The Victorian and modern eras are known for being a time of great change. Victorian authors focused their works on the social, political, and religious upheaval that the country was experiencing during the period. They felt a strong sense of pride in their country, and there was always a sense of hope in their writing. These views are what draw the modern author to retell Victorian novels; yet, the modern writer removes the Victorian sense of hope and replaces it with the sense of the disillusionment which engulfed their era. In this paper, I examine the concept of intertextuality, the study of transactions between one work and a subsequent work, and use the theory to compare four sets of Victorian novels and their modern reinterpretation. When addressing the novel pairings, I focus on one central theme important to both novels: mental illness in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys; xenophobia in The Coral Island, by R.M. Ballantyne, and Lord of the Flies, by William Golding; domestic servitude in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Reilly, by Valerie Martin; and women’s rights in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
