For those with a deliciously dark sense of humour and a taste for the macabre, Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito is an unmissable treat. Set in 19th-century England, this is the tale of Miss Winifred Notty, both demure governess and vengeful murderess. Arriving at her new placement with the well-to-do Pounds family, Winifred tells us that in three months time everyone in the house will be dead. Cue a journey into the mind of a female psychopath in a cleverly parodic novel that borrows brilliantly from Victorian literature (with a nod to Charles Dickens, in particular). This sensationally cinematic book is already in the Hollywood movie pipeline.
Death is lurking everywhere in Victorian England, in the typhoid-tinged drinking water, arsenic green wallpapers, and malnourished babies. It’s also about to take a star turn in Ensor House, a baroque country house of the mounted stags heads and minstrel’s gallery variety. It’s here that Winifred arrives one cold autumn day, to meet her young charges, Andrew and Drusilla.
Andrew is an entitled and obnoxious little gentleman, Drusilla languid and a trifle cadaverous. As for their parents, Mr Pounds appears startlingly keen to practise his hobby of phrenology upon the new governess, whilst Mrs Pounds follows his gaze as it wanders across Winifred’s bosom.
Seemingly content with their new member of staff (after all, her advertisement in The Times did assure ‘an amiable disposition’), the Pounds entrust their children to Winifred’s care, little realising that her heart is full of dark secrets and compulsions.
Sharp, funny, and decidedly offbeat, Feito’s novel explores female psychopathy in a world where many more men are diagnosed with the condition. To spice up an already exciting concept, she places the sarcastic, deadpan Winifred into a historical era whose patriarchal values have confined her to the domestic sphere, whilst also it transpires, tragically blighting and warping the course of her life. Whether this has engendered psychotic tendencies is an interesting question to consider.
Perhaps Winifred has read Jane Eyre. She’s certainly familiar with 19th-century notions of unbalanced women, her covert exploration of the house revealing a secret attic, where, she imagines, ‘the Poundses have stowed their generations of female hysterics through the ages’. Unfortunately, the attic is on course to witness even more disturbing scenes over the coming weeks, as Winifred looks forward to Christmas, and the fulfilling of her death prophecy.
There being nothing quite like a Victorian Yuletide, Feito wittily parodies the Dickensian version with some fantastically vivid description. Christmas dinner guests suck chitterlings from silver spoons, wassail drips from lips to plump cleavages, belches ‘travel up throats, spit-headed maws gnash,’.
At one point, an elderly lady enters the proceedings and Feito delivers the following marvellous sentence:
‘The Dowager, scowling all around, breasts hanging low, one of them resting on her coral cane pommel, the carved cherubs stoically bearing the burden’.
Although Winifred’s secret is signposted fairly early on, the dark pleasure of this story comes from watching her outrageous unravelling in Feito’s humorously inventive, and occasionally eye-poppingly gory novel.
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito is published by Fourth Estate, 208 pages.
