Bourbachokátzouli: A Greek Governess in Victorian England

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In Victorian fiction, the Greek woman often appears as a representation of modern Greece, with the 1821 War of Independence as a backdrop. When the novel A Modern Greek Heroine appeared in 1880, the Morning Post naturally noted that ‘this is not, as might possibly be supposed from its title, the biography of any champion of Hellenic independence, but a novel of English life’ (3). Henry Cresswell, the novel's author, imagined an alternative universe for his heroine. In A Modern Greek Heroine, Bourbachokátzouli has lost her father and connection to her homeland and is haunted not by the ghost of a lost cause but by a man suspected of insanity in a trajectory that brings her to Britain to seek employment as a governess. Cresswell drew inspiration from revolutionary Crete, giving his main protagonist the highly distinctive name of a real-life woman warrior from Sfakia, yet his Bourbachokátzouli is both an unconventional ‘modern Greek heroine’, resenting many elements of her Greek past, and an untypical Victorian governess harnessing the heroic in herself. Employed as a French governess in Britain and received as an untruthful Greek, she discovers heroism in self-abnegation, exposes late-Victorian society's limitations, subverts stereotypes, and finally finds herself in a position of power.