Victorian Psycho

Two of my favorite books are Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw - classic Victorian governess stories - and Victorian Psycho is a new classic for me. It’s much darker than either of those, and while neither of those lacks humor, Victorian Psycho had me literally laughing out loud. The narrator-governess, Winifred Notty, reads (in the Paris Is Burning, insult as art kind of reading) every person she meets, starting with the carriage driver to her new post.

Victorian Psycho is a perfect satire of the classic Victorian governess novels, Feito’s language at once faithful to the style but with a modern cynicism such as when the housekeeper tells Miss Notty that she has given her a small room in the back of the house as she was sure that Miss Notty would “disapprove of the unnecessary finery of the large front chambers.”

Miss Notty is an unreliable narrator, and there are times where we are not sure if what she sees is real or imagined, and she admits that to us sometimes, but Victorian Psycho isn’t about relaying the facts of the story, it’s about showing us through the lens of a disturbed mind the horrors that lie just beneath the facade of the height of polite Victorian society.

And I’m here for it.

Thank you to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review. Pub. date: 2/4/25

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