On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: \u3ci\u3eJames Miranda Barry \u3c/i\u3e(1999) and \u3ci\u3eSophie and the and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance\u3c/i\u3e (2015)

This is the text of the Forty-Fourth George Eliot Memorial Lecture delivered at the Chilvers Coton Heritage Centre on 10 October, 2015. An extended version of this article will appear in late 2016 or early 2017 as an interview/essay in the series \u27anglistik & englischunterricht\u27: Christina Flotmann and Anna Lienen (eds.), Victorian Ideologies in Contemporary British Culture, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag. My first historical novel - lames Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had a very successful and colourful career in remote parts of the Empire. He spent an important period of his life in Jamaica, then a British colony, during the 1830s, taking care of the army garrison stationed on the island to protect the interests of the Crown and put down the numerous slave revolts. The British maintained a regiment there until the island\u27s independence on 6 August 1962. I come from Jamaica: my father was Jamaican and my mother is English. Our house in the Blue Mountains near Greenwich, where the army barracks was situated, had been built by my father on the foundations of the old colonial barracks constructed by Dr James Barry to acclimatize the troops, so that they did not all die from yellow fever upon their arrival on the island . But 1 didn \u27t know that when I began my work on Barry. What interested me was the rumour that leaked out when Barry died in the early 1870s, that he was in fact, a woman. But was he? Which brings me to my second historical novel, Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (Bloomsbury, 2015), which, this time is quite self-consciously written as a NeoVictorian Novel, in awareness that this particular genre has a literary history and an associated, developing body of criticism. Hallucinating Foucault represented two writers, one fictional and the other an historical character, the philosopher Michel Foucault. This time, in Sophie and the Sibyl, I decided to settle my scores with the Victorian writer I most admire, cherish, re-read and adore: Marian Evans Lewes, better known, but never addressed, or described, except in letters, as George Eliot. George Eliot is a textual rather than a lived identity. Oddly enough, Eliot herself, like Barry, although not in the same way, was both man and woman. The magisterial voice of her narrators is often, but not always, masculine. She relished her male pseudonym, while her identity remained secret, and she assumed a male voice in her writing for the Westminster Review. Her writing name has never been abandoned. For us, her readers now, Marian Evans Lewes is never named as the author of Middlemarch. The person who wrote the books is still George Eliot

On Writing Neo-Victorian Fiction: James Miranda Barry (1999) and Sophie and The Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015)

My first historical novel - James Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had a very successful and colourful career in remote parts of the Empire. He spent an important period of his life in Jamaica, then a British colony, during the 1830s, taking care of the army garrison stationed on the island to protect the interests of the Crown and put down the numerous slave revolts. The British maintained a regiment there until the island\u27s independence on 6 August 1962. I come from Jamaica: my father was Jamaican and my mother is English. Our house in the Blue Mountains near Greenwich, where the army barracks was situated, had been built by my father on the foundations of the old colonial barracks constructed by Dr James Barry to acclimatize the troops, so that they did not all die from yellow fever upon their arrival on the island. But I didn’t know that when I began my work on Barry. What interested me was the rumour that leaked out when Barry died in the early 1870s, that he was in fact, a woman. But was he? No one knows what sex Barry actually was. His recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, argues that he was a hermaphrodite.\u27 We would now perhaps describe him as a transgender individual, but we cannot ever know for certain. Whatever he was, he certainly gave a command performance. So my theme was the dramatic interrogation of gender and identity. I decided to create a character that was neither man nor woman, but drew on both roles, sometimes of necessity and sometimes for his own pleasure. I wanted to create someone who was isolated, secretive, trapped inside his own head, and yet absolutely at liberty to be whoever he chose to be. The impulse behind this re-imagining of Dr James Miranda Barry came from my own unease at the roles being offered to me as a woman

Review of Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance

George Eliot\u27s afterlife in adaptations of and sequels to her works is thin compared to those of such contemporaries as Dickens and the Brontes, and similarly the number of novels in which she appears as a character is meagre. True, as early as 1881 the characterization of Theresa in The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford was inspired by the friendship of its author, William Hale White, with Marian Evans in the 1850s, when both lived in publisher John Chapman\u27s house at 142 Strand. Theresa is an idealized character, but recall White\u27s corrective to George Eliot\u27s Life ... by her husband 1. W Cross, in which he laments the absence of salt and spice in the Marian Evans that Cross is carefully recreating. Patricia Duncker, offering George Eliot as the Sibyl in Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance, the latest novel to depict her, goes rather for salt and vinegar. Between White and Duncker there has been a smattering of fictional representations of George Eliot. Some, like J. E. Buckrose\u27s Silhouette of Mary Ann (1931) and Elfrida Vipont\u27s Towards a High Attic: The Early Life of George Eliot (1970), concentrate on the young Marian Evans, up to the point at which she enters into the relationship with Lewes and becomes George Eliot and a published author. Others focus on the relationship with John Cross, which is more susceptible to psychologizing and less to anxious moralizing than that with Lewes. In lohnnie Cross (1983), Terence de Vere White presents an infantilized Cross, overwhelmed by his bride\u27s sexual demands. In one of the episodes of The Puttermesser Papers (1997), Cynthia Ozick allows her heroine Ruth Puttermesser a romance with a painter, a copyist, in which she channels George Eliot and he Cross: the copyist insists that the key emotional dynamic was Cross\u27s infatuation with Lewes, triangulated through George Eliot. Deborah Weisgall in The World Before Her (2008) makes Cross a staid but devoted businessman, and George Eliot more wily and less dependent than in most accounts, fictional or otherwise. Most recently, Robert Muscutt in Heathen and Outcast: Scenes in the Life of George Eliot (2011) employs the novelist\u27s disciple Edith Simcox as presiding narrator, calling on other voices to show a feisty Mary Ann, making central her relationship with brother Isaac (here relentlessly rigid, domineering, vindictive and materialistic)

Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry

publication-status: Submittedtypes: Article© 2012 by Taylor & FrancisSince his death in 1865, military surgeon James Barry has alternately been classified as a cross-dressing woman or as an intersexed individual. Patricia Duncker’s novel James Miranda Barry (1999) poses an important challenge to such readings, as it does not reveal any foundational truth about Barry’s sex. Resting on obscurity rather than revelation, the text frustrates the desire to know the past in terms of gender binaries and stable sexual identity categories. Drawing on feminist and queer theorisations of the relation between gender and time, this essay demonstrates that Duncker’s use of obscurity opens up alternative strategies of gender resistance.The Wellcome Trus