Julian Symons’s (Neo-)Victorian criminals: “She might be a she-devil, but she looked more like an angel”

Postmodern origin texts such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) continue to frame the terms in which the early neo-Victorian project is generally understood. This essay argues that twentieth-century crime writing offers equally compelling approaches, at a time when ‘Victorian values’ were being reinscribed. It takes Julian Symons as a test case, focusing on his Victorian crime novels The Blackheath Poisonings (1978) and Sweet Adelaide (1980). In both novels, female deviance is mediated through experiments with temporality and place, including the historic murder trial of Adelaide Bartlett, ‘the Pimlico Poisoner”’, and the dynamics of a family who refer to their own aesthetic house as “the white elephant”. Symons’s apparent complicity in ‘giving the public what it wants’ is complicated by the voices of his own Victorian characters.

Due to be published December 2025.