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Digging up the Past: Exploring Haunting and Trauma–in and of the Neo-

Victorian Novel 

 

A thesis presented in fulfilment of the  

requirements for the degree of 

 

 

 Master 

of 

Creative Writing 

 

 

 

 

 

 at Massey University, New Zealand 

 

 

 

 

 

Natasha Bland 

2022 

  



1 
 

Abstract 

This thesis explores haunting in and of the neo-Victorian novel, and representations of 

female trauma. The thesis consists of two sections: a critical analysis of the way that neo-

Victorian texts operate in relationship to their Victorian predecessors to voice historically 

silenced trauma narratives, which still have relevance in our modern world; and a creative 

section, the first part of a novel that employs Victorian trauma tropes to tell a story of 

female suffering and solidarity. 

Through a close analysis of neo-Victorian novels and their heroines, including Alias 

Grace and Fingersmith, my critical portion explores how trauma is depicted in ways that 

challenge our perception of the Victorian culture, and that interrogate contemporary 

culture. Through reference to Victorian texts, such as Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman 

in White, my critical portion will also seek to show how neo-Victorian texts are haunted by 

their Victorian predecessors, inviting the reader to reimagine the worlds of these originals; 

but also, to attempt to re-write (or make right) the injustices and traumas that are depicted 

in these texts.  

The creative portion uses Victorian sensation tropes, such as a companion 

protagonist, a hidden past, and an illegitimacy storyline to explore generational trauma and 

its impact on the present, and attempts to reinterpret the role and voice of the middle-class 

Victorian heroine. The story hinges around three women, who have retreated to a solitary 

cottage for the birth of an illegitimate child. It relates the complex web of relationships 

between these women and their efforts to step outside of the restraints of a patriarchal 

system. 

 

  



2 
 

Acknowledgements 

 
 

My thanks go to my supervisor, Thom Conroy, for his insightful comments, encouragement 

and for believing that I could do it. 

 

And to my children, for sharing me with this project, which has seemed itself to require all 

the love, patience and dedication of raising a small child. 
 

 

  



3 
 

Contents 
 

 

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 4 

The ambiguous female: Governesses, companions, and invisible pasts in the neo-Victorian novel ... 12 

The Rising River ..................................................................................................................................... 54 

Novel Synopsis .................................................................................................................................... 166 

Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 167 

 

  



4 
 

 

Introduction 

 

This thesis is a response to the “myth of male universality” (Caroline Criado Perez 21), which 

drowns out female voices and creates a false and one-sided image of the world, and of 

history–an image which still resonates in modern culture:  

The history of humanity. The history of art, literature and music. The history of 

evolution itself. All have been presented to us as objective facts. But the reality is, 

these facts have been lying to us. They have all been distorted by a failure to account 

for half of humanity–not least by the very words we use to convey our half-truths. 

This failure has led to gaps in the data. A corruption in what we think we know about 

ourselves. It has fuelled the myth of male universality. And that is a fact. (Criado 

Perez 21).  

Victorian literature was always a significant part of my life, part of the historical narrative of 

my identity, but also a point of contrast. As a young British woman, there was something 

delightfully nostalgic about the Victorian era, paired with a mild sense of disdain and 

condescension over Victorian repression and intolerance.  I studied Jane Eyre multiple times 

throughout college and university, and always attention was drawn to the radical and not so 

radical nature of the novel and its representations of women, the way it rallies against 

societal limitations on women, while also locking its passionate female voice away in the 

attic. I was reaching my reading maturity when I discovered female neo-Victorian literature–

novels like Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. These novels seemed an answer to the patriarchal 

male perspective that their Victorian predecessors were written from– they exposed the 

gritty realities of Victorian life and they spoke from an unapologetically female voice. Most 



5 
 

strikingly, the female characters in these novels were not judged by male standards or 

perspectives, that “myth of male universality”. Simultaneously though, their relatable 

female characters and familiar themes pointed to the impact of female silencing in our 

world today, the ongoing repercussions of centuries of silence. Without a robust sense of 

female pasts, they prompted me to ask, how can we really know ourselves today? Through 

this thesis, I attempt to put female voices and experience at the forefront; to make women 

not only visible, but central to action, to plot, to character growth.  

There are multiple definitions of neo-Victorian literature. For the purpose of this 

thesis, I am ascribing to the notion that this genre is one that attempts to reimagine and 

reinterpret the Victorian period. Inevitably, this reinterpretation brings with it ethical 

considerations, including the attempt to re-right or heal past wrongs, through a process of 

talking back to Victorian injustices. The novels I discuss in the critical portion of this thesis, 

and use as a model for my creative portion, can be read as an attempted corrective to the 

marginalised female voices of Victorian literature. Yet, as my critical portion discusses, what 

these texts often do, is show the impossibility of ever undoing past wrongs while also 

emphasising ongoing and prevailing injustices in contemporary society. As Sarah Waters 

stated about her novels:  

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s (neo-Victorian fiction) a way of addressing issues 

that are still very, very current in British culture, like class and gender, and 

submerged sexuality or sexual underworlds. Things that we think we’re pretty cool 

with, and actually we’re not, and we keep wanting to go back to the nineteenth 

century to play these out on a bigger scale, precisely because they’re still very 

current for us (Sarah Waters, in Tuttle, 211).  



6 
 

Through a focus on female experience, the neo-Victorian texts discussed in this thesis have 

a dual role in exploring, exposing and attempting to correct historical abuses; but also, in 

casting a mirror on ongoing modern injustices, tracing these ghostly presences back to their 

Victorian roots.   

My initial plan was to explore multiple tropes used in neo-Victorian fiction to depict 

trauma and haunting, but, as I wrote, it became clear to me that my central interest was in 

the role of ambiguous female characters. As discussed in the critical section, these 

characters were a valuable medium for Victorian novels to explore issues around gendered 

inequality and injustices, and this trope is manipulated by neo-Victorian novels. The 

protagonists of Fingersmith, for example, are both not at all what they seem, and question 

ongoing modern assumptions about female characteristics. This project consists of a critical 

discussion comparing the representations of ambiguous female characters in Victorian and 

neo-Victorian literature to both silence and expose female trauma, as well as my own piece 

of neo-Victorian fiction, the opening of a novel in which I employ neo-Victorian tropes to 

construct a story of intergenerational haunting and gendered injustices.   

 

Through a close analysis of Victorian texts, such as Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in 

White, and of neo–Victorian texts, including Alias Grace and Fingersmith, the critical section 

of this thesis shows how neo-Victorian texts are haunted by their Victorian predecessors, 

inviting the reader to reimagine the worlds of these originals; but also, to attempt to re-

write (or make right) the injustices and traumas that are depicted in these novels. Victorian 

novels, I argue, exclude female voices, or offer these through a male perspective, reflecting 

Victorian attitudes to women. Laura Fairlie, the heroine of The Woman in White is wholly 

excluded from the narration of her own story, despite it being told from multiple points of 



7 
 

view; while the only female narrator in the novel has her extract edited by a male character. 

Neo-Victorian literature offers an attempt to redress this situation, to put female experience 

back in the centre. I explore how trauma is represented by neo-Victorian literature in ways 

that challenge our perception of Victorian culture and simultaneously interrogate 

contemporary culture. While neo-Victorian texts construct a strong female voice that is 

suppressed in Victorian counterparts, this voice draws attention to injustices that still haunt 

the world of the contemporary reader. Ultimately, I argue, these texts point to the 

impossibility of ever undoing past trauma and draw the reader’s attention to the fact that 

our society is still haunted by many of the same issues that we see in Victorian texts–

particularly regarding the silencing of female voices and experience. Even today, as I edit 

this introduction, the internet is reverberating with social media posts telling Nazanin 

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has just been released from six years in Iranian jail, separated from 

her husband and young daughter, to be quiet and be grateful. We do not want female 

opinions, the suggestion is: we want their gratitude and docility (Hyde). 

 

While the critical portion of this thesis grew out of my interest in feminist theory, the 

creative aspect grew out of my love of Victorian and neo-Victorian literature. I knew for 

many years that I would like to attempt a novel with a Victorian setting. That was of course 

a daunting task, requiring extensive research, reading and dedication, and it was something 

I began and put aside many times. It was not until beginning my Master’s study that I was 

able to set aside the time that I needed to do justice to the piece. The critical reading honed 

my focus, so that what I first envisaged as a ‘romance-gone-wrong’ became centred around 

the relationships between its female characters and their traumatic experiences as women 

operating in an oppressive patriarchal society.  



8 
 

My creative portion is the first part of a novel that reconceptualises Victorian 

sensation tropes, such as a companion protagonist, a hidden past, and an illegitimacy 

storyline to explore generational trauma and its impact on the present and attempts to 

reinterpret the role and voice of the middle-class Victorian heroine. The ambiguous 

heroines explore and probe female traumatic experience. The novel tells the story of three 

women who have retreated to an isolated country cottage for the birth of an illegitimate 

child, all with complex secret agendas. Emma, a companion with a hidden background, who 

has conceived the child as the result of an affair with her employer’s aristocratic son, 

George, believes she will return to raise the child with George. Miranda, George’s wife, has 

other plans: she thinks Emma will be discarded and she will raise the child as her own. 

Meanwhile, Lady Rowbarton, who has orchestrated the plan, wants only the child, and the 

continuation of the Rowbarton name. As this first part of the novel reaches its climax it 

begins to appear she will go to any dark lengths to achieve that goal.   

While Miranda is undoubtedly from an aristocratic background, she is morally 

ambiguous, and experiences a sense of not belonging, not fitting in her position. Emma’s 

social ambiguity (her role as a companion, her secret past, her merchant father and ‘mad’ 

mother) enable her to subvert patriarchal social structures, and to expose hypocrisies and 

injustices inherent in this system.  The novel places female characters in the centre of the 

action, narrating their own story (unlike many earlier sensation heroines, such as Lucy 

Audley and Laura Fairlie), with male characters side-lined, even marginalised. The novel 

reflects, however, that ultimately, even in the domestic sphere, female agency was limited 

and clipped by patriarchal norms. Even for those middle-class women who tried to fight 

against the system there were few real alternatives to marriage or servitude as a governess 



9 
 

or companion. These women were silenced and their stories untold, sacrificed to that myth 

of male universality. 

Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Woman, describes the myth of male 

universality, and discusses the historical silencing of female perspectives: “…the lives of men 

have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the 

other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.” (XI). Despite my goal to give my 

female characters a strong voice to speak into this silence, and some agency over their 

stories, I wanted to be true to the fact that during the Victorian period female lives were 

ultimately controlled by the men around them. My ending recognises this struggle, giving 

my characters some control over their actions, but in a limited way, honouring the 

constrictions under which even very wealthy women were forced to operate. The novel also 

creates a sense of sisterhood and female solidarity, but again one that is disrupted and 

challenged by the patriarchal system in which these women lived, and which is still 

recognisable to women readers today. The process of writing my own neo-Victorian piece 

brought into focus Atwood’s claim that “we cannot help but be contemporary” (Darroch 1) 

and I was very aware that, as a modern female writer, I was writing from a specific 

perspective and time period. The Victorian issues that were relevant to me were inevitably 

those that are relevant in modern culture–for example, issues around inequality in marriage 

and the continued pathologizing of female emotions.  

Through their imprisonment/retreat in an isolated cottage, my female characters are 

given the opportunity to step outside of patriarchal institutions (mainly the family in this 

case), and to reflect on the impacts of these on their lives. The Victorian family was the 

institution which underpinned patriarchal society, and which trapped and constrained 

women, even while it supported them. For most middle-class and above women, marriage 



10 
 

was a business contract. The cottage gives my characters a female space where they can 

reflect on this situation, even while they are forced to the horrible realisation that their 

options are few and limited: Emma ultimately has to give up her baby or live as an unloved 

kept women, facing the knowledge that she will most likely be discarded; Miranda makes 

the decision to step away from society, knowing that she will never be able to come back. 

These dilemmas are still as relevant as they were in the Victorian era, albeit in a much more 

nuanced and subtle way, when we look at the fact that domestic work is still predominantly 

left to women, even when they have paid work elsewhere; when we consider the impact of 

recent covid restrictions and how women’s lives have been impacted so much more than 

men’s (Annick Masselot and Maria Hayes).  

Miranda’s anxieties about her own marriage, as well as Emma’s impossible situation 

(what options does she have to care for her child if she cannot marry?) are echoed in 

modern narratives around female dependence; modern romance novels and Netflix series 

still tend to hinge around a female protagonist’s search for an elusive partner. These truths 

are difficult ones to face in a society which likes to think of itself as progressive and 

enlightened. It is important to note that many Victorians also thought of themselves as 

progressive and modern, despite their dismissive attitudes to women. Victorian literature is 

brimming with characters who purport this point. “’Whatever women may be, I thought 

that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition,’” (62) Marian tells Walter in  

The Woman in White, making a sexist statement, and suggesting that male thought is 

somehow superior–“above”– that of females, even as she proclaims nineteenth century 

enlightenment. This attitude can blind us to what us is happening around us, to seeing and 

accepting uncomfortable truths. In providing a space to voice these injustices–both in the 



11 
 

past and in the present–neo-Victorian literature has a role in exposing what is still not 

working, and that it the first step in making a change. 

 

  



12 
 

 

The ambiguous female: Governesses, companions, and invisible pasts 

in the neo-Victorian novel 
 

The neo-Victorian novel attempts to reinterpret the Victorian period, often employing self-

conscious references to original Victorian texts, reimagining these, and filling in narrative 

gaps. In this sense it can be understood as more than just a historical novel set in the 

Victorian era. Frequently, the narrative fills in these novels involve traumatic experiences, 

often of a sexual or controversial nature, which were veiled or glossed over in their Victorian 

predecessors. In this essay, I will explore how Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters and Alias 

Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood construct trauma using Victorian tropes—such as the 

female villain and historic family secrets—in a way that interrogates its construction in 

Victorian texts. I will use Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and The 

Woman in White (1859) by Wilkie Collins as my main Victorian sources to compare the way 

that these tropes are used and explore how they change in Fingersmith and Alias Grace, 

arguing that self-conscious metafictional references to earlier texts haunt the characters of 

neo-Victorian texts as much as their own shady pasts. I will argue that the more transparent 

treatment of trauma in neo-Victorian texts, and the metafictional haunting of their heroines 

offer an attempt at redemption; to rewrite the wrongs that are so often intrinsic to the 

originals. However, I will go on to argue, by making such explicit reference to trauma these 

narratives often suggest a form of “displacement”: through exploring contemporary issues 

in long-ago contexts, neo-Victorian novels take a metaphorical step back from the very 

issues they attempt to push to the forefront, blurring and softening the impact of their 

representations of trauma. As Jessica Cox writes, the effect of this is to suggest “possible 



13 
 

parallels between Victorian and contemporary literature and culture in terms of the 

problems of representation inherent in narratives of sexual trauma from both the past and 

present” (147).  Susanne Gruss (136) suggests that these novels only emphasise the futility 

of trying to heal personal and political traumas of the past through literature. I will also 

question the ethics of trying to do so, arguing that the sense of belonging and involvement 

offered to the reader by intertexts and metafictional references creates “affective 

entanglements” which Rosa Karl terms “damnable and politically as well as critically 

incorrect” (39). In its close, self-conscious relationship to the reader, and its preoccupation 

with spectres and traumas, the neo-Victorian novel is haunted as much by our own modern 

traumas as those of the past.  

Trauma in the Victorian and neo-Victorian novels is often embedded in a plot that 

revolves around family, particularly in the context of long-buried secrets that are brought to 

the surface, by virtue of their on-going impact on the younger generation. Lady Audley’s 

Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon for example, is a Victorian text in which the plot is driven 

by a young man’s attempts to uncover his aunt’s dark secrets–bigamy, hereditary madness 

and the unwomanly abandonment of her young child. A neo-Victorian example of a plot 

driven by family-based secrets is Fingersmith, which I have chosen for its similar themes of 

intergenerational deceit and explorations of female villainy, its twists and turns culminating 

in the discovery that the two protagonists were swapped at birth. Unlike Lady Audley’s 

Secret, which villainises and others its female subject with its masculine narrative voice, 

Fingersmith is written from a female perspective, resulting in a narrative that enables the 

reader to access the inner workings of its heroines’ minds, and establishes an element of 

reader intimacy despite their dark deeds. A central component of both texts is the hunt for 

identity; family and the recovery of knowledge is shown to be a major aspect of this. Gruss 



14 
 

(124) links the prevalence of family secrets and trauma in the neo-Victorian novel to Nicolas 

Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion of the transgenerational phantom, whereby collective 

trauma can be perceived in the psychology of the individual and is passed on through 

generations. Cox (141) explains: “[t]he notion of the past haunting the present is central to 

both Victorian and neo-Victorian sensation fiction. The reason for this haunting often lies in 

the traumatic events of the past and their long-lasting effects on those involved. This 

trauma and its aftereffects take on a variety of forms, but are most persistently focused on 

the experiences of women, and in particular those of the (neo-)sensation heroine.” Through 

focussing on “haunted” females, particularly their experience within the institution of the 

family, these novels explore the generational and collective nature of trauma—these 

characters are victims (or survivors) not only of their own troubled backgrounds, but of a 

wider society that can be traced back (and forward) through generations. 

Cox (147) differentiates the treatment of the phantom in Victorian texts from the 

way it is handled in neo-Victorian texts, arguing that Victorian texts repress trauma, veiling 

and glossing over traumatic events and refusing to look back while neo-Victorian novels 

seek to expose trauma and offer a form of catharsis. This restraint reflects Victorian 

attitudes to trauma and suffering, as something best left unseen or forgotten and 

repressed.  We see this attempt to hide from uncomfortable details in The Woman in White, 

through its depiction of Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival. While we are given hints that Laura 

is deeply troubled and unhappy, the reader is never given the details as to what takes place 

between the couple—abuse is suggested, but never actually portrayed. Likewise, these 

novels seek to put the past to sleep, through the act of forgetting, again displaying a 

discomfort with difficult subject matter that is at odds with the tell-all nature of modern 

narratives.  At the end of The Woman in White, for example, Walter encourages Laura not to 



15 
 

dwell on the difficult subject of her past–her traumatic and possibly abusive marriage to Sir 

Percival. Likewise, the final chapter of Lady Audley’s Secret is titled ‘At Peace’, and the 

reader is told: “That dark story of the past fades little by little every day, and there may 

come a time in which the shadow my lady’s wickedness has cast upon the young man’s life, 

will utterly vanish away” (355). Narrative gaps and silences like this make these texts inviting 

to contemporary writers with a desire to fill in and expose the gritty and uncomfortable 

realities of Victorian life.  

On the surface, much neo-Victorian literature emphasises the difference in Victorian 

and modern attitudes to family trauma through its seemingly unflinching depiction of the 

troubling or uncomfortable details that are left of their literary predecessors—in doing so 

these texts differentiate or ‘other’ themselves, and their readers, from the Victorian. The 

French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles), written in 1969, is an early example of this 

othering. With its ironic metafictional narrative, this text pokes fun at Victorian attitudes, 

assuming an almost smug superiority of the modern, and of our supposed ability to explore 

difficult or traumatic subject matter without the need to repress; yet at the same time 

telling a story of a heterosexual romance, whose heroine is only ever narrated from a male 

perspective, and which, despite a smattering of sexual content, might not seem too radically 

different from the contemporary Victorian texts the novel seeks to critique. Authentic neo-

Victorian texts, on the other hand, seek to expose and bring intergenerational wounds to 

the surface, working through these as a form of catharsis and healing. In many cases, this 

catharsis or revelation of secrets leads to the protagonist’s reintegration into society. 

Fingersmith, in contrast to Victorian novels like Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in 

White, ends with an acceptance—uncomfortable, yet convincing—of Sue and Maud’s 

troubled past, with Maud turning to writing the pornographic material her uncle forced her 



16 
 

to read as a way of supporting herself: “‘Don’t pity me,’ she said, ‘because of him. He’s 

dead. But I am still what he made me. I shall always be that’” (546). Such contrasts suggest a 

stark difference between neo-Victorian texts and Victorian ones–a greater knowing, a 

superior ability to process and deal with trauma. Yet a deeper reading of neo-Victorian 

novels shows it is more complex than this. Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which 

ultimately fails to other itself from the Victorians as much as we might think, many neo-

Victorian novels struggle to differentiate themselves from the Victorian in their treatment of 

traumatic subject matter, simply by their refusal to depict such content in a contemporary 

setting. 

Conventions like ghosts and haunting in the neo-Victorian novel work to remind the 

modern reader of our links to our Victorian predecessors; a past that has not yet entirely 

dissolved. Gruss quotes Carla Freccero’s statement that “haunting, ghostly apparition, 

reminds us that the past and the present are neither discrete or sequential. The borderline 

between then and now wavers, wobbles and does not hold still” (134). This wavering line 

between then and now emphasises the similarities between our modern lives with the 

Victorian world. The return of the neo-Victorian novel to themes of family and 

intergenerational trauma, and its apparently explicit treatment of these, suggests an 

ongoing social preoccupation with these concerns. The Victorian era is often viewed as a 

point of origin for contemporary culture: the birthplace of many of our social norms and 

conventions, including family structure. This notion of the Victorians as the fore-parents of 

modern society and culture could possibly explain the displacement of existing concerns to 

a Victorian context, and our desire to look search here for answers and healing around our 

ongoing family traumas–an effort that Gruss suggests is futile due to “a prevalence of 

traumatic memory that cannot (and should not) be overwritten by (at best) pseudo-



17 
 

consoling neo-narratives” (134). The introduction of explicit sexual and family trauma–

familiar themes to the modern reader–into neo-Victorian narratives emphasise the 

similarities between Victorian and contemporary culture and shows a side to Victorian 

culture that is relatable to the modern reader. Neo-Victorian heroines are haunted by their 

Victorian predecessors and their experiences, as well as their own traumas. These cultural 

doppelgangers serve to remind the reader of the text’s link to earlier texts, but also remind 

us of the ongoing generational impact of trauma, and the impossibility of redemption. An 

obvious example of this doubling are the characters of Maud and Sue in Fingersmith, both 

of whom are haunted by their Victorian predecessors in The Woman in White, as much as if 

they were haunted by their own great grandparents.  

Fingersmith is unmistakably penned by modern hand–the book includes graphic 

lesbian sex scenes, one of the heroines is a petty villain, and the other cruel and knowing 

(the opposite of a conventional Victorian heroine). Yet the use of Victorian sensation and 

trauma tropes–mixed identities, the heroines’ brush with asylums, and their very physical 

and negative reactions to male abuse of power–draw attention to the similarities between 

Victorian women’s suffering in a patriarchal system and the struggles women still grapple 

with today. Likewise, Atwood’s Grace is haunted by Victorian representations of the female 

villain, such as Lady Audley, emphasising the way in which we still attempt to pathologize 

and other female protest as well as female experiences of abuse and trauma. The discussion 

of modern themes in a long-ago setting performs a “displacement” (Cox 161), which is 

indicative of persistent problems of articulation. Neo-Victorian literature then, draws 

attention to intersections between the worlds of the modern reader and of the characters 

they read (such as the abuse of male power in family structures), as much as it does to the 

differences (the way that this abuse is articulated and exposed).  



18 
 

 

In the following section, I will discuss the tropes used by Victorian novels (predominantly 

The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) to explore traumatic experience. In the later 

sections of this essay, I will compare the way that neo-Victorian novels (Fingersmith and 

Alias Grace) exploit these tropes to critique the representation of female trauma in their 

Victorian predecessors.  The four novels I will discuss all explore trauma–personal and 

political–through a focus on (a) traumatised female protagonist(s). This protagonist is 

frequently of an ambiguous social position and arouses ambivalent feelings in both the 

characters that surround them and the novel’s reader. The working middle-class woman is a 

familiar figure in the Victorian literary landscape, often in the form of a governess or a 

companion. A respectable, unmarried, woman, from good family, yet forced to work by 

genteel poverty, and still to ascribe to Victorian notions of femininity, she is a figurehead for 

Victorian ambiguities and anxieties about the changing role of women. This anxiety is 

famously addressed by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847), whose protagonist makes 

frequent and passionate statements about the place of middle-class women, calling for their 

right to equality and to a fulfilling and stimulating life, just as gentlemen were able to have:  

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; 

they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their 

brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely 

as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-

creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and 

knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to 

condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom 

has pronounced necessary for their sex (110-11). 



19 
 

The companion was an even more troubling concept than the governess in the Victorian 

novel. Essentially a friend and confidant, and, by necessity, a woman of good birth 

(sometimes equally good as her mistress), the companion was nonetheless paid. Not quite 

fitting anywhere, the working middle class woman had access to areas that other women of 

her status might be denied, both physically and psychologically. Victorian novels often 

feature “invisible” characters like these accessing areas of grand houses that would typically 

be out of bounds or being confided in by their betters (or their inferiors). In Jane Eyre, for 

example, we see Jane gaining access to her master’s bedroom, and eventually even the 

hidden attic, where Rochester’s dark secret (his ‘mad’ wife) is confided to her, in a traumatic 

turn of events that ultimately forces Jane to confront the power imbalances in her 

relationship with Rochester.   

Socially ambiguous figures, such as Jane Eyre, were an important and versatile 

means for Victorian narratives to explore different perspectives and to expose social 

inequalities. In exploring these inequalities, and in particular the suffering of women as a 

result of gendered power imbalances, these novels also draw attention to traumas suffered 

by women — particularly those who did not fit into patriarchal models of dependent, home-

bound ladyhood. These women are often haunted—sometimes literally (as in The Turn of 

the Screw (1898) by Henry James)—by shady, troubling and troubled, backgrounds, which 

they—or others—take great pains to hide or forget, as we see when Lady Audley attempts 

murder in an effort to hide her history of ‘madness’.  

To explore and analyse the power imbalances and treatment of ambiguous females 

in The Woman in White, a short summary of the novel is pertinent here. Anne Catherick first 

appears in The Woman in White as a ghostly figure, an “apparition” (24) who emerges 

before Walter Hartright on the road to London: “the figure of a solitary woman, dressed 



20 
 

from head to foot in white garments” (24). On his later appointment as a drawing 

instruction for the beautiful aristocratic Laura Fairlie—who looks surprisingly like Anne—

Walter grows suspicious of Laura's husband-to-be, Sir Percival Glyde, and falls in love with 

Laura. In a complicated turn of events, it emerges that Anne has escaped from an asylum 

where she was wrongfully placed by Sir Percival. Laura marries Sir Percival, despite Anne’s 

efforts to warn her that he is a villain. He then attempts to bully Laura into signing over her 

marriage settlement. When she refuses, he fakes her death—using Anne’s body (Anne has 

conveniently—for Sir Percival and the plotline—died of natural causes)—and places Laura in 

an asylum, claiming her to be Anne. Laura is rescued by her half-sister, Marian, and Walter 

discovers that Glyde is illegitimate, and that Anne was, in fact Laura’s half-sister, the result 

of her mother’s affair with Laura’s father. Though Anne did not know the details of Glyde’s 

secret, she did know there was a secret, and therefore he had her put in the asylum. Glyde 

finally dies in a fire trying to hide the evidence from Walter. The novel hinges around 

themes of identity, female repression and abuses of power—against married women by 

their husbands, but also against young, unmarried women in a patriarchal society. Through 

doubling the figures of Anne and Laura, the novel explores the traumatic impact of 

patriarchal social institutions on women: marriage and the asylum.   

From the opening of The Woman in White, Anne Catherick is associated with 

haunting and all its connotations of past trauma: “I have been cruelly used and cruelly 

wronged,” she tells Walter, hinting at past ordeals, without revealing the nature of these 

(28). Anne is an example of a heroine whose troubled past emphasises the “notion of the 

past haunting the present” (Cox 141), which, as discussed above, is at the heart of much 

neo-Victorian fiction, particularly in its exploration of female characters. As Laura's double, 

Anne is an ambiguous figure—socially and textually (Is Anne ‘The Woman in White’ of the 



21 
 

title, or is that Laura? Is Anne just a pale ghost of Laura?)—and it is this ambiguity that 

brings about her suffering: “There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner...not 

exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the 

humblest rank of life” (24), Walter says of Anne, describing her ambiguous position.  Despite 

her apparent working-class background, we learn towards the end of the novel that her 

father is in fact an aristocrat (though she was illegitimate)—the late Mrs Fairlie’s husband. 

Anne is Laura’s half-sister. Anne was at one point cared for by Mrs Fairlie—a lady—and 

educated at her school, while her own mother worked as a servant. Anne’s mother writes 

later that through Mrs Fairlie, her daughter “was petted and spoiled” and “they put some 

nonsense into her head about always wearing white” (535).  Anne’s insistence on wearing 

white associates her with ladylike purity and innocence, but also signifies her as a ghostly, 

haunted and haunting figure. Further, her whimsical attachment to Mrs Fairlie, and her 

reluctance to let go of this, signifies an attempt to be something more than what she is, to 

break free of the limiting roles ascribed to her by Victorian society. Not a lady, and yet not a 

commoner, Anne is troubling to the patriarchal society which she is part of, but also to the 

text. Not quite mad, and not quite sane—a “half-wit”—she is shut away by Glyde because 

she threatens his inheritance. Her mother fails to protect her, because Anne does not fit in 

with her ideas of what a daughter should be. She is ultimately killed off by the text so that 

Laura—who is very much a lady—can survive. “Not a voice was heard; not a soul moved, till 

those three words, ‘Laura, Lady Glyde’, had vanished from sight. Then there was a great sigh 

of relief among the crowd, as if they felt that the last fetters of conspiracy had been struck 

off Laura herself... One line only was afterwards engraved in its place: ‘Anne Catherick, July 

25th, 1850.’” Anne is a victim to her trauma, and her refusal to fit in; her death is ultimately 



22 
 

a ‘relief’ because it frees Laura, who is a true lady, to embrace her future as a happy and 

loved wife to Walter. 

It is not only Anne’s social class which separates her from Laura, but her troubled 

past, the etchings of trauma on her body, as if she is a damaged version of Laura: “If ever 

sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s 

face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance 

resemblance” (97), comments Walter, unwittingly foreshadowing the sorrow which Laura is 

yet to suffer, before he realises that the women are indeed sisters. Cox (142) writes that 

“trauma is closely associated with the heroine’s marital relations, and more generally with 

her association with patriarchal culture.” Anne’s traumatic experience—her imprisonment 

in a mental asylum and being silenced and threatened by Glyde—emphasises these power 

imbalances in Victorian society. As an illegitimate woman, she is powerless, stripped of 

autonomy, yet Percival (who turns out to also be illegitimate) is powerful and oppressive. It 

is no accident that after her marriage to Sir Percival Glyde, Laura begins to mirror Anne in 

her physical appearance. Marriage is equated with the experience of the asylum in its 

impact on a woman’s body: “I miss something when I look at her,” writes Marian on Laura’s 

return from her honeymoon. “There was, in the old times a freshness, a softness, an ever-

varying and yet ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face...This is gone” (211). ‘Thank 

God for your poverty,” Laura tells Marian later, discussing her marriage, “it has made you 

your own mistress and saved you from the lot that has fallen on me” (258).   Through 

doubling Laura with Anne, the novel emphasises the abuse of Victorian women within the 

family, and within marriage. Though Anne’s trauma is her experience with the asylum, this 

turns out to have its root in intergenerational secrets: her mother’s affair, and her 

knowledge of Sir Percival’s illegitimacy. Her experience in the asylum was the result of her 



23 
 

mother and her father’s transgressions, as well as Sir Percival’s, and by the attempts of all 

three characters to hide their ‘shame’. Anne is a victim of repressive and inhibitive family 

structures, but this is always implicit; the details of exactly what she has suffered are kept 

from the reader, and, unlike later neo-Victorian characters, Anne is never given the 

opportunity to voice her own experience or to heal from it; she is sacrificed by the novel so 

that Laura (a ‘true’ lady) can thrive. Ultimately then, The Woman in White perpetuates 

Victorian narratives around the female role as passive and powerless. 

Even though The Woman in White hinges around Anne’s secret past, very little page 

space is given to the actual details of her experience. The novel opens with the sentence: 

“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can 

achieve” (9). This is very much the tone of the novel, with female characters passively 

enduring unspecified horrors, while the male characters either afflict these horrors, or 

rescue the women. The action and voice of the novel is resolutely male, so that the female 

voices are hushed and suppressed–a reflection of the pervasive silencing of the female voice 

during the Victorian era. The details of what Laura endures in the asylum and throughout 

her marriage to Sir Percival are never narrated to the reader or to Laura’s own family: “...we 

shall both be happier and easier,” she tells Marian, “if we accept my married life for what it 

is, and say and think as little about it as possible” (212). These gaps around Anne and Laura’s 

traumatic experience are a narrative technique that draws attention to the unspeakable 

nature of trauma; the silence draws attention to the trauma (Cox, 2019).  Simultaneously, 

however, these gaps and silences suppress and disallow the voices of the women who are 

so central to the story, in the same way that Sir Percival silences Anne when she threatens 

to tell his secret: “It ended...in his insisting on securing his own safety by shutting her up” 

(537). Ultimately, Anne is also silenced by the narrative, which kills her off. The image of the 



24 
 

gravestone at the end of the novel is shrouded in silence. The association of the gravestone 

and silenced women is prevalent throughout the novel, with Anne often making an 

appearance in silent graveyards. In Chapter 13 we see Walter find Anne in the quiet night-

time graveyard. Though Walter purportedly wants to know Anne’s secrets and seeks her 

confidence, he hushes her when she begins to express her grief and anger: “I only want you 

to quiet yourself, and, when you are calmer, to think over what I have said,” he tells her, 

putting his own agenda at the centre of the action. Later in the novel, Laura and Walter are 

reunited beside Anne’s grave. Laura’s appearance in this section is a shocking revelation; 

for, like the reader, Walter has believed her dead, and now she appears beside her own 

tomb (which we later learn is Anne’s). Yet, this scene is notable for Laura’s lack of voice. She 

does not say a word: “The woman came on; slowly and silently came on” (410). Laura’s 

silence here adds drama to the scene, but it also emphasises her lack of narrative control 

throughout the novel. Like, Anne, Laura is given very little opportunity to voice her 

experience of trauma–her lack of voice in the novel is remarkable given that it is her story. 

Cox writes that:  

…not only is she (Laura) forbidden from speaking of the past, she is further silenced 

through the presentation of a narrative consisting of multiple accounts with the 

notable exception of her own. The image of the happy wife at the conclusion of the 

novel suggests that either she has suffered no lasting effects from her experiences, 

or that she has repressed events to such an extent that there is no outward sign of 

them (152). 

At the end of the novel, Laura refers to a ‘rule’ she shares with Walter that she must not 

refer to the past: “I am afraid…I can only explain it by breaking through our rule, and 

referring to the past” (626), she tells Walter when he asks how they came to be at 



25 
 

Limmeridge House. Like Glyde, Walter shows himself confronted and uncomfortable with 

evidence of female suffering. He considers Anne the less attractive woman, due to the 

physical manifestations of trauma on her appearance. He shudders when comparing her to 

Laura. “‘To associate that forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness 

only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright creature’” 

(62), he tells Marian when he recognises the likeness between Anne and Laura.  Again, we 

see trauma presented as something women must hide away and not voice, glossed over by 

the novel, which thereby demonstrates a Victorian discomfort with traumatic experience 

that might seem at odds with the tell-all nature of modern trauma discourse. 

 

Lady Audley’s Secret is another example of a Victorian sensation novel that employs an 

ambiguous female protagonist with a hidden background to explore the impact of 

intergenerational trauma.  From the outset, Lady Audley is a suspicious character by virtue 

of her being an ex-governess who has married above her station. Early in the novel, she is 

told by Mrs Dawson that she is “lucky” to have the attentions of Sir Michael because of her 

lowly station. The reader is reminded frequently that Lady Audley is not a real lady: she is 

childish and spoiled, and described as flashy, dripping in diamonds and perfumes: her rooms 

(56) contain “glittering toilette apparatus”, “rich odours of perfumes”, and “Hothouse 

flowers.” There is an underlying whiff of sexuality in these descriptions of Lady Audley, 

which does not conform to Victorian ideals of modest ladyhood. In contrast, Lady Audley’s 

stepdaughter Alicia, is a ‘real lady’, born in wedlock to parents of good birth: she is “never 

familiar with the servants” as Lucy (Lady Audley) is with her lady’s maid Phoebe (48), 

showing Alicia’s awareness and conformity to Victorian values around keeping to one’s class 

and station. Alicia describes her stepmother as childish and frivolous and mistrusts her. Her 



26 
 

opinion, as a ‘real lady,’ counts and undermines Lucy’s trustworthiness to the reader.  

Despite Lucy’s appearance as a lady then, which has fooled not only Sir Michael, but the 

whole of society–she is the “belle of the county”–the reader is constantly reminded that she 

is not quite what she appears. We see this in Sir Michael’s reaction to her acceptance of his 

proposal: “…neither joy, nor triumph…as if he had carried a corpse in his heart” (12). This 

imagery links to the description of Audley Court as decaying and crumbling: “…a broken ruin 

of a wall…and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss” 

(3). Lucy has taken advantage of her access to superior social spaces, and her angelic 

appearance in order to seduce and dupe Sir Michael and trick her way into a position that 

she does not belong in. The family was seen as being at the heart of Victorian social 

structure, and the ideal wife was at the very centre of this model–self-sacrificing, and 

morally irreproachable. Lady Audley’s posturing as a lady makes her dangerous, a threat to 

these Victorian ideals of modest, innocent femininity, and thereby to the very structure of 

Victorian aristocracy. 

By presenting Lucy as dangerous and suspicious, Lady Audley’s Secret complies with 

the Victorian convention of silencing female voices in literature. The sense of danger is 

compounded by the knowledge that Lady Audley has a mysterious past, which is hinted at 

very early on in the narrative: 

She had come into the neighbourhood as a governess… No one knew anything of her 

except that she had come in answer to an advertisement which Mr Dawson, the 

surgeon, had inserted in The Times. She came from London; and the only reference 

she gave was to a lady at a school at Brompton, where she had once been a 

teacher...Her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous that it seemed 



27 
 

strange that she should have answered an advertisement offering such very 

moderate terms as those named by Mr Dawson (6).  

The suggestion is that Lady Audley is a stereotypical femme fatale, manipulating men to 

achieve her own selfish ends. She even admits to her husband-to-be that she is motivated 

by financial and social advancement: “I cannot be blind to the advantages of such an 

alliance. I cannot, I cannot!” (11). When Lucy goes on to speak of her mother, there is a hint 

that there is something more troubling at play than mere greed, that there are hidden 

skeletons in Lucy’s family background: “My mother—but do not let me speak of her. 

Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations!” (11). Alone in her boudoir, 

Lady Audley expands on this: “‘No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more 

humiliations,’ she said; ‘every trace of the old life melted away—every clue to identity 

buried and forgotten…’” (12).  These words imply that Lady Audley has suffered 

considerable hardship in her past, and as such she represents the suffering of the Victorian 

working woman, suffering that remains “buried and forgotten,” even though the plot of 

Lady Audley’s Secret revolves around her metaphorical ghosts.  The details of Lady Audley’s 

troubled past are overshadowed by the way she uses her suffering to evoke sympathy, so 

that she comes to seem sly and manipulative, rather than a victim of circumstance. Hoffer 

states this is a common strategy in sensation novels of this era: “...sympathy is represented 

as a self-centred strategy for gaining transgressive power, social mobility, romantic 

attachments, and narrative centrality... the darker side of sympathy became a topic of 

concern during these mid-century years” (xii). Lucy’s manipulation of her plight makes her a 

figure of suspicion to the reader, rather than of concern. Ultimately her story is played down 

in favour of the impact her actions have on the male characters around her, and despite 



28 
 

being the novel’s central character, Lady Audley is silenced. As in The Woman in White, Lady 

Audley’s Secret marginalises female trauma, betraying a discomfort with female experience. 

Through marginalising female experience Lady Audley’s Secret reaffirms Victorian 

stereotypes about women and the dangers of challenging one’s class and gender-based 

position in society. The narrative devotes very little page space to exploring Lucy’s 

motivations; her ‘madness’ and hysteria takes centre stage, so that the novel can avoid 

exploring or interrogating in any depth the social conditions that have contributed to her 

downfall. When the narrative confirms that Lady Audley is indeed a bigamist, Robert’s (and 

the reader’s) suspicions about her are confirmed: it appears she is a femme fatale. Cox (143) 

states that “female transgression in the sensation novel is persistently associated with past 

trauma”. Lady Audley’s mention of her mother, as quoted in the previous paragraph, links 

her suffering to her family background–she is haunted by her family past. When the reader 

learns then that Lady Audley’s secret is essentially that she is mad, it seems an injustice. 

Rather than exploring Lady Audley/Helen Tallboys as a victim of her family past, and of a 

patriarchal social structure, the responsibility is firmly placed on her, as a depraved 

madwoman. Though the reader is told of Lady Audley’s drunken father, he is presented as 

an almost comical figure, and little exploration is given to his impact on Lady Audley’s 

upbringing. Likewise, the trauma Lucy would have experienced growing up with a mentally 

unstable mother is downplayed, not to mention the “humiliations” she has experienced as a 

governess, the belief that she has been abandoned by her husband and left alone with no 

money and a small child to support and an alcoholic father–all this in a patriarchal society 

which offered very few options for a woman to work. The reader is told of these 

experiences yet given no detail. The narrative gaps around these experiences seem gaping, 



29 
 

and speak of trauma (Cox, 143). As a modern reader these gaps are frustrating; as a writer 

of neo-Victorian fiction they call for filling in. 

Even though the entire novel is devoted to uncovering Lady Audley’s secret, the 

reader is never shown more than the merest glimpse of the true Lucy Audley/Helen Talboys. 

She is pathologized, her trauma and its aftereffects explained away as hereditary madness. 

The narrative describes Lucy/Helen being shut away, “Buried Alive” (as Chapter 6 is entitled) 

in a madhouse, her voice and her history squished and voiceless, and we are told this is the 

best possible outcome:  

Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets forever! Whatever crimes she may 

have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were to dig a hole for her 

in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her 

away from the world and all worldly associations. But as a physiologist and as an 

honest man I believe you could do no better service to society than by doing this; for 

physiology is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes ago is a woman to be trusted at 

large (302). 

So the doctor tells Robert Audley on shutting Lucy away. Even Lady Audley’s own loving 

husband silences her, refusing to see any hint of her troubles:  

Do you know, Lucy, that once last night, when you looked out through the dark-

green bed curtains, with your poor white face, and the purple rims around your 

hollow eyes, I had almost a difficulty to recognise my little wife in that ghastly, 

terrified, agonised-looking creature, crying out about the storm… I hope to heaven, 

Lucy, I shall never see you look as you did last night (62).  

The reader is given clues to Lucy’s experience, but her voice is frequently drowned out by 

the judgmental tone of the narrator, and the very male and Victorian voices which surround 



30 
 

her. Like Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, Lucy/Helen is silenced, and her trauma is shut 

away and contained, leaving unanswered questions around Victorian female experience 

that we see neo-Victorian texts attempt to answer. 

 

In this section I will discuss the way in which neo-Victorian novels portray trauma, and 

compare this to the Victorian novels discussed above. The Woman in White and Lady 

Audley’s Secret demonstrate how Victorian literature denies and silences female 

experiences of trauma, suggesting it can be contained and repressed. Neo-Victorian fiction 

can be differentiated by its much more candid exploration of trauma and its impact on the 

present, emphasising the inherent difficulties of trying to gloss over suffering: 

“Contemporary trauma narratives, in contrast, suggest the impossibility of this: the past will 

influence the present, and the future—it will rear its head through bad dreams, flashbacks, 

and other manifestations” (Cox, 150). These texts provide an opportunity for cathartic 

working through of trauma for its heroines, which was denied to their Victorian 

counterparts. Neo-Victorian texts, then, can be viewed as “cultural doppelgangers” for their 

nineteenth-century predecessors (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2), and act as a “corrective to 

the Victorian past, to acknowledge the widespread existence of traumas which were all too 

frequently concealed from public view” (Cox 146). Through employing socially ambiguous 

figures, which echo the companion and governess figures of earlier fiction, neo-Victorian 

texts can give these characters a voice that is either not represented, or is drowned out, in 

earlier texts. In terms of Levinas’ writing, these modern heroines have an ethical role in 

speaking for the other and acknowledging past wrongs against women in a patriarchal 

society: 



31 
 

…this form of an ethics of alterity coincides with an ethics of justice, or more 

specifically an ethics of acknowledging past injustices: the doubled injustices of 

literal acts of violence that inflicted untold suffering on others, and the subsequent 

symbolic violence, repeating the offence, of sidelining the trauma or consigning it to 

outright historical oblivion. (Kohlke and Gutleben 20) 

Through ‘speaking for the other’ these novels attempt to tell stories that have been left 

untold, and to give a perspective of Victorian life that is often left out of traditional texts–a 

female perspective. The implication is that in giving voice to these stories and to this 

suffering, neo-Victorian novels play a role in putting the ghosts of Victorian injustices to 

rest: 

Since this act of creation concerns not only generalised stories and previously 

encountered subjectivities but also new individual voices, particularly those of the 

ex-centric, the marginalised and/or the deviant–that is, voices previously 

unheard/unheard of rather than an effect of discursive repetition–neo-Victorian 

fiction manages to perform a labour of regeneration from both an ideological/ethical 

and stylistic/aesthetic point of view. (Kohlke and Gutleben 31) 

 Yet, as the following paragraphs discuss, these neo-Victorian heroines are still ambiguous 

and troubling in their own ways, and neo-Victorian novels continue to raise questions about 

how much has truly changed for women between nineteenth century and the twenty-first. 

 

Alias Grace tells the story of Grace Marks, a real-life Canadian murderess who was pardoned 

on the grounds of insanity after serving many years in jail for the murder of her employer 

and his housekeeper. The novel plays on the competing narratives that have been woven 

about Grace over the years, and their various versions of her: a dangerous femme fatale; an 



32 
 

innocent girl who was wrongfully blamed; a madwoman. The novel includes quotes from 

these different versions at the start of each chapter–excerpts from newspapers, letters, 

court papers, and Life in the Clearings (1853), by Susanna Moodie, a nineteenth century 

text, which portrays Grace in terms of Victorian discourses about working women. In Life in 

the Clearings, Grace is a femme fatale with ideas above her station, employing her looks and 

sexuality to manipulate an innocent young man to commit murder: 

I looked at her with astonishment. 'Good God!' thought I, 'can this be a woman? A 

pretty, soft−looking woman too and a mere girl! What a heart she must have!' I felt 

equally tempted to tell her she was a devil, and that I would have nothing to do with 

such a horrible piece of business; but she looked so handsome, that somehow or 

another I yielded to the temptation, though it was not without a struggle; for 

conscience loudly warned me not to injure one who had never injured me (Moodie 

94).  

In this (fictional) passage we see Victorian ideals about the ‘soft’, incorrupt nature of 

women clashing with Grace’s supposed evil nature, as she attempts to convince a young 

man (a fellow servant) to help her to murder their housekeeper. The idea that a young girl 

could be capable of committing or instigating a gruesome murder subverts the ideal of the 

angel in the house, and as such, is dangerous and threatening to the patriarchal social 

structure.  

Alias Grace explores Victorian anxieties about ambiguous women who did not fit 

within the limited roles assigned to them by patriarchal society in a neo-Victorian context. 

The novel uses reader expectation based on knowledge of Victorian texts to interrogate 

these anxieties: “With the gothic novel as a genre that seems to ‘infect’ the majority of neo-

Victorian texts, the strong focus on ghosts and haunting is not only part of the texts 



33 
 

themselves, Victorian intertexts also haunt neo-Victorianism in general” (Gruss 123).  When 

the modern reader meets neo-Victorian female figures then, they bring this knowledge, 

these preconceptions with them: they are haunted by our knowledge of the 

slippery/deceitful role of the ambiguous Victorian woman in literature these characters 

come to us as a type. Grace first appears in Alias Grace in her role as a prisoner/servant, yet 

she also seems, incongruously, like a well-to-do guest in the prison governor’s home. Reader 

knowledge of other female characters who do not quite fit–characters like Lady Audley and 

Anne Catherick–adds to our understanding that Grace is a character who will challenge and 

interrogate social norms. Grace Marks, already a complex figure, is never going to be the 

compliant, truthful, law-abiding companion/maid she now appears to be. Through her 

ambiguity, Grace personifies Victorian anxieties about ladyhood and the working female. 

Grace accesses the governor’s home through her role as a servant, yet she is confided in by 

the governor’s daughters, her accomplishments are praised, as if she were a lady herself. At 

the reader’s first meeting with Grace, she could—almost—be a lady; we see this in the way 

she sits as well as in the imagery of smooth, white gloves: “I am sitting on the purple velvet 

settee in the Governor's parlour...I have my hands folded in my lap in the proper way 

although I have no gloves. The gloves I would wish to have would be smooth and white, and 

would fit without a wrinkle” (23). Like Lady Audley and Anne Catherick, the reader sees that 

Grace does not fit comfortably into patriarchal Victorian notions of womanhood; she sits 

outside of these, and as such represents a challenge. Grace acquires the privilege of her 

place in the home through remaining tight lipped about her past, assessing and drip-feeding 

knowledge of her inner world as she sees will benefit her: “I am a model prisoner, and give 

no trouble...If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go” (5-

6). This shows Grace’s awareness of herself as a type; her ability to play to this for her own 



34 
 

ends, and to use reader expectation to shape her own narrative. Grace shows herself very 

aware of her role as “celebrated murderess” (25), and as an object of fascination, always 

watched by an audience. Early in the text, Grace comments on Mary Whitney’s “crude” way 

of speaking: “I used to speak that way as well, but I have learnt better manners in prison,” 

she comments, as if prison has gentrified her. The novel ends with Grace living in her own 

respectable home, “white in colour, and with shutters painted green, but commodious 

enough for us.” (527). She has a respectable husband, a hired man to help on the farm, and 

has been offered her own servant, which she has declined “as they pry too much” (528). 

Grace has employed her ambiguity to work to her own ends, and, like Lady Audley, she uses 

sympathy to acquire favour and power, in an institution and wider society that allows little 

autonomy for women. 

Neo-Victorian texts differ from Victorian texts in the authorial control granted to 

their female narrators. Grace proves herself a much more complex figure than Lady Audley 

or Anne Catherick/Laura Fairlie, by virtue of her first-person narrative, and the control this 

affords her over her own narrative. Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke write that:  

Neo-Victorian literature lends a voice to the voiceless, speaks for the speechless, 

where historians can only speculate as to what such persons might have said or 

sounded like, emphasising the purely theoretical nature of their representations. Nor 

is neo-Victorian fiction obliged to present a measured view or depict both sides of a 

conflict objectively; with unashamedly partisan outrage, it can denounce the 

suffering of the forgotten of history – the excluded, the outcast, the downtrodden, 

the marginalised, the colonised (19). 

 Like Lady Audley and Anne Catherick, Grace’s past is obscured and mysterious. Unlike these 

women, Grace is given full narrative control over the information she imparts. In contrast to 



35 
 

the protagonists of Victorian novels, Grace narrates much of her own story—to the reader 

and to Dr Jordan, a nineteenth-century medical man who has determined that he can 

uncover the truth about Grace, and explain her in scientific language: “I must stick to 

observation, I must proceed with caution. A valid experiment must have verifiable results. I 

must resist melodrama and an overheated brain” (69). Yet, as he learns from Grace, truth is 

not something so easily defined and measured as he would like to believe. In many cases 

she appears slippery, unreliable—this very slipperiness empowers Grace, gives her full 

control as to how she is seen and understood:  

While Jordan and the reader are joint "listeners" for most of Grace's story, important 

aspects are not divulged to him, and the reader is made aware of these omissions in 

her first-person narration...Cooke argues that the deployment of fictive confessions 

serves to "implicate the reader in the power politics under discussion" while 

bestowing "upon him/her both the authority and the responsibility of witness" 

(225)...The reader comes to occupy the role of Grace's confidante, the role formerly 

accorded to Mary Whitney (Grace's "alias" and purported alternate personality) and 

never entirely bestowed on Jordan. (Heidi Darroch 110) 

Grace shows herself adept at reading what her audience wants from her, and delivering 

accordingly, both to the reader and to Dr Jordan: “Because he was so thoughtful to bring me 

this radish, I set to work willingly to tell my story, and to make it as interesting as I can, and 

rich in incident, as a sort of return gift for him” (286). Her weaving, back and forward 

narration, sometimes tragic, sometimes shocking, other times lurid; her constant attempts 

to remind us/herself of her respectability, contrasted with what we learn of her background, 

as well as her current imprisonment, only enhance her ambiguity, but it also draws our 



36 
 

attention to the ethics of narrating trauma, the fine line between catharsis, providing a 

voice for the voiceless, and outright voyeurism.  

By giving Grace a voice, the narrative offers Grace the opportunity for healing that is 

denied to Victorian heroines, such as Laura Fairlie, Anne Catherick, and Lady Audley. For 

Gutleben and Kohlke the very act of narrating trauma is a healing one:  

Narrating trauma is essentially performative, because the trauma – and 

consequently the possibility of recovery and of the ruptured subject’s reintegration – 

only come into existence with and through the production of speech and/or 

narrative during the act of witnessing the self’s and/or others’ suffering...The 

embedded trauma narrative, then, is not only a verbal exchange; it also constitutes 

an act of generation, begetting the (however partial) understanding, transmission, 

and healing of trauma (28). 

The act of narration further creates “a community of feeling” within the modern reader, 

inviting sympathy, and building bridges between nineteenth century traumas and modern 

experience (Gutleben and Kohlke 28). From this perspective, the act of narrating is also an 

ethical one, playing an important role in atoning for or re-righting the past wrongs 

committed against women in fiction, and providing a potentially cathartic voice for 

marginalised characters. Grace is a haunted figure. Her narrative of her past life is a 

traumatic one, and her frankness is more striking in comparison to the reticence of her 

Victorian predecessors. From her troubled childhood to her experiences as a servant, 

through to the humiliations she has suffered in prison, Grace shows an awareness that 

much of what she says will not be believed: “A woman like me is always a temptation (to a 

doctor), if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will 

not be believed” (32). This telling line speaks to Cox’s statement that neo-Victorian texts 



37 
 

often offer acknowledgement of “widespread” and “concealed” abuses (146).  By taking the 

narrative back to her childhood, Grace clearly traces for us the intergenerational nature of 

her suffering. At the opening of Chapter 13, Grace quotes a Verse to Dr Jordan:  

Needles and pins, needles and pins/When a man marries his trouble begins. It 

doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins. Perhaps mine began when I was born, 

for as they say, Sir, you cannot choose your own parents, and of my own free will I 

would not have chosen the ones God gave me (118).  

With these words, Grace identifies herself as a woman, a representative of her sex and of 

their troubles; she also clearly links her suffering, her “trouble,” to her parents. Grace does 

not hold back in revealing lurid details of her past to Dr Jordan, giving quite specific details 

of what she endured as a child: “Already my arms were black and blue, and then when night 

came he threw me against the wall, as he’d sometimes done with my mother, shouting that 

I was a slut and a whore, and I fainted” (149). Grace’s haunted background acknowledges 

and gives voice to other women of her time, and their struggles against a repressive society, 

which gave them little options for autonomy and control. 

Grace is also haunted quite literally by the figure of Mary Whitney–a representative 

of the suffering of women at the hands of men. Mary’s suffering is foreshadowed by Grace’s 

mother’s own painful death on the voyage to Canada. A woman who appears to passively 

accept her place in life, the death of Grace’s mother is also linked to haunting–she dies from 

a growth in her stomach, after years of giving birth to unwanted babies—“mouths to 

feed”—to a man who is unable to take responsibility for his actions and their consequences 

for his wife and her body: he drinks and beats his family, while his wife turns to needlework 

to support them financially, and raises the children: “He would say he did not know why 

God had saddled him with such a litter, the world did not need any more of us, we should all 



38 
 

have been drowned like kittens in a sack” (124). Grace mistakes the growth for another 

pregnancy –a phantom baby. Grace is not able to open a window when her mother dies and 

believes her spirit is “trapped in the bottom of the ship...And now she would be caught in 

there for ever and ever...” (141). These words and images associate Grace’s mother with the 

notion of phantoms and spirits, introducing the idea that female traumatic experience is 

linked to haunting. Unlike Grace’s mother, Mary Whitney rails against her position in life: 

Grace describes her as a “democrat”, and this brings about her downfall. Mary is knowing, 

she warns Grace about the dangers of gentlemen, yet she succumbs just as Grace’s mother 

did: “...the man had promised to marry her, and given her a ring, and for once in a way she 

had believed him...but he’d gone back on his promise...and she was in despair…” (200). 

Mary, in contrast to Grace’s passive mother, takes matters into her own hands and 

succumbs to a botched backstreet abortion. Grace accompanies her, and once again 

witnesses the agonies of a woman’s death, which she describes in detail: “screams, and 

crying” (203), “groans of agony,” (204), “the salty smell of blood.” (205). Through her 

mother and Mary Whitney, Grace learns the lack of power women in her society have over 

their own bodies. A servant, Grace is powerless to avenge Mary, or even to gain any 

acknowledgement of the inequalities and abuse that have led to her death, yet her narrative 

makes it clear that she felt the injustice of it: “...it is my true belief that it was the doctor 

that killed her with his knife; him and the gentleman between them. For it is not always the 

one that strikes the blow, that is the actual murderer; and Mary was done to death by that 

unknown gentleman, as surely as if he’d taken the knife and plunged it into her body 

himself” (206). Reflecting on the injustice, Grace realises she forgot to open the window, 

and this is when she first hears Mary’s voice: “Let me in” (207). Grace opens the window: “I 

was hoping Mary’s soul would fly out the window now, and not stay inside, whispering 



39 
 

things into my ear. But I wondered whether I was too late” (207). Again, here we see female 

suffering linked to the idea of haunting. When we finally learn of Grace’s possession by 

Mary towards the end of the novel, it only raises more questions: about Grace’s credibility 

as a narrator, about truth, about fiction, and about our own ability to see and hear only 

what we want to: “‘You see?’ wails the voice. ‘You’re the same, you won’t listen to me, you 

don't believe me, you want it your own way, you won’t hear…’ It trails off, and there is 

silence” (468). This appears a direct accusation against the refusal of patriarchal society to 

see and acknowledge female suffering as it is, without inserting its (society’s) own 

discourses.  

Addressed by Mary/Grace, Doctor Jordan represents the implied reader, desperate 

to pin down the truth, yet unable to ever be objective because of his own experience, his 

own bias, and his desire to rescue Grace: “How much of her story can he allow himself to 

believe? Does he need a grain of salt, or two, or three?...He cautions himself against 

absolutism...The difficulty is that he wants to be convinced...He wanted her to be 

vindicated” (374). Doctor Jordan is left confused, questioning not only Grace, but himself as 

well, his most fundamental beliefs: “...he can’t state anything with certainty and still tell the 

truth, because the truth eludes him. Or rather it’s Grace herself who eludes him. She glides 

ahead of him, just out of grasp, turning her head to see if he’s still following” (473). Jordan 

(and the implied reader) wants to understand Grace, and yet his social conditioning within a 

patriarchal framework means he can never be certain of what he is hearing (or reading). 

Grace appears to elude male understanding, speaking to the impossibility of ever truly 

representing female trauma. In modern terminology, Grace would be described as a trauma 

survivor: not only has she lived through horrendous abuse and neglect and witnessed the 

deaths of two women she has loved, she has also been present at and possibly complicit in 



40 
 

the brutal murder of another woman who has been a central influence on her life. Grace 

claims to have been asleep during the deaths of her mother and Mary Whitney, and not to 

remember Nancy’s death. These gaps in her memory, however, could be explained as a 

symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the text, Grace’s memory lapses are finally 

explained in Victorian medical terms as “auto-hypnotic somnambulism” and “double 

consciousness” (501). The result is that Grace is pardoned (unlike Lady Audley), but also that 

she is pathologized; Grace’s story (and those of the other women in her world) remains 

unheard. There is then, an irony when Verringer writes that: “It moves me to tears to think 

how this poor woman has been wronged through a lack of scientific understanding” (502). 

This points to an inability to see a wider truth, to examine the wider cultural and sociological 

implications of Grace’s story. Darroch points out that:  

Atwood relies on the complicated history of hysteria and feminism as an intertext. 

There is a peculiar pleasure in knowing more than Jordan, the expert, and for post-

Freudians perhaps an additional satisfaction in retracing the common narrative 

trajectory of the ambitious male analyst's misunderstanding of, and overinvolvement 

in, his female patient's story of seduction, violence, and betrayal (114). 

Like Lady Audley and Anne Catherick then, Grace is explained and pathologized by the men 

around her, and yet the suggestion is that she has used this to her advantage. Unlike these 

earlier figures, the implication is that Grace has manipulated her story to suit her needs. 

Grace walks free, and lives to tell her own story, maintaining full narrative control of her 

story, and forcing her listeners and readers to consider questions about the ethics of 

narrating trauma. 

Alias Grace affirms the impossibility of ever healing trauma through literature, and 

explores the ethics of trying to represent it in novel form. Through exploiting her 



41 
 

relationship with Dr Jordan, Grace raises questions about the relationship between the 

speaker and listener; one which implicitly mirrors that between the writer and reader. As Dr 

Jordan listens to Grace’s story, he comes to feel like a voyeur: “She was threading the wet 

end of the thread in her mouth, to make it easier, and this gesture seemed to him all at 

once completely natural and unbearably intimate. He felt as if he was watching her undress, 

through a chink in the wall; as if she was washing herself with her tongue, like a cat.” (105). 

For Darroch, this is a “nod to the ethics of narrating traumatic experience” (110). The reader 

becomes Grace’s confidante as much–or perhaps more–than Dr Jordan, and Grace’s 

awareness of her audience’s reaction to her story cause her to question our own reactions. 

At the end of the novel, for example, Grace writes to Dr Jordan that her husband likes to 

hear stories of her suffering: “...if I add the improper behaviour of Dr. Bannerling towards 

me, and the cold baths naked and wrapped in a sheet, and the strait-waistcoat in the 

darkened room, he is almost in ecstasies” (530-31). Her husband becomes sexually excited 

by these details. Grace shows here her awareness of voyeurism, and her ability to employ 

this: “I could tell when your interest was slacking,” she writes to Dr Jordan, comparing him 

to her husband, “as your gaze would wander; but it gave me joy every time I managed to 

come up with something that would interest you” (531). This voyeurism is enacted in the 

seance scene, the breathless audience watching Grace; their thirst for salacious detail and 

Jordan’s reluctant credulity echoing the reader’s: we should know better than to believe in 

such nonsense, and yet… we want the details, we want to know the truth:  

It’s too theatrical, too tawdry, thinks Simon; it reeks of the small-town lecture halls 

of fifteen years ago, with their audiences of credulous store clerks and laconic 

farmers, and their drab wives, and the smooth-talking charlatans who used to dole 

out transcendental nonsense and quack medical advice to them as an excuse for 



42 
 

lining their pockets. He’s striving for derision; nevertheless, the back of his neck 

creeps (462).  

This voyeuristic element to Alias Grace is familiar to modern day readers, we see it in the 

tabloids, on social media, in confessional literature; this prurience emphasises the 

similarities between modern day culture and Victorian culture. Darroch shares a quote by 

Margaret Atwood: “we cannot help but be contemporary, and Alias Grace, although set in 

the mid-nineteenth century, is, of course, a very contemporary book” (1). Darroch 

contextualises Alias Grace in terms of 1990’s preoccupation with childhood traumas, 

splintered identities and the (un)reliability of memory. This preoccupation with trauma and 

crime is not the only theme or concern that the novel shares with contemporary society—

the focus on female sexuality and bodily autonomy is one that many readers will recognise 

(only recently the pop star Britney Spears claimed that she is forced to wear an IUD to 

prevent her conceiving a baby); and the male characters’ attempts to explain Grace to 

herself smack of ‘mansplaining’.  Through exploring such themes, the novel critiques both 

past and present, and to explore persistent inequalities in the way women are treated, and 

the intergenerational nature of these. As Gutleben and Kohlke point out, “writers (of neo-

Victorian literature) clearly intend readers to make crucial connections between the earlier 

period and our own (11)”. This could be seen to draw the reader closer to our Victorian 

ancestors–to make them seem less ‘other’. For Cox the exploration of traumas in a past 

setting is a form of displacement: “the traumas of the present are obscured, veiled even as 

they are reimagined within a historical setting” (11). Rather than “healing” past trauma 

then, neo-Victorian trauma discourses draw attention to our continued discomfort with 

female suffering, and the associated difficulties in representation. 

 



43 
 

Like Alias Grace, Fingersmith features as its protagonists two women of ambiguous social 

background, both with secret pasts and struggling to break free of the intergenerational 

trauma that haunts them. The novel uses a dual narrative to explore the story from two 

perspectives, but also to relate to the reader in different ways; to hide and impart 

knowledge in a way that allows unexpected twists and turns in the plot.  Sue and Maud are 

troubling figures, even by the standards of modern readers, and Sarah Waters uses the 

Victorian trope of the ambiguous traumatised women to raise very modern questions about 

morality and ethics, identity and hereditary. Both women control and voice their own 

narrative, and use this in their struggle for freedom against a repressive patriarchal system. 

Like Alias Grace, the use of an intimate first-person narrative manipulates reader 

expectation, raising questions about identity, female empowerment (or lack of it); and 

forcing the reader to question their own assumptions about Victorian otherness. 

A thief, brought up by a baby farmer, Sue is trained by Gentleman/Rivers to be a 

lady’s maid to Maud in order to help to convince Maud to marry him so he can dupe her of 

his fortune. Parodying the traditional Lady’s Maid, Sue recites her role to Gentleman before 

leaving for Maud’s home, showing her awareness of Victorian anxieties about the intimate 

and duplicitous nature of the Lady’s Maid: “‘I must wake her in the mornings,’ I said, ‘and 

pour out her tea. I must wash her, and dress her, and brush her hair...I must be her 

chaperon for her drawing lessons, and not see when she blushes’” (40). Sue’s intimate 

narration draws the reader to feel complicit with Sue; our sense of outside, retrospective 

knowledge of the class and gender systems she is playing, and knowledge of the sneaky 

Lady’s Maid role (for example, Phoebe in Lady Audley’s Secret) draw us into her narrative. 

As in Alias Grace, we meet a heroine who is haunted by reader preconceptions and 

Victorian intertexts. Sue is given a dress to wear for her new post. Seeing her, Gentleman 



44 
 

sums up the two-faced aspect of the Lady’s Maid trope in Victorian literature: “It was a plain 

brown dress, more or less the colour of my hair; and the walls of our kitchen also being 

brown, when I came downstairs again I could hardly be seen...Gentleman said it was the 

perfect dress for a sneak or a servant–and all the more perfect for me, who was going to 

Briar to be both”(38). Sue is confiding in us, we feel eager to see what happens next and we 

feel knowing when we meet Maud—as knowing as Sue: “...she was a chick, she was a 

pigeon that knew nothing” (66). When we learn that it is, in fact, Maud who has tricked Sue, 

we are left confused and bewildered—we feel Sue’s anger, for we have been as duped as 

she was: “You thought her a pigeon. Pigeon, my arse. That bitch knew everything. She had 

been in on it from the start” (175). Rosa Karl writes of the participatory nature of neo-

Victorian fiction, the sense of bonding between the reader and the text:  

…apt neo-Victorian readers can, for example, measure their reading success by the 

amount of intertexts or historical (mis)representations they are able to identify. The 

perceived manipulation of cultural capital establishes a state of belonging, a bonding 

between neo-Victorian text and competent reader (43).  

This relationship is manipulated by Waters, as much as Gentleman/Rivers himself has 

manipulated Maud and Sue. A master manipulator, Gentleman/Rivers compares his role to 

that of a writer, drawing the reader into a plot: “‘She will be distracted by the plot into 

which I shall draw her. She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the 

constructions she expects to find there. She will look at you, here, knowing nothing about 

your uncle—who wouldn’t, in her place, believe you innocent?’” (227). Our knowledge of 

Maud’s complicity changes our view of her innocence, so that she too becomes an 

ambiguous figure–we now learn (from Maud) that she is far from the innocent girl she 

appeared to be—her role as assistant to her uncle is far more troubling than Sue (or the 



45 
 

reader) had been led to believe: Maud is, in fact, kept by her uncle and has been forced to 

catalogue and recite pornographic material since she was little more than a child:  

‘Sometimes,’ I say, not looking up, ‘I suppose...that I have been ticketed and noted 

and shelved—so nearly do I resemble one of my uncle’s books...We are not meant 

for common usage, my fellow books and I. My uncle keeps us separate from the 

world. He calls us poisons; he says we will hurt unguarded eyes. Then again, he 

names us his children, his foundlings, that have come to him, from every corner of 

the world...I believe he likes the gross ones best; for they are the ones that other 

parents—other bookmen and collectors, I mean—cast out. I was like them, and had 

a home, and lost it...’ (218).  

Once again, Waters uses the metaphor of the reading relationship to describe her 

characters. Here the word ‘poison’ draws attention to the power of literature to harm 

‘unguarded eyes,’ to influence and mislead. Like Sue, Maud is far from what she seems. As 

in Alias Grace this slippery narration raises questions about the ethics of narrating trauma; 

the impossibility of ever representing traumatic experience in an objective way, unravelling 

it from the expectations and social preconceptions of the reader or listener. 

Fingersmith links traumatic memory to identity. Sue’s background is a traumatic one, 

and her narrative opens with a memory of watching Oliver Twist at the theatre at the age of 

five or six: “I remember a drunken woman catching at the ribbons of my dress. I remember 

the flares, that made the stage very lurid; and the roaring of the actors, the shrieking of the 

crowd” (4). Sue’s strong use of imagery and her fearful reaction invites the reader into her 

world and encourages a sense of identification with her emotions: “...I became gripped by 

an awful terror. I thought we should all be killed. I began to scream, and Flora could not 

quiet me” (4). In this passage we see traumatic memory linked to Sue’s sense of self, of 



46 
 

identity (which turns out to be false): “This is the first time I remember thinking about the 

world and my place in it” (3). Sue believes herself an orphan, raised by Mrs Sucksby after 

her mother (a thief) was hanged for killing a man during a botched robbery. Like Sue, Maud 

has no memory of her mother, yet other characters have filled in the gaps for her, along 

with her imagination. Her vivid description again invites reader sympathy and draws the 

reader into her mind: “I imagine a table, slick with blood. The blood is my mother’s...My 

mother is mad. The table has straps upon it to keep her from plunging to the floor...When I 

am born the straps remain: the women fear she will tear me in two!” (179). This vivid 

imagery and the intimate, confiding tone creates “an analogous community of feeling”, as 

discussed by Gutleben and Kohlke:  

The circulation of trauma described within the novel is meant to generate a wider 

circulation of trauma outside of/beyond the world of the text. This emotional and 

ethical involvement of contemporary readers of neo-Victorian fiction serves as 

another means of securing a continuity between nineteenth-century traumas and 

contemporary experience (28). 

Both Sue and Maud are haunted and troubled by their beliefs about their mothers’ 

backgrounds–their fears are used by other characters to repress and control them: “The 

madhouse. Do you think very often of your time there? Do you think of your mother, and 

feel her madness in you?” Rivers/Gentleman asks Maud (219); “...I know what she would 

feel in her heart—what dread, but also what pride, and the pride part winning—to see you 

doing it now,” Mrs Sucksby tells Sue when she has qualms about the plot she believes she 

about to take part in (47).   These fears also prey on the unknowing reader. Maud does 

seem unhinged, slapping her maid, refusing to eat, insisting on wearing gloves–will she, in 

fact, be driven over the edge? Sue is a thief, and a liar; perhaps she will be caught out, as 



47 
 

her mother was. For all their disguise and the roles they are asked to take on, both women 

seem trapped by the backgrounds which have made them who they are. 

Ultimately, these fears of history repeating itself prove false.  Expectation is turned 

upside down when we learn that it is Sue the Lady’s Maid/sneak who is cruelly duped and 

tricked by her mistress. In a final twist, it turns out that neither woman is at all who she 

seems; both discover they were switched at birth. This ultimate twist to the tale raises 

questions around female identity and exposes insecurities around our sense of self. It turns 

a story of female duplicity into a story of female solidarity and freedom in the face of a 

repressive patriarchal society. There is a heavy price to pay though, in the form of Mrs 

Sucksby’s life, a woman whom both girls have had cause to call mother. Sue watches her 

hanging, and hears the cheers go up: “Now I listened as those hurrahs went up, and it 

seemed to me, even in my grief, that I understood. She’s dead, they might as well have been 

calling. The thought was rising, quicker than blood, in every heart. She’s dead— and we’re 

alive” (525). Mrs Sucksby’s death represents the freedom of both characters, yet also their 

traumatic losses, of their pasts, their histories, their sense of self. Gruss writes that: 

The phantom is ...a personification of the parent generation’s traumatic silence that 

haunts a younger generation who becomes ‘the mere vessel for narratives and 

dramas outside of their control and their time frame’ (Berthin 2010, 18). At the same 

time, the phantom...demands to be heard—it ‘underlines a concealed secret which 

has not come to light as yet, but still has to be acknowledged’ (Arias 2009a, 135). 

(126)  

 In this sense, Sue and Maud have been haunted by the silences of their own parents, but 

also by their Victorian counterparts: such as Lady Audley, and Anne Catherick. In finding 

their voices and their freedom, Sue and Maud speak for all these women. They personify 



48 
 

Freccero’s wavering line between past and present, showing how much has changed, and 

might be seen to have a redemptive role for Victorian literary heroines. 

Chapter seventeen begins: “My name in those days was Susan Trinder. Now those 

days all came to an end” (509). In providing Sue and Maud with the truth about their 

backgrounds and their heritage, they can break free from these beliefs, and from their own 

traumatised pasts. Maud turns to writing pornographic texts to support herself. No longer a 

passive and unwilling consumer, she becomes an active producer. This reflects her changing 

position in the novel, as she is given narrative control of her story: “They say that ladies 

don’t write such things. But, I am not a lady…” she tells Sue (546).  This narrative control 

exemplifies Gutleben and Kohlke’s quote, discussed above in relation to Alias Grace, that 

the act of narration is “performative... an act of generation, begetting the (however partial) 

understanding, transmission, and healing of trauma” (28). It is no accident that Maud’s 

section of the novel, though first person, is written in the present tense, giving the 

impression that she is only discovering alongside the reader. She is not with-holding. In 

contrast, Sue writes in the past tense. The suggestion is that she knows where the story 

ends–and yet it is Maud’s words that the novel ends with: “She (Maud) put the lamp upon 

the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to show me the words she had written, one by 

one” (548). This final line, narrated by Sue, brings an equality to the ending of the story, 

giving Sue and Maud ownership, and bringing a hopefulness to their tragedy. The 

implication is that they might be free to live their own lives on their own terms, where their 

neo-Victorian doppelgangers were not able to do so. Unlike Lady Audley who ends up 

silenced in an asylum, and Anne Catherick in a grave, Sue and Maud walk free, using their 

(unconventional) words to not only tell their own stories but to give them the freedom to 

live a life outside of patriarchal society. 



49 
 

Yet even while Fingersmith appears to offer its heroines the freedom and voice that 

is denied their Victorian counterparts, the text also points to disturbing parallels between 

Victorian and modern culture. Speaking of her neo-Victorian texts, Sarah Waters once 

stated that: 

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s a way of addressing issues that are still very, very 

current in British culture, like class and gender, and submerged sexuality or sexual 

underworlds. Things that we think we’re pretty cool with, and actually we’re not, 

and we keep wanting to go back to the nineteenth century to play these out on a 

bigger scale, precisely because they’re still very current for us. (Sarah Waters, in 

Tuttle, 211).  

Through employing morally dubious heroines and inviting the reader to critique their 

reactions to these characters, Fingersmith emphasises continued inequalities in modern 

gender politics—a persistent refusal to allow women characters to be flawed and self-

interested—and points to these as a continuation of Victorian concerns. Neither Sue nor 

Maud are conventional Victorian heroines. While their histories explain their behaviour, 

both women are at times unlikeable. Early in the text, Sue brazenly states her motives for 

participating in the plot against Maud, with no sense of shame: “...here was my fortune, 

come from nowhere–come, at last. What could I say? I looked again at Gentleman. My heart 

beat hard, like hammers in my breast. I said: ‘All right. I’ll do it. But for three thousand 

pound, not two” (31). Maud is cruel and twisted, as we see when she abuses her maid: “She 

reminds me of myself, as I once was and ought still to be, and will never be again. I hate her 

for it. When she is clumsy, when she is slow, I hit her. That makes her clumsier. Then I hit 

her again. That makes her weep. Her face, behind her tears, keeps still its look of mine. I 

beat her the harder, the more I fancy the resemblance” (203). This self-centredness is in 



50 
 

stark contrast to the Victorian heroine–Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick are both sweet and 

gentle characters; even Lady Audley is innocent and childlike on the surface. Her ultimate 

descent into madness means she must be shut away and punished; Sue and Maud in 

contrast walk free. In the way Fingersmith allows its heroines to embrace their troubled 

pasts, and their ambiguous positions, it shows itself a very un-Victorian book, but also one 

that is radical by modern standards:  

…the male antihero has a well-established history. A villain may tell his own story 

and charm his readers into accepting him as good company, even if they wouldn’t 

want to encounter him in real life… But a female antihero, a true counterpart to the 

masculine figure, someone who acts entirely out of brazen self-interest, who refuses 

to be victimised, and doesn’t conform to accepted moral standards, is still impossible 

for many readers to accept (Tuttle 213).  

Rather than vindicating Victorian literature and its oppressed heroines, Fingersmith and 

other neo-Victorian texts cast a mirror that shows the many parallels between Victorian and 

modern culture, forcing the reader to explore the more dubious and unchanging aspects of 

our own modern world, and our own continued anxieties around traditional Victorian 

themes, such as hereditary and identity, as well as sexual discrimination, and the continued 

difficulties for women in a society that has been shaped around the patriarchal conventions 

that we see so much of the Victorian novel.  

Through using difficult, ambiguous, and even unlikeable women as narrators, neo-

Victorian literature can explore diverse voices from the past, and to take a subjective 

“unashamedly partisan” look at history that other texts might not. For Gutleben and Kohlke, 

this gives neo-Victorian literature an important ethical role:  



51 
 

In this way, neo-Victorian rewritings of nineteenth-century traumas acquire the 

capacity “to speak-for-the-other”. This opening to and concern for the various forms 

of the other correspond closely to Levinas’s conception of ethics as an ethics of 

alterity, in which (or through which) the self – in the case of neo-Victorian fiction the 

contemporary self – is enlarged and enriched by the other and transcends its own 

egoistic limits. Clearly, this form of an ethics of alterity coincides with an ethics of 

justice, or more specifically an ethics of acknowledging past injustices: the doubled 

injustices of literal acts of violence that inflicted untold suffering on others, and the 

subsequent symbolic violence, repeating the offence, of sidelining the trauma or 

consigning it to outright historical oblivion (20).   

This role is a complicated one though, by virtue of neo-Victorian literature’s emphasis of the 

wavering line between past and present, and of the continued wrongs in modern society; as 

well as its intrinsic interrogation of the ethics of narrating trauma, and of the difficulties in 

redeeming past wrongs through literature (Gruss 134). Like Alias Grace, Fingersmith shows 

an awareness of the ethical difficulties of narrating trauma. We see this in the audience 

watching Mrs Sucksby’s hanging, in the lurid details of Gentleman’s death, which seems to 

mirror Sue’s theatrical descriptions of her Oliver Twist experience at the start of the novel: 

“He reached,