ON WRITING NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION

This essay revisits the founding texts of Neo-Victorian fiction: John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) and A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance (1990) in the context of a reassessment of an ever-expanding genre in contemporary commercial fiction. I approach the peculiar phenomenon of Neo-Victorian fiction as a novelist, as well as an academic, and I interrogate the forms, registers, and methods of the contemporary novels through the spectral presence of canonical texts of Victorian fiction. Fictions by the Bronte " s, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens are among the works discussed. Particular attention is paid to the role of the omniscient narrator, the use of double narratives, and the problems of endings. The relationship between the writer and the reader in Victorian and Neo-Victorian fictions therefore informs the discussion throughout.