorac, Neo-Victorianism on Screen, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64559-9_1
2 A. Primorac

Whereas before 2012 it was unusual to come across the ­ adjective

outside academia, ‘neo-Victorian’ has by now become a widely accepted
term used to describe these adaptations and appropriations of Victorian
literature and culture across media.1 As Cora Kaplan pointed out in one
of the first studies of the phenomenon, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions,
Criticism (2007), the interest in the material remnants of the Victorian
era started in Britain in the 1960s and gradually expanded so that all
other aspects of the period came to be appropriated and used in art,
literature and design (pp. 2–3), and also, crucially, since the 1980s, in
political discourse: first through the appropriation of the ‘Victorian
Values—thrift, family, enterprise’ by Thatcher’s Conservative govern-
ment, which was followed by Blair’s retooling of ‘Christian Socialism’ in
his branding of New Labour (Kaplan 2007, pp. 5–7). Neo-Victorianism
has gathered momentum in the last couple of decades, and it now refers
not only to the numerous screen adaptations of Victorian literature and
Victorian-inspired TV series and films, fiction and graphic novels, but
also to the ways in which fashion, art and interior design have hearkened
back to the Victorian era, which has also led to a mainstreaming of the
Steampunk and Goth subcultures’ aesthetic.2 After some terminological
jousting in which the prefix neo won out over the backward looking ones
of post and retro,3 neo-Victorian studies has emerged as an academic field
of endeavour, and this was solidified with the launch of the open access
journal Neo-Victorian Studies in 2008.4
However, even though neo-Victorian studies has grown rapidly in
the last decade, its critical spotlight has, so far, primarily been directed at
fiction (including, to a smaller degree, graphic novels5), resulting in, as
Caterina Grasl noted, the marginal status of neo-Victorianism on screen
in the field (Grasl 2015, p. 21). What attention has been paid to film and
theatre6 adaptations of Victorian and/or neo-Victorian fiction has usu-
ally been in the context of a broader discussion of the relevant adapted
text7; indeed, neo-Victorianism on screen as a subject in its own right
has rarely been dealt with independently8: it is usually a part of the big-
ger argument about neo-Victorian afterlives.9 Like the two special issues
of Neo-Victorian Studies (2:2 and 4:2),10 book-length studies of neo-
Victorian screen adaptations have primarily focused on filmic adaptations
of Victorian literature that critically interpret the lacunae of Victorians’
attitudes to gender, race, class and empire.11 This does not come as a
surprise, since the field itself took off within literature studies, with focus
on explorations of self-conscious, postmodern takes on the historical
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 3

novel set in the Victorian period; as such, it has generally been aligned to
the genre of historiographic metafiction. What is surprising, as the adap-
tation studies scholar Imelda Whelehan notes (2012), is the persistent
reluctance to approach neo-Victorianism on screen on equal terms with
neo-Victorian literature, especially as from its inception as a discipline,
neo-Victorian studies scholars recognised adaptation as ‘a fundamental
part of neo-Victorianism as a concept’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010,
p. 244). Whelehan stresses that neo-Victorian studies’ approach to neo-
Victorian adaptations (understood as both adaptations of classics that
offer new readings of Victorians’ silenced or marginal points of view, and
screen adaptations of neo-Victorian texts) has mostly treated them as sec-
ondary to literary texts:

A favoring of reading over spectating and a nagging belief that reading is

better because “adaptations often flatten out the complexities of Victorian
fiction” (Hadley 2010, 142) positions screen adaptation as the ersatz
“nineteenth-century dress-ups,” as if historical authenticity (even reim-
agined history) is the peculiar domain of fiction. Neo-Victorian fiction’s
intertextual universe is part of “a cultural memory, to be re-membered,
and imaginatively re-created, not revised or understood” (Mitchell 2010,
7); whereas adaptation’s intertextual potentialities roam across eras and
genres in fantastic and dangerous liaisons yet to be emulated by the neo-
Victorian novel. (Whelehan 2012, p. 289)

The hierarchical approach to neo-Victorianism on screen is all the more

vexing because, as Whelehan points out, ‘neo-Victorian literary texts are
themselves adaptations; even when they do not refer back to a single
Urtext, they remain compatible with contemporary definitions of adapta-
tion and appropriation’ (Whelehan 2012, p. 272). Since screen adapta-
tions of Victorian classics by and large belong to the genre of costume
drama, these connections are all the more pertinent because, in Julianne
Pidduck’s words, ‘historical fiction and costume drama alike depict the
past through the stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies of present cul-
tural production’ (Pidduck 2004, p. 4). So far, the only monograph deal-
ing solely with the nineteenth century on screen that gives equal space
to adaptations of classics as well as to neo-Victorian meta-adaptations
(original screenplays set in the nineteenth century) is Iris Kleinecke-
Bates’s Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television,
1995–2005 (2014). Kleinecke-Bates also introduces a chapter on a genre
not usually examined in the context of costume drama—the so-called
4 A. Primorac

factual history programming, characterised by popular TV shows such as

What the Victorians Did for Us and The 1900 House, where she analyses
the transformation of the latter genre under the influence of reality TV
in the UK and reads it within the broader context of the affective turn in
the humanities.
This book aims to address this imbalance in neo-Victorian studies by
focusing solely on neo-Victorianism on screen, which is here understood
as an umbrella term that encompasses adaptations of Victorian texts that
offer a critical re-visioning of Victorian narratives; screen adaptations
of neo-Victorian texts; contemporary biopics of Victorians; and meta-
adaptations of Victorians (mash-ups and appropriations of more than
one Victorian text, as well as original screenplays set in the Victorian era
that play with and adapt received ideas about the period). Central to this
analysis is the figure of the Victorian heroine and how she is represented
for contemporary audiences, because the Victorian woman—with her
corseted body epitomising her repressed sexuality, limited social roles,
career and life choices—is the pivotal image through which contempo-
rary ideas about the period are dramatically tested. Following Pidduck,
these representations of the Victorian woman are examined in terms of
their ‘stylistic, critical and generic vocabularies’. The adaptations I con-
sider span the period from 1993 (the premiere of The Piano) to 2016
(the premiere of ITV’s first season of Victoria). My aim is to highlight
and examine the important role that films and TV series have played in
this period in contemporary understandings of the Victorian past in gen-
eral and in notions of women’s agency, gender, colonial space and family
in particular.
1990 is most commonly taken as the beginning of the boom in neo-
Victorian fiction, marked as it is by the publication of one of the most
studied and by now canonical neo-Victorian novels—A.S. Byatt’s Booker
Prize winning Possession: A Romance.12 The early 1990s have also been
identified by film studies scholars as the time when the nostalgic, imperi-
alistically inclined subgenre of historical film—heritage cinema—started
to change in tone and focus, giving way to darker, more critical visions
of the past in adaptations of the classics and begetting variants usu-
ally dubbed post-heritage or anti-heritage13 (more on the heritage film
debate and its relevance to neo-Victorianism in Chap. 3). From the point
of view of feminist media studies, this was also a time when a perceiv-
ably postfeminist sensibility started to permeate cultural production in
the West.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 5

‘Postfeminist sensibility’ was introduced as a term by Rosalind Gill

in her Gender and the Media (2007), where she developed Angela
McRobbie’s interpretation of postfeminism as a ‘double entanglement’
of anti-feminist and feminist ideas (cf. McRobbie 2004). Gill suggests
that since ‘postfeminism’ has accrued many, often contradictory, mean-
ings—denoting at the same time the object of study, a period and an
approach—the analytical gaze should rather be directed at the study of
postfeminist media culture and its resultant sensibility. This approach
allows the discussion to move away from the impasse of debates about
‘authentic feminism’, and it can instead concentrate on identifying what
is new in contemporary representations and definitions of gender in the
media (cf. Gill 2007, pp. 254–255). For my purposes, it thus enables a
focused analysis of the many different, yet connected, ways that Victorian
heroines have been adapted and appropriated across contemporary exam-
ples of neo-Victorianism on screen.
Following Gill, the postfeminist media culture is one in which key
feminist notions of empowerment and choice have been appropriated
by the neo-liberal media that seeks to inspire women (especially young
women) to perceive their agency as that of active, self-monitoring, het-
erosexually desiring consumers who are now encouraged to choose tra-
ditional gender roles (cf. Gill 2007) as a way of tackling the social
imperative to ‘have it all’ (marriage, children and a career) (Negra 2009,
p. 31). Considering this context, it is not surprising that postfeminism’s
favourite author is Jane Austen because she has become, in Shelley
Cobb’s words:

a sign of female agency also doubly entangled. She is both popular and a
member of the canon; she writes ‘romances’ but is taken seriously; her life
does not match the stories she wrote, and forever some critics will call her
feminist and some an anti-feminist. For a contemporary woman to navi-
gate postfeminism and its expectations successfully is impossible; Austen
makes space to express the illegible rage against the oppression of agency
possible. At the same time, she offers the option to identify with someone
who did not fulfil the expectations of women in her life but who is remem-
bered as great for her work. (Cobb 2015, p. 136)

This postfeminist appropriation of Austen uncannily mirrors the

Victorian appropriation of Austen as an honorary Victorian. In this
guise, Austen appears in numerous postfeminist adaptations and appro-
priations, especially the popular ‘chick-lit’ and ‘chick film’ appropriations
6 A. Primorac

that Shelley Cobb analyses (such as Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in
Austen and Austenland) as well as in the academic studies of the film
adaptations of the long nineteenth century.14 This fact is perhaps best
exemplified by the way in which Austen has been visually represented for
generations. The most commonly used portrait—and the one chosen to
be put on the 2017 issue of the ten pound note—is, in fact, a re-visioned
Victorian adaptation of the only surviving en face painting of the nov-
elist by her sister Cassandra. Commissioned by J.E. Austen-Leigh, Jane
Austen’s nephew, for the 1870 publication of his Memoir of Jane Austen,
James Andrews’s portrait shows Austen remade for a Victorian audience:
the cross-armed and rather stern-looking Jane of Cassandra’s watercol-
our was transformed by the addition of hair-curls, bonnet frills, a wistful
look and a completely redundant wedding ring (luckily omitted from the
banknote design). As such, his portrait reflects Austen-Leigh’s reinven-
tion of the author in line with Victorian notions of femininity. Both the
portrait and the biography turn the highly sardonic, undeniably ambi-
tious and fairly unconventional author into the tame, apolitical and
sweet-tempered ‘dear Aunt Jane’. The Memoir further bowdlerised the
remaining letters (many of which had already been burnt by Cassandra
or revised by the author’s siblings) editing out any mention of politics,
drinking or, heaven forbid, passion. However, like the portrait, this sani-
tised Victorian image of Austen, which makes her into an author of sen-
timental and romantic plots rather than one of wit and irony, seems to
stubbornly prevail over and against all subsequent investigations of Jane
Austen’s life and writing.15 The endurance of Jane Austen’s Victorian
makeover can be quickly confirmed by the sheer plethora of Jane Austen
fan websites and fan fiction or by a perusal of the online debates that
ensued after the Bank of England announced in 2013 that it was going
to put her image on the ten pound note. More than anywhere else,
though, this makeover survives in the screen adaptations of her life16
and in TV and film adaptations of Austen’s novels, which by and large
prioritise romance and a nostalgic, class-specific, whitewashed view of a
utopian past of stately homes and bucolic countryside. Apart from influ-
encing the future popular perceptions of Jane Austen, Andrews’ and
Austen-Leigh’s joint makeover of the author’s image illustrates the way
different periods reinterpret writers and their works of art in accordance
with their own zeitgeist, and vividly demonstrates the nature of adapta-
tion as a process that generates subsequent perceptions of the adapted
text or image.
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 7

I have brought up the case of Jane Austen not only because of her
continuing status as an honorary Victorian in postfeminist media and
the numerous studies of Victorian adaptations, but in order to highlight
two issues pertinent to this study: the long-term transformative and gen-
erative repercussions of visual adaptations on the one hand and on the
other, the postfeminist context in which the adaptations I shall be analys-
ing have been created. While Jane Austen the honorary Victorian may be
the individual mobilising figure of postfeminist angst because, as Cobb
highlights, her life and work have been interpreted as emblematic of
both an anti-feminist and (proto-)feminist agency, the vacuum for more
or less nostalgic fantasies of the past created by a postfeminist media cul-
ture has arguably been filled by neo-Victorian adaptations. By providing
what Aantje Ascheid has identified as ‘safe rebellions’ (2006)—narra-
tives of (invariably heterosexual, white-, middle- or upper-class) women’s
struggle for self-fulfilment displaced into a repressive Victorian context—
neo-Victorian costume dramas’ representations of Victorian women offer
the fulfilment of postfeminism’s impossible goals, with the added frisson
of engaging with sexual taboos and corsets. Resembling the way in which
contemporary perception of Austen is still dominated by her Victorian
makeover, the success of these narratives depends heavily on certain pre-
sumptions about the period becoming cultural memories that, following
Coupland’s legislated nostalgia, the audiences are expected to share and
believe in. Yet, as I show in Chaps. 3 and 4 in particular, these presump-
tions often rely on unquestioned tropes and stereotypes about the past
which come to constitute cultural memories that are taken as immutable,
even when they invariably shift with time.
The relationship between neo-Victorian fiction and cultural memory
was examined by Kate Mitchell in her monograph History and Cultural
Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2010), where she argues that neo-Vic-
torian texts pose as ‘acts of memory’ (p. 4) and as ‘a means toward his-
torical recollection […] [wherein] nostalgia might be productive, giving
voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear wit-
ness’ (p.5). Moreover, she sees neo-Victorian texts as

less concerned with making sense of the Victorian past, than with offering
it as a cultural memory, to be re-membered, and imaginatively re-created,
not revised or understood. They remember the period not only in the
usual sense, of recollecting it, but also in the sense that they re-embody,
that is, re-member, or reconstruct it. (p. 7)
8 A. Primorac

This approach is based on a reading of Svetlana Boym’s notion of

‘reflective nostalgia’ that is open to ambiguous and/or critical inter-
­
pretations of the past (see Boym 2001, p. xviii; for more on Boym and
cultural nostalgia see Chap. 3). For Mitchell, cultural memory thus
becomes a part of ‘the “matrix” (Rigney 2007: 53) formed by history,
historical fiction, film, memory, memorials and material heritage, all of
which contribute to the way we, in the twenty-first century, think about
ourselves historically.’ (Mitchell 2010, p. 31, added emphasis) Mitchell’s
approach to neo-Victorian fiction as ‘memory texts’ that re-member the
past offers the most developed, if culturally and linguistically circum-
scribed, interpretation of neo-Victorianism’s relationship with cultural
memory: circumscribed because it is culturally limited to the notion of
a shared Anglophone culture and history in which re-visiting and re-
membering the Victorians is important because of the role ‘they’ play for
‘us’ and ‘our’ own feeling of history. Mitchell’s exploration of cultural
memory is thus beholden to the idea of a shared past that leads to (seem-
ingly uncomplicated) post-imperial, contemporary, Anglophone identi-
ties. This assumption is problematic on several levels. As Aidan O’Malley
has noted, such a conception of nostalgia relies on a very limited per-
spective on the varieties of experience in the Victorian era—even within
the Anglosphere. Nostalgia cannot name any sort of approach to the
Irish Famine, as O’Malley argues in his reading of Joseph O’Connor’s
2002 Star of the Sea, an immensely popular neo-Victorian novel that is
regularly overlooked by neo-Victorian scholars (see O’Malley 2015), nor
can it be applied to describe the workings of the British Empire in India
during the Opium Wars as described in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
(2008). Furthermore, such a conceptualisation of neo-Victorianism as
a memory-text contingent on nostalgia does not explain the persistent
appeal of neo-Victorianism to global audiences outside the Anglosphere
and its transnational popularity and consumption that goes beyond the
notion of a shared history, culture or language. While Mitchell proposes
the memorable figure of ‘re-membering’ as neo-Victorian fiction’s domi-
nant procedure (the how) of bringing the readers and writers together
in their attempt to ‘participate in making historical meaning’ (Mitchell
2010, p. 8), the crucial questions of who remembers what, where and
for what purpose are left open.17 Mitchell’s explanation that it is because
Victorians are important to us does not quite explain their uses or the
pleasure of their consumption outside the Empire-identified parts of the
Commonwealth.18 This focus on a shared experience brings to mind the
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 9

other side of nostalgia as theorised by Boym: the restorative nostalgia

that ‘stresses nostos and attempts at a transhistorical reconstruction of the
lost home’ (Boym 2001, p. xviii). As a work such as Mitchell’s suggests,
this lost home can be read as the lost imperial influence of the metropoli-
tan centre. While an identification of the metropolitan centre as home
was encouraged throughout the British Empire, this study explores how
the post-imperial legislated nostalgia of the analysed screen texts re-con-
firms this, only now far beyond the boundaries of the former Empire,
thanks to the cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere.
Neo-Victorianism on screen’s rapid global dissemination today has
been made possible thanks to several overlapping aspects of contem-
porary media consumption: the sharing of digital and digitised content
through social media; the easy global distribution of said content via
streaming services and sharing platforms (both legal and not); and the
possibility of consuming content in the original as box sets or, in the case
of pirated material, as torrents with quickly produced subtitles, thanks
to the status of English as a global lingua franca. It is no wonder then
that, in this new, digitally redefined space, the neo-Victorian campaign
for Hendrick’s gin—a recently revived brand made in Scotland and
debuted in New York—was created by a Madrid-based marketing agency,
DraftFCB Spain.19 What is more, the quirky, steam-powered Victorians
featured in the campaign’s ads owe as much to images from Edward Lear
and Lewis Carroll’s books as to Terry Gilliam’s collages and animation
for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.20 The latter phenomenon—the crea-
tion of neo-Victorian images as adaptations of adaptations of Victorian
images—is one that has raised questions about the issues of authenticity
in neo-Victorian studies.
Visual neo-Victorianism’s complex web of textual, visual and filmic
references which does not link an adaptation clearly to one or more iden-
tifiable adapted texts seems to be the reason at the heart of neo-Victorian
adaptations’ relatively subordinate status in neo-Victorian studies. Faced
with this characteristic of adaptations, Heilmann and Llewellyn raise the
following questions in their field-defining study Neo-Victorianism: The
Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009:

This internalization of the nature of adaptation, whereby adaptations speak

to themselves and one another rather than only to the precursor text, has
led to a paradigmatic shift in the nature of adaptation itself. What, now,
does it mean to adapt the Victorians? And what are we adapting: the
10 A. Primorac

Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone

in popular culture? Does each adaptation move us further away from the
Victorians, just as chronology creates a greater number of years between
us and them, or does this very fact represent a new challenge to adaptors
in terms of how they deal with the issue of authenticity itself? (Heilmann and
Llewellyn 2010, p. 212, added emphasis)

These unanswered questions about the issue of authenticity are picked

up in the recent polemic on the breadth of neo-Victorian studies’ pur-
view by Marie-Luise Kohlke (2014). Expanding the already broad
description of the field published in the ‘Aims and Scope’ section of the
journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2008), Kohlke makes a claim for an
inclusive definition of neo-Victorianism that goes beyond geographical,
national, or linguistic divisions. She also argues against the field’s nar-
row focus on self-conscious, postmodern fiction’s revisiting and rewriting
of Victorian literature and culture and its attendant cerebral pleasures of
detecting intertextual links. Kohlke suggests that neo-Victorian studies
should examine

cultural and critical practice that re-visions the nineteenth century and its
latter-day aesthetic and ideological legacies in the light of historical hind-
sight and critique, but also fantasy—what we want to imagine the period
to have been like for diverse reasons, including affirmations of national
identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in
escapist exoticism. (Kohlke 2014, p. 21)

Using Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) to point out

that the view that ‘rescription/revision is hardly postmodern (or ‘neo’)
and may have little more critical legitimacy or usefulness than the con-
cept of originality’ (Kohlke 2014, p. 25), and drawing on Hutcheon’s
caution that adaptations appear as variants of intertextuality only to
those who are familiar with the adapted text, Kohlke maintains that
even the ‘unacquainted may take pleasure of a different sort from the
adaptation: from a visceral immersion in the vividly re-imagined world,
a renewed faith in the power of stories, their moral purpose and poetic
justice – none of which require palimpsestic double-vision or knowledge’
(p. 25). However, Kohlke then shows reluctance bordering on unease
when addressing Heilmann and Llewellyn’s remark about adaptations’
propensity to adapt other adaptations (Kohlke 2014, p. 26). Despite
arguing for an inclusion of immersive examples of neo-Victorianism that
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 11

do not necessarily make their adapted texts obvious to the reader/viewer,

Kohlke dismisses the study of ‘free-floating simulacra that have taken on
virtual life of their own, no longer reducible to particular source-texts or
adaptation histories’ and suggests that they do not qualify for ‘being ele-
vated to the defining characteristic of neo-Victorianism’ (Kohlke 2014,
p. 26, original emphasis).
This ‘phantasmatic quality’, however, is precisely what is fascinating
about neo-Victorianism on screen as an adaptive phenomenon. Film
adaptation in particular can be read, via Dudley Andrew, as a peculiar
kind of celluloid palimpsest, ‘in that the surface layer engages, rather
than replaces, a previous inscription’ (Andrew qtd. in Geraghty 2008,
p. 195, added emphasis). Building on this image, Christine Geraghty
suggests that the adaptation process, considered as a layering of previ-
ous adaptations, ‘involves an accretion of deposits over time, a recogni-
tion of ghostly presences, and a shadowing or doubling of what is on
the surface by what is glimpsed behind’ (Geraghty 2008, p. 195). Every
adaptation, after all, contains ghosts of not only the adapted text or its
previous adaptations, but also of other renditions of the period the adap-
tation is set in. As such, the adaptive process that creates screen neo-
Victorianism (as well as visual neo-Victorianism in general) can better be
read via Thomas Leitch’s concept of ‘generation’, which looks to include
the generative aspect of adaptation usually missing from theoretical dis-
cussions: ‘generation looks both backward, in terms of genealogy, and
forward, in terms of production’ (Leitch 2011, p. 44). This conceptu-
alisation makes the dynamic, complex nature of screen adaptations more
apparent, highlighting the fact that they are in dialogue not just with one
(or more) adapted text(s), but also with previous adaptations of the said
text(s), the related images and adaptations that depict the era, extending
into the future towards new adaptations.
An application of Leitch’s, Andrew’s and Geraghty’s approaches to
film adaptation—as a generative process of dynamic layering, creat-
ing a mutating palimpsest of related adaptations—to the study of neo-­
Victorianism on screen, combined with feminist media and culture
studies’ examinations of contemporary postfeminist media discourse
and production contexts informs this study’s perspective on questions
about the contemporary uses of memory, nostalgia, and the past. This
investigation goes beyond exploring the relationship between individual
adapted texts and their adaptations as a dialogue between (or, rather
often, monologue on) our own time and contemporary ideas about the
12 A. Primorac

past that is being brought to life. In its examination of the uses of the
past in contemporary screen adaptations of Victorians, this study seeks
to expose the push and pull between the demands of a given genre, the
marketing priorities of the industry, the creative vision of the makers and
the audiences’ expectations of the costume drama and their conflicting
(often nostalgia-imbued) demands for authenticity and pleasure on the
one hand, and novelty and difference on the other.
Representing and recreating the past on screen is an enterprise always
fraught with the issues of authenticity, agency and ethics, which in turn
reflect the questions of who gets to tell the story, how true to the his-
torical events the adaptations really are or whose side of the story gets
depicted. Film and television play a key role in the re-interpretation of
the past and the creative re-imagining of the period’s events and fic-
tion. Neo-Victorianism on screen actively contributes to the creation of
spectral moving images of the past in contemporary popular culture. In
turn, these images often take on the function of an imagined memory,
contributing to the growth of a ‘legislated nostalgia’ for a Victorian
past that never was—but which, nevertheless, mobilises the emotions
and reactions of its audiences, challenging some of their ideas about the
past while reinforcing others. Developing Leitch’s work, I look at neo-
Victorianism on screen as a generative phenomenon that adapts and
absorbs aspects of what is understood as Victoriana, creating along the
way a neo-Victorian imaginarium that enables a sensory immersion in a
fantasy of the past. ‘Imaginarium’ is here used as an umbrella term that
illustrates neo-Victorianism’s dual character: as a dynamic and generative
(creative) process that builds on preceding adaptations, and as an evolv-
ing compendium of the said generated images.
As Kleinecke-Bates pointed out, the success of an adaptation depends
on the look of the adaptation (2014, p. 55). This is because the look
is crucial to the creation of the effect of authenticity that is an integral
element of the generic expectations of costume drama (the umbrella
term that encompasses heritage cinema, history film, romantic drama
and a number of other related genres that deal with representation of
the past).21 Crucially, these audiences’ expectations are moulded less
by a knowledge of the period based on the archival data (maps, blue-
prints, lithographs, paintings, photographs, life-writing, fictional and
newspaper accounts), but more by the images generated by other, pre-
ceding, films and TV series set in the same period. There is always, as
a result, the risk of what might be termed excessive metonymy in this
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 13

enterprise: where parts are chosen as representative of the whole, the

same parts start to define the period as a whole. More specifically, the
dynamic of ‘­legislated nostalgia’ derives from and generates stereotypes
or the already accepted ideas about the Victorians for the sake of period
authenticity. Furthermore, as Kleinecke-Bates demonstrates in her analy-
sis of original TV series set in the nineteenth-century, the shows which
deviate from audiences’ expectations of the genre of costume drama or
assumptions about the period (class relations and dynamics)—end up
‘flopping’.22 What this means, in no uncertain terms, is that stereotypes
about the Victorian past are (still) an important foundation on which
popular adaptations rely.
Successful and subversive adaptations often offer a deviation from
and/or variation on an accepted generic aspect, trope, or a stereotype,
following on Hutcheon’s (2006) notion of adaptation as a repetition
with a difference. I therefore analyse the use of some of the most com-
mon tropes and stereotypes about Victorians in general and Victorian
women in particular in contemporary adaptations and appropriations, by
focussing on women’s clothes and agency, gender roles, sexuality, atti-
tudes to the colonial space and the idea of Victorian families as heter-
osexual nuclear units. Through a close study of their representations I
examine how the image of the Victorian woman is employed for con-
temporary debates on women’s agency and gender roles, and functions
as an implicit figure of comparison between past and present expansion-
ist policies of the West. I also examine how fantasy and the supernatural
are used to implicitly debate the notion of the queer and the family of
choice.
Chapter 2 (‘Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
Stories: The Case of Irene Adler’) examines the depiction of Victorian
women’s agency in contemporary adaptations and appropriations of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories by studying the portrayal
of Irene Adler, the only female antagonist to have outsmarted Holmes.
The spotlight is on the rendering of Adler in the BBC’s TV cult series
Sherlock from 2012 (‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, series 2, episode 1), with
reference to the use of the character with the same name in the Primetime
Emmy award-winning CBS television series Elementary (2012–2016),
as well as the two equally successful Guy Ritchie films, Sherlock Holmes
(2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). This reading
also considers the appropriation of Adler in the neo-Victorian mystery
novel Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas (1990) and
14 A. Primorac

several other earlier screen adaptations and appropriations. The chapter

demonstrates how Irene Adler’s on-screen afterlives reflect the contem-
porary postfeminist media’s use of the naked, sexualised, female body as
the source of women’s power and agency. Special attention is paid to the
historical parallels made by the screen texts between the ‘now’ of adapta-
tions’ production contexts and ‘then’ of Doyle’s short stories, particularly
in those adaptations—such as BBC’s Sherlock—which update the narra-
tives to a contemporary setting. The spectacle of the naked or overtly
sexualised body, coded as a liberation of the repressed Victorian heroine,
is identified as a distraction from a significant diminishment of Adler’s
agency. I furthermore point to the ways in which the naked body of the
heroine and its counterpart, the veiled woman of the former colonial
space, are used to draw parallels between the Empire of the Victorian era
and its equivalents today.
The relationship between cultural nostalgia and cultural mem-
ory in neo-Victorian screen adaptations is at the heart of Chap. 3
(‘Re-presenting the Past: Gender, Colonial Space and Cultural Nostalgia
in Neo-Victorianism on Screen’). The analysis examines adaptations of
Victorian texts directed by prominent women directors (Jane Campion’s
adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Mira
Nair’s adaptation of W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (2004) and Andrea
Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (2011))
and contrasts them to an adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel (Gillian
Armstrong’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997)) and
the neo-Victorian TV show Ripper Street (S02E01, ‘Pure as the Driven’,
2013), with reference to Sally Wainwright’s Brontë biopic premiered on
ITV, To Walk Invisible (2016). Identifying belated uses of, amongst other
things, orientalism and self-orientalism in the adaptive process, I exam-
ine the use of historical costumes for the heroines’ characterisation. The
analysis explores the relationship between neo-Victorianism on screen
and heritage cinema and its later forms—post-heritage, anti-heritage and
alternative heritage film. I show that adaptations which aim to critically
address Victorian gender roles often employ the colonial space in an ori-
entalist fashion, while adaptations of neo-Victorian texts which challenge
the Victorian attitudes to the colonial space often perform a postcolonial
critique of imperialism at the cost of female characters’ agency.
Chapter 4 (‘In the Grip of the Corset: Women as Caged Birds
in Contemporary Victoriana on Screen’) analyses the ways in which
the Victorian metaphor of the caged bird is visually translated in
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 15

contemporary screen adaptations of Victorian women through the

use of period costumes—specifically, through the use of corsets and,
where the adapted fashions of the period allow for it, crinolines.
Unveiling how the image of a tightly laced, corseted female figure has
become the accepted visual shorthand for the notion of the literally and
metaphorically repressed Victorian woman, I argue that this is more
­
due to the cumulative effect of contemporary screen appropriations
and their interpretations of what ‘Victorian’ means than to any other
source. By tracing the numerous metaphorical and literal connections
between corsets and crinolines on the one hand and cages and caged
birds on the other in contemporary Victoriana, I chart the tangled roots
of their symbolic usages to specific Victorian topoi of the fallen woman
and the embowered woman and, in the process, unearth a key aspect
of the inherently metonymic structure of neo-Victorian adaptations.
The analysis focuses on the use and abuse of corsets in the portrayal
of Victorian heroines in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
and, to a lesser degree, the director’s own neo-Victorian film The Piano
(1993); Baz Luhrmann’s mash-up musical Moulin Rouge! (2001); Tim
Burton’s adaptation of a Broadway musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and his animated feature The Corpse Bride
(2005); and the four-part TV adaptation for BBC of Michel Faber’s
­neo-Victorian behemoth, The Crimson Petal and the White (2011),
written by Lucinda Coxton and directed by Marc Munden. The anal-
ysis further demonstrates how the representations of the Victorian era
on screen often rely heavily on unquestioned visual stereotypes and
assumptions that reinforce rather than question or dispel the received
notions about the period.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and its less successful
sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass directed by James Bobin (2016),
John Logan’s TV show Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), especially its first
season, and the TV film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian
novel Affinity (1999) adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Tim
Fywell and first broadcast on ITV in 2008 are all examined in Chap. 5
(‘Re-Fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations: Tailoring and
Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation and Appropriation’). These screen
texts, which share a Gothic visual style, employ the concepts of tailoring
and shape-shifting, transformation and re-fashioning to signal changes
to Victorian gender relations generated by the adaptations. Most promi-
nently, these include a rejection of the mother figures by the young,
16 A. Primorac

shape-shifting heroines, who instead seek male characters to play the role
of authority figures. What these adaptations also implicitly or overtly pre-
sent is a redefinition of traditional, heteronormative family relationships,
introducing either a reversal of gender roles or a construction of queer
‘families of choice’ (Weston 1997, p. 3). In this light, the chapter inves-
tigates the ways and the extent to which these screen texts, originally
aimed at mainstream audiences, succeed in queering narratives about
Victorian heroines and their families, concluding that the downplaying of
queer relations or happy endings primarily derives from their production
contexts.
The concluding Chap. 6 (‘No Country for Old Women’) examines
the representation of Queen Victoria in contemporary biopics: Mrs
Brown (1997) directed by John Madden; the two-part BBC mini-series
Victoria & Albert (2001); the feature film The Young Victoria (2009)
written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée; and the
first season of ITV’s eight-part TV show, Victoria, created by Daisy
Goodwin and first broadcast in 2016 (with a second season to be aired
in late 2017). The three most recent adaptations (2001–2016) shift the
attention entirely to the early years of the Queen’s life. Such a focus
enables the representations to be generically coded as romance since
they are concentrated primarily on her relationship with Prince Albert.
Furthermore, they centre on her personal growth as a young woman,
wife and mother, downplaying her role as a ruler. Victoria’s interest in
the ‘job’ of the monarch is introduced in a fashion that makes her duties
relatable to the contemporary audiences’ notions about women’s work
and ambitions. Victoria becomes the ideal postfeminist subject because
the fulfilment of her ambition to be a successful queen is ultimately
defined through motherhood.
In these biopics, authenticity is achieved either by stressing period
detail and costume (Victoria & Albert, Mrs Brown), introducing tab-
leaux that bring to life famous Victorian paintings (The Young Victoria)
and, most worryingly, privileging stereotypical Victorian femininities that
foreground ‘heterosexiness’ (Gill and Scharff 2011), and effectively writ-
ing out historically documented stories of the intelligence and achieve-
ment of the women at Victoria’s court. The oldest of the four biopics
under discussion, Mrs Brown, is also the only one to focus on Victoria’s
later years. As a heritage film about monarchy, it respectfully shies away
from depicting Victoria and Brown’s relationship as anything but chaste.
Through its avoidance of representing an older woman as a passionate
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 17

subject on screen, it reflects postfeminist media culture’s limited per-

spective on women’s subjectivity which prioritises sexy, youthful, white,
middle- (and upper-)class heroines and narratives of motherhood over
all others. Cumulatively, these re-visions of Queen Victoria as the ideal,
youthful, postfeminist subject end up rewriting the received image of the
monarch as a stern-looking, old widow in black weeds, generating a cul-
tural memory that expands the neo-Victorian imaginarium.
What the recent biopics of Victoria share with other screen texts
here discussed is a stress on the heroines’ youthfulness: Alice of Alice
in Wonderland, Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White, Selina in
Affinity, Joanna in Sweeney Todd and Edith in Crimson Peak (as well as
the protagonists of the adapted Victorian novels—Becky at the begin-
ning of in Vanity Fair and Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady) are, or are
about to turn, 19. The neo-Victorian past is thus imagined as a youthful
era of generative potential. This idealisation of the past as holding out
the promise of a better future recalls, to some extent, the dynamics of
Coupland’s ‘Now Denial’: these screen texts offer the pleasures of a nos-
talgic return to an era of perceived gender certainties for a generation of
viewers who take feminism’s achievements for granted and who do not
have a memory of its struggle. As the following chapters illustrate, it is
through the fashioning of young heroines that the legislated nostalgia of
neo-Victorianism on screen merges with, and assists in the generation of,
a postfeminist sensibility.

Notes
1. 
These include examples as various as the Mann Booker prize win-
ning novel The Luminaries (2013) by the New Zealand author Eleanor
Catton, the globally popular TV shows such as BBC’s Sherlock (2010–
2017) and Sky Atlantic/Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), biop-
ics like ITV’s TV series Victoria (2016–present) or reality TV-inspired
factual programming such as Victorian Farm (BBC2, 2009), Victorian
Farm Christmas (BBC2, 2011) or Victorian Bakers (BBC2, 2016). The
Victorian period is the setting of some popular video games, such as
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate or PS4 The Order: 1886 (both 2015). These
have come on the heels of popular graphic novels such as Bryan Talbot’s
Grandville series (2009–present) and Alan Moore’s From Hell (1989)
and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (1999–2007), both
adapted for the big screen in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
18 A. Primorac

2. See, for example, American Vogue’s December 2015 fashion editori-

al’s praise of Victoriana and lace (‘The Big Tease’), Vogue Nederland’s
November 2012 neo-Victorian spread, Prada’s corset inspired autumn/
winter women’s collection for 2016 and its Steampunk-inspired mens-
wear collection for autumn/winter 2012, or the decidedly neo-Victorian
turn in wallpaper design. The latter was notable throughout all the major
brands in Britain over the last few years and was lavishly displayed on the
set of Ripper Street or, more interestingly, in the Baker Street interiors
of BBC’s Sherlock further promoted through WearSherlock, the series
blog on costumes and props (see http://wearsherlock.tumblr.com/). In
terms of arts and crafts, the Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition Victoriana:
The Art of Revival (7 September–8 December 2013), accompanied by
the eclectic publication Victoriana: A Miscellany edited by Sonia Solicari,
offered an insight into the state of contemporary neo-Victorian arts and
crafts, showcasing works as various as pottery by the Turner prize win-
ner Grayson Perry, Miss Pokeno’s taxidermy chair and a postcolonial
photographic reimagining of Dorian Gray by Yinka Shonibare. Recently
the photographic collages by Charlotte Cory have also been attracting
attention (e.g. Cory’s Capturing the Brontës exhibition at the Brontë
Parsonage, 4 October–31 December 2013).
3. Most notable examples would be Sally Shuttleworth’s introduction of
‘retro-Victorian’ (1998) and Andrea Kirchknopf’s case for ‘post-Victori-
anism’ (2008) following its tentative use by Kucich and Sadoff (2000).
4. The peer-reviewed, open access journal of Neo-Victorian Studies is hosted
by Swansea University and edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke, who is also
the co-editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s (now Brill’s) Neo-
Victorian Series.
5. See, for example, the collection of essays Drawing on the Victorians: The
Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (2016) edited by
Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell.
6. See, for example, Benjamin Poore’s Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern
British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (2011).
7. See, for example, the final chapter in Shachar’s Cultural Afterlives
and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and
Company (2012) and selected chapters in Functions of Victorian Culture
at a Present Time (2002) edited by Krueger or Victorian Afterlives
(2000) edited by Kucich and Sadoff. Monographs dealing with contem-
porary uses of Victorianism give a single-topic analysis of fiction (e.g.
Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–
2000 (2004), Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing (2009) or
King’s The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction
 1 INTRODUCTION: NEO-VICTORIANISM ON SCREEN … 19

(2005)). Books that tackle screen adaptation as part of neo-Victorianism

usually mention it in passing—for example, Heilmann and Llewellyn’s
seminal Neo-Victorianism: Victorians in the Twenty-first Century 1999–
2009 (2010) deals with one film adaptation of a neo-Victorian novel in
one of the chapters; Joyce’s The Victorians in a Rearview Mirror (2007)
dedicates one chapter to heritage film industry; and Victoriana: Histories,
Fictions, Criticism (2007) by Kaplan discusses Campion’s film The Piano
in a chapter. Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss’s edited collection includes two
essays on screen adaptations of Victorian literature (by Anne Enderwitz
and Doris Feldmann, and Jessica Cox respectively).
8. Notable exceptions are Julia Kinzler’s article on The Young Victoria and
Kara M. Manning’s article on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, both
published in Neo-Victorian Studies 4:2 (2011).
9. For an example of a well-balanced, thematically focused, study of both
textual and screen afterlives of Victorians, see Helen Davies’s Neo-
Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show
(2015).
10. At the time of writing, Neo-Victorian Studies published a call for papers
for the 2017 special issue entitled Screening the Victorians in the Twenty-
First Century, to be edited by Chris Louttit and Erin Louttit.
11. See, for example, Liora Brosh’s Screening Novel Women: From British
Domestic Fiction to Film (2008), Dianne Sadoff’s Victorian Vogue: British
Novels on Screen (2010) or Burnham Bloom and Sanders Pollock’s edited
collection Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation (2011). Shachar’s
monograph on adaptations of Wuthering Heights (2012) dedicates a
chapter to a neo-Victorian adaptation. The forthcoming collection edited
by Benjamin Poore entitled Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and
Transformations in Popular Culture (2017) includes a number of essays
on screen adaptation with a thematic focus on the representations of
villainy.
12. While the first titles to be studied as neo-Victorian were published in late
1960s (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and John Fowles’s The
French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969), it is in the 1990s that there is a
surge in self-conscious historical novels that will be described as neo-Vic-
torian (see Mitchell 2010, pp. 1–3; Hadley 2010, p. 2). Recently, argu-
ments have been put forward to consider as neo-Victorian a number of
novels published earlier in the twenty-first century (see Grasl 2014).
13. For a detailed overview, see Monk (2011).
14. See, especially, Kucich and Sadoff’s edited collection Victorian Afterlife
(2000); Sadoff’s monograph Victorian Vogue (2010), the collection
of essays Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation (2011) edited by
20 A. Primorac

Burnham Bloom and Sanders Pollock, or the introduction to Kleinecke-

Bates’s Victorians on Screen (2014).
15. See, especially, the careful studies of the author’s work, letters and juve-
nilia by feminist scholars such as Claudia Johnson (1988), Emily
Auerbach (2004) or Kathryn Sutherland (2005).
16. See, for example, Becoming Jane (2007) or Miss Austen Regrets (2008),
both of which frame Austen’s life as a romance and explain her writing
career primarily as a result of disappointment in love.
17. That the latter are more of a rule than an exception, even in the cases of
neo-Victorian ‘re-memberment’ of the Victorian ‘freaks’, can be inferred
from Helen Davies’s lucid exploration of neo-Victorian representations of
Victorian freakery (2015), where Davies highlights the sexualised aspect
of ‘re-memberment’ due to the neo-Victorianism’s obsession with recov-
ering Victorian sexuality (see p. 8).
18. This seems to be a persistent blind spot in neo-Victorian studies that is
perhaps driven by neo-Victorianism’s institutional context—as a means
of exploring contemporary uses of British cultural heritage within the
Anglosphere. For more on this problem, see Primorac and Pietrzak-
Franger (2015).
19. For more information on the campaign, see Ads of the World website,
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/dm/hendricks_gin_choose_the_
unusual_way_1_0.
20. See Bruce-Gardyne, Tom (2014), ‘Hendricks: A Brand’s History’,
The Spirit World, 29th October, http://www.thespiritsbusiness.
com/2014/10/hendricks-a-brand-history/.
21. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘the “norms and conventions” behind a
period drama’s successful visual recreation of the past are irrevocably tied
to its own time’s notions of fidelity and authenticity. These have always
depended on adaptation’s convincing use of mise-en-scène; lately they
have also increasingly been relying on a clever use of both real and com-
puter-generated locations.’ (Primorac 2017, p. 128).
22. See Kleinecke Bates (2014, pp. 103–146), especially her analysis of the
TV show Servants, which tried to marry a soap opera style focus on
the lower classes with the heritage aesthetic without much success, she
argues, precisely due to the audience’s expectations about costume dra-
ma’s focus on the upper classes. Her conclusions point to a systemic
problem with all attempts at subverting the nostalgic bent of the costume
drama as a genre: the audiences of costume dramas still tend to expect
a certain type of social interaction and class focus that they expect to be
sanitised from intrusions of ‘real history’ (as the flop of Patricia Rozema’s
postcolonial adaptation of Mansfield Park (1999) aptly illustrates).
Another random document with
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 Two people, the woman of mystery truly said, were better than one; they
presented a more imposing front to the enemy—that is, the hotel-keeper—
and in case of any bluffing or attempt at imposition, offered a double supply
of the courage necessary to unmask and combat his stratagems of war.

"But why leave Les Oliviers?" she questioned, as they stepped down the
ravine side together. "Surely there could be nothing more charming, or half
as healthy, down below?"

To this Mrs. Allonby began with haughty reticence, to the effect that
one had excellent reasons not always possible or desirable to explain, and
ended, before they reached the town, by confiding to her that she had been
turned out of Les Oliviers, the manner of which turning out she related not
without humour, the absurd side of the catastrophe having suddenly
presented itself to her imagination. The whole episode now showed itself in
the light of an excellent joke and capital opportunity of getting a change.
Les Oliviers was undoubtedly dull, euphemistically, restful. It had been
remarked by foreign visitors that none but English could put up with the
dulness of that high-placed, solitary house.

The woman of mystery observed that the onslaught of Madame

Bontemps was sudden and apparently unprovoked, and Ermengarde
returned that it was absolutely unprovoked; she had not so much as seen
either mother or daughter for a couple of days at least, so that an
opportunity of provocation had not been forthcoming even.

"I was out nearly all day yesterday," she said, "and went straight to my
room when I came in at night, and I was down late this morning, and
breakfasted alone in the corner looking down the gorge, and never moved
till I went in. I couldn't move, in fact, because my Italian lesson came
immediately afterwards."

"Oh, your Italian lesson," said Agatha, with a look of enlightenment.

"Ah! and you found Mlle. Bontemps in the office? I see."

Having found the key to the mystery, she suddenly became so absent-
minded as not to hear the question, "What do you see?" Then she began to
warn Mrs. Allonby equally against the larger hotels and any in the Caravan
Bay, and Ermengarde took the opportunity of finally refusing to drag her
into the fag of hotel-hunting, and got into a tram going towards Caravan by
herself.

But when, a couple of hours later, she found herself leaning on the
balustrade by the sea on the Promenade du Midi, very tired and hot, and
unable to find any room in the crowded hotels just visited, she was partly
annoyed and partly pleased to see the tall, slight figure of this woman of
mystery coming towards her.

"I never saw it more darkly and deeply blue," Agatha said, stopping and
leaning at her side, "or the turquoise of the shoal water more clear and
lovely."

The soft boom of surf on the rocks was very lulling and sweet, and the
scent of the pure, azure-shadowed spray that dashed from waves breaking
in fine curves of every shade of blue, with never a tint of green, fresh and
vivifying. Even the subdued menace of the ground-swell was mellow, not
harsh with the scream of dragged shingle, as in paler, greyer seas. It was
restful to look and look, to plunge and steep the sight in the intense glowing
blue, and wonder if it could be true, a real sea rolling through this mid-
earth, and not some incredible splendour of "faery lands forlorn." Even the
wickedness and cruelty of Arthur took a softer complexion in the light of
that warm and clear dark sea. Far out towards the horizon the velvety depth
of blue made the sky white by comparison; but nearer it had a liquid quality,
a sparkling sweetness that promised to assuage thirst and renew failing
pulses as with some divine elixir. One might drink deep of that clear wave
and lose all memory of pain and grief, or, like the waters of Eunoe, it might
bring to mind all that is beautiful—lost joys, forgotten aspirations, divine
desires, old sweet loves.

But in a world of prose and fatigue tea was a more desirable, or at least
a more attainable, elixir; for was not Rumpelmayer's hard by—
Rumpelmayer's of the pure and perfumed China leaf and select company?
Thither Ermengarde turned, and secured a table outside, with that broad
purple splendour still in sight, and its salt freshness stealing through the
palm-colonnade and rustling the feathery tops of the giant eucalyptus in the
public gardens opposite; and thither, after some hesitation and consultation
of her watch, the woman of mystery was persuaded to accompany her.

The last strains of the band were dying away in the dark greenery of the
gardens; people were streaming off in every direction in the golden
afternoon; Rumpelmayer's was rapidly filling to overflow inside and out—
carriage after carriage rolling up and setting down charming costumes of
muslin and pale summer tints of various texture, oddly finished with furs
and sunshades of dainty hue. There was a cheery murmur of voices and
laughter all around, with the solemn undertone of sea-surges booming
through all. Ermengarde had left Agatha to fill the cups with that exquisite
China fragrance, while she went in to choose cakes, and was just coming
out with a heaped plate when she met the smiling gaze of Ivor Paul, who
seemed to have been strolling aimlessly with the crowd, when he stopped to
speak to Agatha, whose manner conveyed an impression of unrest and
anxiety, rather than embarrassment, at this meeting.

"You may have forgotten Mr. Paul, who was at Les Oliviers some time
since," she said; and Ermengarde, replying graciously, reflected that her
opportunities of forgetting this young man had been singularly scanty. He
positively haunted them; he was as persistent as a family ghost, or the
Anarchist himself.

He proved more entertaining than either of those, however, discoursing

most gaily and pleasantly about nothing, laughing at less, and listening with
due sympathy to the sorrows and fatigues of Ermengarde in her expulsion
from one hotel and ineffectual hunt for another, and observing that it was a
beastly shame, and that hotel-keepers were a rotten lot, which confirmed
her in a growing conviction that this turning-out was of the nature of an
excellent joke and delightful adventure. Had Mrs. Allonby tried Pension
Gilardoni? An aunt, or some such elderly and respectable relation, of his
had wintered there, and found it most satisfactory and quite reasonable—
altogether a ripping place. It was just along there on the west of the gardens
by the sea. It would give him pleasure to conduct her to the house there and
then.

But Ermengarde had had enough of hotel-hunting for that day, and after
a little pressure accepted the woman of mystery's offer to go and explore the
house for her, personally conducted by Mr. Paul; or rather, as she reflected
when left to sip her second cup alone, the two young people had simply
gone off at once upon this benevolent quest, without waiting for any
consent or comment, vanishing among the palms before there was time to
take breath, and leaving Agatha's steaming second cup to waste its perfume
on the unthinking crowd.
 Chapter XVII

The Promenade du Midi

"Do you know that you are half an hour before time?" Agatha said as
soon as they were out of hearing in the gardens.

"Yes; but I didn't expect to find you yet. But when I spotted you at the
tea-shop I had to come. I thought you were alone. The game's up at last, and
no mistake. This is good-bye, sweetheart—good-bye for ever now!"

There was a sudden break in his voice. He wanted to tell her that he had
hungered for a sight of her, and longed for a word to restore him to hope,
courage, self-respect; that he had lost his bearings, and was drifting
headlong upon hidden rocks and quicksands; but would not founder without
throwing up some danger signal, and catching at any spar floating by or any
rope flung to him. But he could find no words. The hoarse murmur of the
broken surf and subdued roar of the ground-swell mingled with the heavy
surging of blood in his ears, and dazed and stupefied him, as they walked in
the nearly deserted gardens, their eyes on the ground.

Presently Agatha looked up and saw that the surface laughter had died
from his face, which was white and drawn, and almost stern in its gravity.

"Now you look like your mother, Ivor," she said gently; and he retorted
with sudden fierceness:

"Heaven forbid she should look like me! She is a good woman, Agatha;
it was a bad day for her when she brought me into the world. I've always
been in the wrong box, somehow. To go straight I ought to have been born
rich; I'm made like that. But it's all done and over now. And I want you to
tell her—tell her—I'm sorry for her sake—I've gone under. That's all."

"No, Ivor, not all. Let me tell her—for her sake, that you have risen
again—as you can and must—for her sake."
 "You talk like a woman," he said impatiently. "And what do women
know?"

How could he tell her—not that he wished to—what had driven him
there to be near her, if not actually with her, an hour before the time fixed,
for succour and refuge from shipwreck more complete and terrible than that
of which she knew—in part, at least—already? How could she enter ever so
slightly into the passion and misery that were tearing him, into the struggle
of all that was best in him enlisted on the side of all that was worst, of a
weak and wavering will, drawn hither and thither by the fierce contention of
honour and chivalry, gratitude and compunction—against despair and
passion and a certain dire, half-conscious need of that tenderness, even
protection, that weak woman often gives to strong man?

The dumb and piteous appeal in his eyes—great, soft eyes, like a loving
repulsed dog's—went to her heart, but what did it mean? Was he only sorry
for himself, this great man-child, helpless before his own passions, or was
the spring of real penitence touched at last? Did he want comforting
exculpation and the assurance that his mother would never know half or
grieve for a quarter, and that all would come right by some mysterious
magic? Silently, with a gentle pressure, she slipped her hand into his arm;
he pressed it hard against his throbbing side, with a deep, gasping breath,
and drew her to a bench, set back in shining foliage outside the gardens
fronting the sea, where they sat looking absently at sunlit sails dipping and
gliding over the broad blueness, and listening absently to the continuous
plunge and break of tumbling waves.

He had been in quite other company that day, and was still tingling and
throbbing with the sound of another voice and the excitement of a scene of
sudden, unimagined passion, the thought of which made him press the hand
in his own more convulsively to his side, as if it had power to save him, like
a frightened child clinging to a mother.

It had come so suddenly. He had been loitering drearily in the Casino

gardens in the forenoon to kill time till the appointed meeting at Mentone,
loitering by a hedge of prickly pear, its bare, bone-like stems and fleshly
leaves spread like distorted hands, its dull-red, warty fruit, grotesquely
suggestive of weird spells and horrible enchantments, when round the
corner all at once he had come eye to eye with the Countess, solitary, sad
and with a new, subdued gentleness in her manner.

He must come in to her apartment, to the balcony looking on the

gardens, he heard; she was alone; they must breakfast together; she was
sure he had not breakfasted; they would have a bottle of that Clos Vougeot
he had liked.

The breakfast had been very cheerful and reviving—dainty cookery, a

lively and warm-hearted hostess bent on pleasing, and afterwards an
excellent and favourite cigar and a cup of coffee of unimaginable
perfection. Such things soften the bitterness of affliction and bring people to
contemplate misfortune in gentler mood and through rosier light. And in
this cool, sumptuously fitted apartment by the balcony that looked on the
gardens, it was pleasant to linger and laugh, forgetful of the thorns of life.
And there and then the offer to square the Spider had been pressingly
renewed and courteously declined. No man preyed upon women.

But the woman this time was in luck; she could spare whatever was
necessary to appease the cormorant; there was no question of preying on
her.— But men must stand or fall by themselves. No; he was cruel; he
scorned her help; there were tears.

These, of course, had to be dried. There followed assurances of

gratitude, friendship, respect; then the counter-assurance of her suddenly
inherited wealth. Still her desire to recognize and return old kindnesses was
not held to justify preying upon women. He was sincerely grateful, but she
must not be hurt by an absolute refusal of her generous offer.

Then came the bolt from the blue, in the shape of an outburst of frenzied
passion, fiercely tender, throbbing with life, deep as death.

She loved him. It was the one deep and lasting and genuine passion in a
life of many loves, light, fugitive, and easily forgotten; no pale, self-
regarding girl's love, but the fervid and passionate self-devotion, the
worship, of a matured and full-blooded nature, of one who had drunk
deeply of the cup of life, who knew the world and had sounded all the
mysteries of passion. She asked nothing in return—nothing but leave to
adore, to cherish. They would go to some sunny summerland, where he was
not known, wherever he pleased; they might cruise about in their own
yacht; they might live on her estate sometimes—anywhere, only together. If
he were, as he said, cast broken and friendless upon the world, without a
crust, with neither friends, nor hope, nor prospects, why not take refuge in
her love? Her wealth was ample. All she had was his without reserve. He
might exchange into a regiment on foreign service; he might serve in a
foreign army. He might not think it, but she could be a tame, fireside
woman for his sake: she would make him a true and devoted wife, married
or not. When a woman loved truly she was capable of anything.

Her appeal had the irresistible force of real passion; she was handsome
—he had had no idea how handsome till now. Emotion brought back the
sweet freshness of youth to her face, called out wonderful tones in her voice
and strange brilliance in her eyes. Now she was tender, gentle, sisterly; now
she was tragic, fierce, despairing; then suppliant and reproachful, but
always with that electric flame of passion kindling and overcharging an
atmosphere of mysterious enchantment akin to the magic of the weirdly
beautiful gardens and the diablerie of the glittering Casino.

The details of that wild scene he could in no wise recall; nor could he
remember exactly how it had come to an end, and he had found himself
once more in the free air, thrilled, intoxicated, revolted, bewildered,
fascinated, but not bound.

After all, there were worse women than the poor countess. She was a
good comrade, and infinitely to be pitied. Was it her fault that she had been
torn from her convent in the white innocence of ignorant girlhood and flung
without power of protest into the arms of an elderly and unlovable husband,
with no pause for reflection, and neither knowledge nor a moment's
experience of life? What was there to guide and protect a lovely, lonely,
fascinating girl, childless and unloved, and unconscious alike of her power
and her weakness, through the rocks and quicksands of a hard and cruel
world? Poor child—poor, dear, good-hearted countess! And if her
reputation were a trifle damaged, how many, far less tempted and yet of
spotless fame in the eyes of a hoodwinked world, were frailer than she!
And, after all, who was spotless among women—except Agatha?
 To be near Agatha would be calm and safety from that wild and
wandering fire. And yet, as he sat listening to the multitudinous murmur of
broken seas, with her hand pressed hard to his side, he was powerless to
shake off the spell of that passionate hour; the physical attraction, the
glowing eyes, the transfigured beauty, the thrilling voice, the pathos, the
pity, the deep emotion, were always in his eyes and ears and heart. What
could Agatha know of that, or of the intensified power of it all in an hour of
desperate need and misery?

"Is it true," he asked, after a long silence, "that my mother is pressed for
money, and that you give typewriting to the girls?"

"Ask her yourself. I may say nothing."

"And are you that man's paid secretary? Don't say that's true—not that."

"What man?"

"Oh, that foreign chap, that Pole—de Konski, as he calls himself. He's
on some secret service; half English he says he is. He's all right for me; but
for you to be his secretary!"

"Certainly I am—his confidential secretary."

"Good Lord! Confidential! Mixed up in all that underhand business—

intrigues—who knows what devilry! In his pay! And why? When you have
a good home, when mother is wanting you, and would give anything to
have you back with her."

"Surely you know why, Ivor—not that your poor mother does. We try to
keep the worst from her. The girls help a little—she thinks it is her own
money. She can't realize how that has dwindled—and then my—pay is very
good."

"O Lord! As bad as that! And if only—yes, I might have gone straight, I
might—if only—if only you had given me a chance, a hope, had kept true
to me!"
 "True? I have always been the same to you. We have always been
friends, Ivor, ever since we were such little things, playfellows, then
companions. Always fond of each other—in that way—till now, when you
reproach me and make other claims upon me."

"I should never have got into this mess if only you would have cared for
me."

He knew this was untrue; but the Circean spell, working so strongly in
his blood, darkened his brain and made him savage to her who had power to
set him free.

"What nonsense, Ivor! Why should I care for you in that way? Anything
of that kind was hateful to your mother; you know that she was always
against it. Even if you had spoken out, she had other views for you. She
trusted me, and told me, and you know it, Ivor. How could I, under her roof,
eating her bread—how could I take her son from her and spoil her
happiness?"

"Spoiling my happiness is nothing, of course. Yet she chose her

husband. A man has a right to choose his wife."

"But you had not chosen me. She was not sure. She was only afraid of
what might be if we were much together. You were so young, even if you
had really cared——"

"Really cared? If? When you knew——"

"I knew nothing but her fears and objections. You said nothing——"

"It was understood——"

"Only by you. And so you took it for granted, till just now since you
found me here? You had no right to do so. You never spoke, Ivor."

"And if I had spoken? Agatha!"

"I could only have asked you to forget. I knew her dislike of it. I was no
match for you. I had less than nothing. My dear aunt was quite right. She
knows you. Are you the sort of man to be happy on a crust? Yet she is no
lover of mercenary matches."

He let go the hand, till now squeezed so fiercely to his side; the touch of
it sent a mortal chill through him. She could sit there, calm and cold and
unmoved, and discourse of the unwisdom of penniless marriages, while he
was thirsting for a word or sign responsive to the love that thrilled him, and
the need of love that devoured him, and the longing for sympathy that filled
him with a desolate despair. And yet it was not such love as hers that he
wanted in his secret heart, but a wilder, fiercer flame, though he did not
know it. Yet he knew and feared the baser enchantment working in his
blood, and in his better self revolted against it.

Her voice was even and sweet; all that she said was reasonable, cold,
and calculated. She was so self-contained, so perfectly composed; kind and
gentle, but with no hint of hidden fervour or suppressed feeling. Could
nothing carry her off her feet; could she never forget herself in any sudden
warmth, any gust of unconscious emotion?

And all the time the glow and stir of that other woman's tempestuous,
self-forgetting passion moved him; the love-thrilled voice, the impassioned
gestures, the splendidly moulded figure, the transfiguring tenderness on the
beautiful, though faded, face, dazzled and inebriated him, in spite of
moments of repulsion and disgust.

"Money," he muttered, "money! when all that one hungers for is a little
love. Oh, you good women, cold and calculating and condescending to us
poor, hot-headed, hot-blooded sinners, who only want a hand to help us out
of the mud—a hand you won't reach out ever so little for fear of tumbling in
yourselves."

"How unjust you are, Ivor," she cried, with tears in her voice and eyes,
"you who clung to the mud you speak of, and refused to be helped out of
it!"

"Help me now," he murmured. "Reach out a hand now—now that I'm

sinking—deeper and deeper. I'm a beast, and a selfish beast at that. But
marry me; it's my only chance. I haven't a penny in the world, and I've no
prospects. I'm done for—broken, good for nothing—but—marry me—pick
me out of the gutter."

"Ivor! Are you mad?"

"Yes, and drunk too—raving mad and blind drunk," he shouted

savagely. "I was always in love with you," he faltered, "even when you
were a little mite of a thing in short frocks and long hair, when you used to
bowl for me and bat for me and field for me, and I used to swing you in the
swing in the big horse-chestnut——" He dropped his face in his hands with
a heavy sigh, his arms propped on his knees, and his eyes bent frowningly
on the gravel.

She was trembling now, but controlled her voice too well.

"And yet," she said, "I have no power with you—you will do nothing
for me—you want me to go on batting and bowling and fielding for you in
the perpetual, desultory cricket you make of life."

"And you," he retorted—"you want me to go on swinging you

everlastingly under the humdrum, goody-goody chestnut you make of life."

"And this," said Agatha bitterly, "is love—a man's love!"

"Oh, I'll swing you," he returned savagely, "if you'll only have me—
swing you for all I'm worth, if you'll only love me—love me, love me,
Agatha—backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as long as you
like, till my arms crack and drop off. That's love—a man's love."

She could not speak for the hot rush of sobs rising in her throat. She
shut her hands tight, choked back the sobs, and looked straight before her at
the broad blue sea glowing deeply in the sun. The dolphin-like hill-spur of
Bordighera, all dreamy blue, with violet tints, paled while she looked and
slipped suddenly under a veil of grey mist, while a huge black cloud, rising
rapidly behind it, threw its shadow over the sea, changing peacock-blue and
turquoise into deepest indigo. The chill of it struck into her. She drew in her
breath and swallowed down her tears, and spoke in a low, even voice.
 "Ivor," she said, "will you do this for me—only this one thing—the
thing I have asked you so often before?"

"I'll do anything, everything; but I can't turn Methody, if you mean that
—even for you——"

"Will you, once for all—I ask it for the last time—for my sake, give up
gambling in every form—cards, betting——"

"How can I? Oh, you can make terms and conditions. You can stop and
haggle over whether I'm worth raking out of the gutter or not. Well, I'm not.
You may stake all you're worth on that. But if you cared twopence for me,
you'd never stop to think whether I was or not; you'd just reach out a hand
before you knew where you were, and haul me out. I know what love is,
what even a woman's love can be. You don't——"

"Ah! Don't I?——"

"I'm not worth raking out. I know that fast enough. And I've only one
chance to make it worth while from your point of view, and that is to square
Mosson somehow. De Konski thinks it just possible; he may get him to wait
awhile on a heavy percentage and say nothing. My leave is up in two days,
and in those two days I must somehow rake in the dollars—supposing the
beast will wait, that is—and of course my infernal luck is bound to turn
now. And when I get home I know a horse or two I stand to make a pot of
money on. So you see I can't do the thing you ask anyhow. Ask me
something easier, Agatha; there's nothing I won't do for you but that, which
I absolutely can't."

"But this is all I want," she said, shivering In the growing chill.
"Promise this one thing, Ivor."

"It's mocking at me to ask that. It can't be done. If Mosson sticks to his

pound of flesh, as he jolly well will—there's only just the off-chance that he
won't—it means I'm broken, have to send in my papers—you know what
the chief is—sell up the last stick, raise something on expectations, and
begin again with no chances and a heavy debt. The best would be to work
out a passage to Canada or South Africa and try my luck there. Else—there
is only the sea," he said, looking at the waves darkening under the great
cloud sailing up from Bordighera with a cold blast before it, that drove sand
and small pebbles into their faces and swept the promenade clear of people,
donkeys, and mules in a minute, crashing eucalyptus-boughs together,
twisting and twining tulip-tree and catalpa, and making the palm-tops
writhe and rattle drily with a sound of pattering rain.

They were forced to get up and shelter from blinding sand and pebbles
behind the trees and shrubs in the gardens, whither the storm pursued them,
piercing through every chink. Ivor's hat went, and he had to plunge some
yards after it, while Agatha, half blinded by a branch dashed in her face,
stood waiting, cowering from the wind behind shrubs, through the stems of
which she could see the broad band of sea, the western half still glowing
deeply like a peacock's throat in vivid sunlight, and the eastern half meeting
it in accurate sharp division, as darkly and deeply indigo, the shallow
waters shading to duck's-egg. Calm and storm, brightness and darkness,
were in close contention, like the spirits in Ivor's soul—the dark and the
bright, the pure love and the impure. Yet the sunlight lay deep and warm on
the western waves, and the western sky was clear and cloudless above the
shadowed bluffs.

"Only the sea," he repeated sullenly, striding back to her, holding on his
hat, and bracing himself against the fierce blast; "and you'll all be jolly well
rid of me."

"Why will you talk like an idiot?" she cried through the loud wind. "Be
a man, Ivor, for once. Your own folly brought you to this, you know
perfectly well. Try to use a little sense, a little manliness. Pick yourself out
of the mud and make a better thing of life than you have ever done yet.
Give up this miserable gambling, for your own sake, if not for mine. Square
the man yourself. He can get nothing by breaking you. Who can get blood
from a stone? What if you have to leave the Service? Use those muscles of
yours to some purpose. Use your brains. You are not the idiot or the child
you make yourself out. Think of those who depend upon you, and don't talk
of being dependent on women. Don't for a moment suppose that I, or any
woman of spirit, would dream of marrying a man who can't stand on his
own foundation."
 They were walking against the wind, fighting their way through the
deserted gardens to shelter behind the bandstand. The storm was so wild
that things displayed outside shops parallel to the gardens were swept away
before there was time to take them in; china hung on the walls rattled,
clashed, and even cracked; newspapers, cards, handkerchiefs and scarves,
flew hither and thither across street and gardens; the sunshine left the
mountains, and the sky darkened.

"I was an ass to think you would," he replied grimly, maddened by her
scorn, and in spite of the beating wind on it his face was quite white; for he
knew that of the spirits casting dice for his soul the black one had won.
"But," he added, stopping to catch the scarf that flew from Agatha's hand as
she tried to wind it round her neck—"but—— Hullo, here's de Konski!"

The Anarchist was sheltering from the storm inside a café, and came out
on their approach in the first great drops of a pelting rainstorm. "Yes, here I
am," he repeated, saying something to Agatha in a language that had no
meaning for Ivor, to which she replied quickly in the same, stepping aside
in the shelter while the Anarchist hailed and stopped a fiacre flying past to
stables. Then she wished Ivor good-bye, offering her hand, which he either
did not or would not see.

"Good-bye," he said, when de Konski was handing her into the carriage.
As she got in, she looked out and saw him replace his hat in the buffeting
wind. Then she drove to Rumpelmayer's, where Ermengarde was still
waiting. She could not catch the expression of his face as she drove off, but
fancied a softening in its sullen hardness, while Ivor, unable in the rain and
wind to catch a full glance of her face, turned back into the café with a
dreadful sickness of heart, feeling that he had parted once for all with the
better influences and purer hopes of his life, and was thrown definitely back
to such consolation as a dishonourable union offered. Nothing mattered
now; a sort of reckless joy took hold of him at the thought, and he shook off
the heart-sickness with a wild laugh.

"Let's have a bock," he cried gaily. "If we must go to the devil, let's go
with a light heart."
 "But why go to the devil at all?" de Konski asked, when the waiter
brought the drink.

"Nowhere else to go to, old chap. Nobody else to so much as look at the
likes of me. I ain't worth the snap of a finger. Lord bless you, de Konski,
that young saint you just popped into the trap out of my contaminating
company never cared a hang for me—no, not a twopenny damn, so she
says, and now I'm down on my luck she won't—— O Lord! Well! who
cares? Better fish in the sea than ever came out of it, eh?"

"That depends on your fishing. Sometimes you net one with gold in its
mouth. Pity to let that kind go."

"I shall never net this one," he sighed, setting down the glass he had
drained, and staring blankly at the table before him. "She never did and
never could care for me," he repeated silently to himself. And all the malign
enchantment of the morning rushed back in full force, now that, scorned
and rejected of one, he felt free to surrender himself to the other. "But I'll do
the square thing," he told himself. "I'll marry her, I'm blest if I won't. She
shall have her chance at last, poor woman!"

The Anarchist, sitting opposite at the wine-stained table, contemplated

him with interest. "How," he asked presently, "do you propose to make the
journey?"

"Going to marry for money, to begin with."

"No occasion, then, to trouble about the Spider any more?"

"O Lord, that beast! I'd forgotten all about him. I'm an ungrateful brute,
de Konski. I'm awfully obliged to you, though, all the same. Shylock sticks
out for his pound of flesh, of course?"

"Well, hardly that. After all, even he's human, Paul."

"Oh, I say, though, you don't mean to say—you can't mean to say—
you've squared the beast!" he cried, springing up and making the glasses
dance on the table.
 "Well, yes, I've squared him—in a way."

"What way? Half my pay as interest? Seventy per cent. at the final
square up six months hence?"

"No; but on conditions——"

"Conditions? Mosson making conditions?"

"Here is a paper signed by him. It is in duplicate, signed and witnessed.

He remits you——"

"Mosson remitting? The sun'll tumble out of the sky."

"He remits you the whole, gives you a receipt in full—there it is in

black and white—on condition that you bind yourself to play no more, to
give up every kind of gaming and betting, and sign to that effect—
witnessed by me. So now, Paul, you are a free man. No question of the
descent to Avernus, the mercenary marriage, or anything of the sort—
always providing you take this pledge."

"Oh, I say!" he muttered thickly, the drops starting on his forehead. "It
can't be true—it can't. And the chief?——"

"Will know nothing."

"But Mosson?" he gasped. "Mosson to make me a present of all that?

It's unheard of! Besides, it isn't the square thing; he must be paid—you can't
rook him, if he's ever such a beast. And it's nothing to him whether I go
under or not."

"Mosson is paid to the last centime—that is, he will be if you make this
promise."

"Paid by whom?" he asked hoarsely.

"Naturally not by an enemy. By some one who makes it a stipulation

that you never know, by some one who has your welfare so much at heart as
to be willing to pay a price for it, who wishes you to be absolutely free and
unfettered by any obligation—except that of giving up this stupid, ruinous
vice."

"The countess!" he whispered, turning cold and sick, as he sank back in

the chair he had left, covering his face with his hands.

"Pff! Is it likely? I may not give you the smallest hint; I'm bound in
honour, so don't ask. But, if you mean the woman you are always helping
out of tight places, is it likely? Look here, Paul, there is the paper and its
duplicate. Here is a pen—a fountain. Read and sign it. But think before you
sign."

There was silence for some time—silence except for the fitful return of
the quieting storm outside, the crackle of hail on roof and pavement, and the
last faint pattering of rain before it stopped. Ivor did not move from his
posture, his head fallen forward on the table between the glasses, his face in
his hands, his shoulders slightly convulsed once, then rigid. The Anarchist
looked at him with a sort of weary patience, but said nothing.

At last Ivor got up and went to the window, drawing the back of his
hand across his eyes, and looked out on the drenched gardens, where
orange-trees and palms were still quivering in the half-spent blast and the
hail lay in great stones like lumps of sugar on the sunlit grass. Then he
turned back, read the papers carefully, and silently asked for the pen and
signed, his signature being duly attested by de Konski, who gave him one
paper and kept the other.

"Now you are free," the Anarchist said, shutting up the pen and
pocketing one paper.

"Yes, free," repeated Ivor, like a man in a dream.

 Chapter XVIII

The Only Hope

The storm had become so furious that the driver, after taking
Ermengarde up from Rumpelmayer's, insisted on putting in for shelter
under the crowded porte cochère of the nearest hotel.

"We might as well have stayed at Rumpelmayer's, after all," she

murmured, the wretchedness evoked by reading the publisher's parcel
rushing back upon her at the first dull moment. Rumpelmayer's bon-bons
were pleasant, and several interesting glimpses of human nature had been
given her there at the little tables which were unusually thronged for the
time of day on account of the storm.—"It was at least warm at
Rumpelmayer's. And what of Villa Gilardoni, Miss Somers?"

"Oh, Villa Gilardoni! What will you think of me, dear Mrs. Allonby?
My cousin began talking of—family matters; they were absorbing; time
somehow slipped away, and the storm rushed up so suddenly—it was
impossible to stand against it——"

"And so 'the hobby-horse, the hobby-horse, was forgot'? But it was too
kind of you even to propose this fag on my behalf, much less to try to carry
it out. And yet—you are looking very tired, dear Miss Somers."

"I am not tired," she replied hastily; "I am exhausted. I—oh! these
storms upset one's nerves."

"Which storms?" Ermengarde wondered, and came to the conclusion

that nothing merely meteorological had caused this upset. Could it be
remorse? or was it the connexion by marriage? How much easier, simpler,
and sweeter life would be were there no men in the world, she reflected,
though, like other Utopias and earthly paradises, she thought it might be
just a trifle dull. And who knew that, not only man, but even the devil
himself might have his uses in the economy of things? The latter
supposition she prudently confided to the secrecy of her own breast, while
murmuring sympathetic common-places to Agatha, until such time as it
pleased the driver to brave the abating fury of the storm, and take them
through the drenched town to the sheltered road under the plane-trees, and
so to the foot of the ridge where there was nothing for it but to walk or ride
up on donkeys and mules.

They chose the former alternative, the heavy rain having given place to
a hailstorm by this time, and, before they had climbed in the shelter of
vineyard-walls and steep rock-ledges to the first ridge, the hail gave over
and the storm-beaten, indigo sea spread darkly, dashed with white foam-
ridges, to their sight, when they stopped to take breath and shake out their
skirts, whitened by hail.

Some fresh mimosa boughs in a jar of rough country pottery adorned

one of the faded shrines of the Seven Sorrows. Who had placed it there, and
in memory of what anguish? Agatha wondered, and Ermengarde told her of
the phantom nuns Heinrich the porter had seen haunting the shrines at night.

"He must have believed that he saw them," she argued, "because nuns
are improbable. If he had invented them, they would have had to be monks,
since this was a male community—and still is—for the brothers come back
occasionally now. How the people must miss them! They used to serve that
church across the ravine. And look—this is how they got to their church."

She pointed to a long straight flight of narrow steps, hewn by hand-

labour out of one steep and solid rock, making a long and giddy descent of
slippery and uncertain footing where the narrow steep stairs were mossed
and uneven; so steep and so long the flight was that the greater part of it
was hidden from sight below.

Agatha looked with unseeing eyes, her heart too full of her grief to be
interested in anything unconnected with it. She remembered well her first
acquaintance with those pathetic shrines, deserted but still finding some
humble hearts to honour them in their evil hour. She remembered her
anguish and prayer—prayer she knew now ungranted—on the convent
steps, in the very face of the consolation offered upon the cross planted
there as if in welcome. All the earth had seemed full of silent prayer in the
hush and glory of sunset, on that first evening; every hill and ridge had been
an altar smoking with sacrificial incense, and the amphitheatre of mountains