Governess in a big house

Vulture has selected the '30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025' and one of them is

Victorian Psycho, Virginia Feito (February 4)

$25

Virginia Feito’s first novel, Mrs. March, illustrated the inner life of a woman folded in on herself with anxiety and burdened by the assumed expectations of others. It was pure psychodrama, a picture of the kind of strangled and cloistered existence that seems to belong to a time before suffrage. So naturally, Feito’s next book is set in the 19th century. Victorian Psycho is a riff on horror-adjacent “governess in a big house” gothic stories like Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw. But with a twist: What if the nanny is a freaking psychopath? The novel is already getting the feature-film treatment, starring Margaret Qualley and Thomasin McKenzie. So read the book now before the paperback gets one of those horrid movie-poster covers. (Bethy Squires)

In the Financial Times, Patrick Grant discusses all things roses.

I’m close to Brontë country, so Rosa Emily Brontë is on the list and, sticking with the literary theme, we’re planting Gabriel Oak, Desdemona and The Poet’s Wife.