Victorian Vamps

My chat with Joanne Harris (Oxford Lit Fest, last entry) prompted me to dig out an early of hers that I’d never read – ‘Sleep, Pale Sister’ (Transworld), a slice of Victorian gothic that preceded ‘Chocolat’, the novel that made her famous. ‘SPS’ takes for its background the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, and more generally the most sickly, unhealthy and weird elements of Victorian art.

Harris’s fictional artist is Henry Chester, whose passionate love of a young girl brings to mind both Ruskin (mentioned in the novel) and Lewis Carroll. He marries Effie, his prepubescent model, as soon as it’s decent, having used her to inspire many poignant images of abused femininity. Henry is an extraordinary creation, filled with lust and self-loathing, and projecting the blame and shame of his desires on to his innocent wife, whom he subdues with laudanum and oppressive care. More worldly but perhaps no less dangerous is the raffish painter Mose, who also becomes captivated by Effie and drawn against his will into the fraught Chester household.

Effie discovers she can escape from the pressures of Victorian womanhood by a form of astral travel, defying the bonds of flesh entirely. This uncanny ability attracts Fanny Miller, the seductive and calculating madam of a brothel frequented by both Henry and Mose, and a plot is laid to punish Henry for a terrible crime committed long ago. It’s a terrifically creepy story pitting female seductiveness and cunning against male brutality, with twists and turns that culminate in a shocking denouement in Highgate cemetery. A drugged and dreamy narrative of sexual obsession, it’s thoroughly gripping and so steeped in its era that you can imagine every single one of Chester’s fictional paintings.