Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Feminism

In 1972, Adrienne Rich wrote that re-vision is "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich 1972: 18).More importantly, she claimed that this act, when viewed in retrospect, would present itself as more than just another moment in cultural history, but would distinguish itself rather as an act of survival for women.Most readers of Neo-Victorian Studies will be familiar with Rich's pronouncement, which also contained a call to "understand the assumptions in which we are drenched" and which prevent us from knowing ourselves (Rich 1972: 18).Here again, it is not without significance that, for women, this drive to self-knowledge is necessarily more "than a search for identity: it is part of [women's] refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society" (Rich 1972: 18).These are certainly no small claims, and in the same breath Rich went on to demand that feminist writers, editors, publishers, and academics look differently at the past and recognise that literature, in particular, should be a cornerstone of this cultural revolution.Looking back, she argued, would help feminists of the 1970s to move forward.It is perhaps no coincidence that a similar impulse can be found in the neo-Victorian fiction of that period.Quite famously, in fact, the oft-cited ur-texts of neo-Victorianism, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), both explore Victorian women's limited roles "with fresh eyes".Likewise, Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), in which Atwood adopts the voice of Moodie, a real-life writer and Victorian immigrant to Canada, is another example from this period of re-visionary work that seeks to reevaluate women's roles in the nineteenth century.Neo-Victorianism and feminism, then, have always been related endeavours in a variety of historically determined ways.One example is the neo-Victorian project of giving "historical non-subjects a future by restoring their traumatic pasts to Is the desire to return to the Victorian period "an act of survival" in Rich's terms (Rich 1972: 18), and if so, in what sense?As many of the articles included here argue, for contemporary feminist writers, artists, musicians, performers, and academics, the Victorian period remains an important site of historical re-vision.In part, the sustained interest in the Victorian era as a locus of continued contest and revision hinges on received notions

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