Clara Reeve

No, not that Clara Reeve--although I suspect we're supposed to have her in mind--but the heroine of Clara Reeve (1975), "Leonie Hargrave's" (that is, Thomas M. Disch's) neo-Victorian romance. Disch's novel strikes me as deliberately unoriginal, in the sense that it cheerfully pastiches a number of Romantic and Victorian narratives: the heroine's voice and some of her predicament owes much to Jane Eyre; the inheritance trick at the novel's core borrows from Gothic and romance tropes; there's some debased Byronism going on (indeed, the primary villain, who thinks he's Byron's illegitimate son, is named "Manfredo"); a character redeems herself at the end by heading off to Australia, as in Dickens' David Copperfield; and so forth. Clara's family tree is comically baroque. The result hovers just this side of high camp, particularly in the heroine's didactic moments and in the almost-hilarious denouement atop Mt. Vesuvius. I never quite laughed, if you know what I mean. At times, the book does make more serious points about the trickiness of memory and narrative, the ways in which individuals try to reimagine their own pasts in order to shape their public identities, but such points ultimately play second fiddle to the novel's confectionary quality.

Unlike more recent neo-Victorian novelists, Disch has no real interest in re-embodying the Victorians. He has some fun with stereotypical Victorian sexual prudery--Clara's total cluelessness about sex fuels a good deal of the plot--but there's none of the insistent materiality you'll find in Michel Faber or Sarah Waters. Similarly, while the marriage market plays a role, Disch doesn't have any interest in Victorian commodity culture or "thinginess." Disch first and foremost targets nineteenth-century literary culture, in other words, instead of its social fabric.