Thackeray's mistress

D.J. Taylor, writer of a recent biography of Thackeray, presents his new book Kept: A victorian mistery, published by Chatto and Windus, in an article in The Indepedent. The article is titled "A passion for the Victorian Novel"

The novel never reached greater heights than in the Victorian period, yet the era is still widely misjudged and belittled. D J Taylor explains why his passion for the Victorian novel lead him to create one of his own. (...)

The plot of my novel Kept, whose half-mad heroine lies concealed in a remote country house while guardian and lawyer plot to defraud her, was suggested by the story of Thackeray's wife, Isabella, who lost her reason after the birth of her third child, tried to drown herself during a boat-trip across the Irish Channel, and spent the remaining 53 years of her life in a state of semi-autism. Without ever knowing it, Isabella inaugurated the whole "madwoman in the attic" tradition of Victorian literature. When Charlotte Brontë dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, a rumour sped round literary London to the effect that the novel was a roman à clef, with the author as the heroine, Thackeray as Mr Rochester and Isabella the wild-eyed dement upstairs.

Kept is also a kind of homage to the "voices" of Victorian literature that have haunted me ever since I started reading Victorian novels. (...)

Categories: In_the_News, Books, Charlotte_Brontë, Jane_Eyre