An Immense Quantity of Clever and Thoughtful Rubbish’? Twentieth Century Victorians and the Problem of History

Abstract

The twenty-first century places the neo-Victorian narrator in a dangerously exposed position, operating a text which seeks engagement between an assumed reader and characters with immeasurably different cultural norms. While this location of narrative authority posed similar problems for writers nearly a century ago, the post World War I life writing of late Victorians, such as Mary Cholmondeley's Under One Roof: A Family Memoir (1918), E. F. Benson's As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow (1930) and Netta Syrett's The Sheltering Tree (1939) subtly elude reader expectation. As they renegotiate the terms of fin de siècle ‘rebellion’ in the light of twentieth century assumptions about the Victorian age, each of these narratives seeks to resist or complicate historical appropriations of the 1880s and ‘90s.