Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. This novel isn’t just aware of all this it gleefully writes it into the plot. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line.

In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.įor my part – well, I won’t lie. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented.

1998 novel by sarah waters