Neo-Victorianism in John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer: Spectral and Textual Communications

Abstract

The article analyses John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) as a neo-Victorian novel and places it against the backdrop of the multifarious definitions of the term. Like numerous other neo-Victorian novels, Harwood’s narrative revolves around the modern protagonist’s quest into the Victorian past. Gerard Freeman’s amateur research into his family history leads to the discovery of manuscripts authored by his Victorian great-grandmother. Subsequently, the ghost stories that stimulate the protagonist’s interest in an unknown part of his own ancestry are paralleled by his increasing sense of being haunted by Victorian spectres. This article argues that whereas, as a rule, in neo-Victorian fiction communication with the Victorian dead takes place either in the textual or the supernatural realm, Harwood’s novel combines the two modes, mixing the textual and the spectral. The intertextual allusions, epistolary components as well as intersections between the fictional narratives and the protagonist’s experience further obliterate the distinctions between literature and reality, between the living and the dead, between the Victorians and their twentieth-century descendants. It is argued that Harwood’s novel represents an intricate combination of several modes typically employed in neo-Victorian fiction. The essential duality of The Ghost Writer, in which nineteenth-century and contemporary plots run in parallel and occasionally intersect, is another recurrent characteristic of neo-Victorian narratives; however, compared with “romances of the archive” such as Byatt’s Possession (cf. Keen 2003), the protagonist’s repeated encounters with the material and immaterial remnants of the past, rather than liberating him, ultimately entangle him even further in the textual fabric.

Keywords

• neo-victorian fiction
• gothic fiction
• spectrality
• intertextuality
• john harwood