Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, “Unwomen, " and Femmes Fatales: Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I

Abstract

As Gothic horror stories proliferated in the Victorian era, mad and unreliable narration became a standard device. Somewhat overrepresented, madness has also been a staple of neo-Victorian narratives, regularly featuring hysterical women and mad scientists. Even Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys (1966), arguably the first neo-Victorian novel, seeks to redress the literary fate of the Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic” by reassigning narrative agency. While a frequently gendered revision of lunacy is thus a core concern in neo-Victorian narratives, what is still missing is an analysis of how the stipulation of madness pertains to unresolved issues of unreliable narration, both in cognitive and rhetorical perspectives. This chapter addresses questions of unreliability and insanity in texts such as Nell Leyshon’s The Colour of Milk (2012) and Jane Harris’ Gillespie and I (2011).