Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Happy Women’s History Month, readers! To begin with, let’s look at an arresting novella about a young woman who refuses to play by the rules of Victorian England, no matter the cost to herself or to anyone around her.

Winifred Notty is a troubled soul. Raised by a mother driven to madness by the intolerable pressures of society and a father who cannot reconcile Winifred’s intractable nature with his own belief in God, she’s made her way from one governess posting to the next, indulging her predilection for gore and violence while nimbly eluding justice. When she arrives at the countryside estate of the Pounds family, it’s with a hidden agenda that she readily hides behind a simpering smile and a dedication to proving herself as agreeable to everyone as she’d advertised when she first began maneuvering for this position.

The ancestral home of the Pounds is inhabited by the phrenology-obsessed Mr Pounds, the self-absorbed Mrs Pounds, the anemic teenager Drusilla and the younger, coddled heir Andrew. In addition to pretending to teach the children skills deemed useful by their social set, Winifred has to balance Mr Pounds’ undue interest in her with Mrs Pounds’ simmering jealousy. At night, Winifred explores Ensor Hall, examining portraits of ancestors and searching for hidden passageways. Through it all, she tamps down the darkness that keeps urging her to bite and to kill, as she waits for the perfect time to launch her surprise for the Pounds, their houseguests and assorted servants, all gathered at the manor for Christmas.

Winifred’s voice is the main thing propelling this tale of rage and vengeance that is by turns delightful, hallucinatory and downright gory. The way she revels in bloodshed and butchery stands in stark contrast to the polite mores that dictate her existence, allowing her to get away with sadistic jokes and bloodstained evidence more often than not. The influence of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho is impossible to ignore, as Winifred and the earlier novel’s protagonist Patrick Bateman share more than just an aptly descriptive book title. Fueled by rage at their circumstances and armed with imaginations that hew to the destructive and intimate, they indulge in the kinds of violence that their immediate circles refuse to countenance, at least until the violence falls directly upon their own heads. It’s a wonderful bit of literary alchemy, as Virginia Feito filters the psychotic impulses of of a male yuppie struggling against 1980s capitalism into the weirdly relatable vessel of her Victorian-era antiheroine.

I especially loved the ending, both as an affirmation of justice and as class and social critique. Winifred might be awful and evil and misguided in her choices, but she seems almost a natural product of a milieu determined to break women and force them to submit to the unjust use of power. If she’s going to be deemed immoral by a hypocritical society, why not just show them what immorality really is? Some people don’t break, after all: some bend and warp and become even more terrifying than the systems that created them, serving almost as a corrective, and certainly a scourge, to an ecology gone out of control. Ms Feito perfectly balances Winifred’s cathartic actions with the ending that seriousness demands, even as she hints at the revolutionary shadow that her protagonist casts. I found this to be a deeply satisfying book about rage and vengeance and the bloody work of being a human woman, whether in the past or the present day.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito was published February 4 2025 by Liveright Publishing and is available from all good booksellers, including