The Neo-Victorian novel: contemporary trend in British fiction

In 1966 when Jean Rhys wrote Wide Saragasso Sea no one would have guessed that she was starting a new literary movement whose very essence dwelled in re-thinking and rewriting Victorian myths and stories which Sally Shuttleworth named the retro-Victorian novel1. As a matter of fact, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman published in 1969, brought to public attention the parody of Victorian social, sexual and literary conventions2 but it was really in the 1980's and 1990's that many British novelists rekindled the great Victorian tradition.3 Retro- or neo-Victorian novels take up themes, motives, characters - which are either factual, as in Peter Ackroyd's Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, or fictitious, as in George McDonald Fraser's Flashman series. Neo-Victorian novels imitate texts from the Victorian era and in most cases they follow the Victorian narratives structurally, formally and/or thematically.4 These contemporary rewrites of the Victorian texts also seem to imitate the average physical length of Victorian novels in as much as they are often very hefty tomes indeed, something which may be problematic for many readers in the bit/byte generation. Structurally, in most cases the texts are divided into books or chapters, sometimes preceded by chapter summaries or epigraphs. They imitate the most..