Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Some governesses sing lullabies. Winifred Notty has other plans.

Set against the fog-draped moors of Victorian England, this wickedly sharp novel introduces us to Winifred, newly arrived at Ensor House to tutor the insufferable Pounds children and endure the insufferable Pounds adults. Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes to himself. Mrs. Pounds takes a particular pleasure in punishing Winifred for it. The children are, well — children. And Winifred, beneath her perfectly composed exterior, is struggling.

What follows is a deliciously dark, sardonic descent into the mind of one of fiction’s most compelling new antiheroes — a woman of impeccable manners and deeply impractical impulses. Think Jane Eyre if Jane had considerably fewer scruples and considerably more imagination.

Praised for her “silver-polish sentences and eerie psychological acumen” (Constance Grady, Vox), and celebrated for her debut Mrs. March as “a brilliant debut… [by] a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes” (Sarah Ditum, The Guardian), Virginia Feito has returned with something even sharper, stranger, and more gloriously unsettling.

Brimming with sardonic wit, Gothic atmosphere, and a conclusion that will leave you genuinely breathless, this is the kind of novel you’ll want to read in one sitting — preferably on a grey, stormy afternoon with the door locked tight.

A love letter to Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, and Patricia Highsmith, filtered through a lens that is entirely, brilliantly Feito’s own. Dark, funny, and utterly unforgettable.

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