“The Testimony of Love”: The Lesbian Neo-Victorian Novel

The cultural and critical focus on queer revisioning of the nineteenth century has proliferated in the last two decades. This chapter contends that representations of queer women in neo-Victorian media from the last decade (books, television, and film) have developed, in part, a post-Sarah Waters perspective. Such texts interrogate the labels ascribed to queer bodies and sexualities at the level of gender, sex, and performance, challenging traditional categories and divisions of gay/straight, male/female, or self/Other. This chapter first historicises Waters’ contributions and reviews the primary critical perspectives surrounding her work in order to place her work on a continuum of neo-Victorian queerness. This literature review is followed by an examination of the current primary concerns in queer neo-Victorianism, such as identity categories, the relationship between the body, the self, and the outer world, and what can be categorised as “queer.” Finally, in order to exemplify the way these concerns work in practice, Friars presents an overview of queer women in neo-Victorian literature post-Waters and examines three major contributions to the canon that address these concerns: identity in Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music (2011), race in Sara Collins’ The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), and the contemporary queer Gothic in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020).