Rewriting Victorian Stereotypes: Questions of Female Identity in Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent

Contemporary British novelist Sarah Perry’s pastiche, The Essex Serpent (2016), goes beyond the way women were portrayed in 19th-century fiction in several ways, including their relationships with men. Therefore, it is worth having a closer look at the complexity of female-male relationships represented in the novel. After a brief outline of the social construct known as Victorian marriage, I will examine the three main female characters’ relationships with men, let them be husbands, suitors or, for that matter, comrades. In this way, I intend to prove that these women understand female-male relationships on a spectrum transcending the stereotypical roles offered to them by Victorian society