Abstract
Even though earlier -works such as John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman or Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea foreshadow current interest in the Victorian period, neo-Victorian fiction has been defined as an independent genre since the 1990s. More than just examples of historical fiction, neo-Victorian novels engage with and (re)interpret the Victorians with a marked self-consciousness. Thus, they perform a double task: in masquerading as Victorian novels, they raise questions about identity and difference between the Victorian period and the present day, shedding light on contemporary issues as well as providing a vehicle for expressing Victorian taboos, or questioning their (our?) values. The recurrent trope of cross-dressing and masquerade can be understood as a reflection of this duality. The aim of this paper, then, is to explore the use of this trope in the novels of Sarah Waters as a metaphor for the status of neo-Victorian fiction in general.
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