Whatever people make of Virginia Feito’s new book, a scabrous, morbidly funny murder ballad, they can’t say they weren’t warned. Thanks to several instances of real and imagined violence to men, women, children and babies – not to mention a deer, a duck and three whippets – Victorian Psycho lives up to its name, and to the first sentence of its prologue: “Death everywhere.”
“It’s not like a surprising twist that builds slowly over the pages,” the 36-year-old Spanish writer says of her second novel. “You know where we’re going from the very start.”
Feito’s debut, Mrs March – which explored a wealthy, Upper East Side woman’s descent into suffocating paranoia – earned comparisons to Patricia Highsmith and Daphne du Maurier. Like its predecessor, Victorian Psycho is written in English and has already been snapped up for a screen adaptation. But it is, quite deliberately, a radically different book.
The novel, whose title is a hat-tip to both Bret Easton Ellis and the 19th-century literature Feito grew up on, chronicles the homicidal thoughts and deeds of Winifred Notty, a governess who arrives at a remote country house in Yorkshire with rather more than the imparting of a traditional education in mind.
“Ever since I was little, I’ve loved gothic horror and I think there’s a lot in the children’s literature that I was reading from a very young age, like The Secret Garden,” says Feito in the flawless English that is the product of her time in an American school in Paris and a British school in Madrid. “That book starts with a cholera epidemic that’s killed everyone and Mary is alone in her bungalow in India, which is the most gothic thing I’ve ever read. And then there’s a bit of gothic in Roald Dahl, who is a huge inspiration – especially his short stories.”
Feito also loved the Brontës and Dickens, but with Victorian Psycho, she says, she wanted to creep into the darker recesses of the 19th century. So parts of the book are inspired by the crimes of killers such as Constance Kent, who slit the throat of her half-brother and threw his body down a privy, and Amelia Dyer, the “baby farmer” thought to have murdered as many as 400 infants placed in her care.
If her debut was a deeply disturbing satire on social conventions, Feito turns up the volume in the new novel, “because it was fun, but also because they did drip belladonna into their eyeballs!” (A poisonous Victorian beauty hack to make your pupils dilate.)
“It’s not that I was limiting myself with Mrs March, but this one felt like it had to be a rage,” says Feito. She notes that the new book’s publication comes at a time when issues of female anger and physicality are being explored in films such as Titane and The Substance. Victorian Psycho plays with the era’s demure Angel in the House stereotypes by giving the reader a protagonist without inhibitions, filters or limits.
“I guess I was kind of poking at that: what if the evil psychopath were female this time?” she says. “What does that mean? And will readers justify her because she’s female?” Feito wants to see how far she can push things before the reader begins to lose sympathy for the abused and vengeful Notty.
Today’s culture, she argues, seems to have lost its fear of psychopaths, with some – such as TV serial killer Dexter Morgan – even moving from antihero to hero. “You root for them because you secretly want them to get revenge against the people who wronged them,” says Feito. “I wanted to avoid that. Sure, you can feel empathy because Winifred has had an awful childhood, but I’m very explicit about the violence she’s committing against children.”
All of which raises a question: isn’t she feeding the reader’s appetite for Grand Guignol and depravity – only to reproach them for gobbling up all the gore? Feito laughs and pretends to scold one of her readers: “You love it, you sick fuck!” But she admits she is equally guilty. “I watch loads of true crime, freaking out over shows like Monster by Ryan Murphy. It’s fun and I sit there cheering them on. But then I’m like: ‘Eurrgh! What’s wrong with us? Why are we so morbid? These are real people who died.’”
Feito, who studied English and drama at Queen Mary University in London, says it was always inevitable that she would write in English rather than Spanish. The four years she spent at the American school when the family moved to Paris for her father’s work proved formative. “I was reading and writing and speaking at school and watching television in English because I didn’t understand French very well,” she says. “So I clung to English and I found that I took to it really, really well. You can almost add an ‘-ing’ to anything and it’ll exist, probably. And if not, nobody will be mad. It’s so much more playful.”
These days Feito says she is intimidated by her native tongue and doesn’t understand its rules very well. She was delighted to turn down the offer of translating Mrs March into Spanish herself – “I couldn’t; I would have destroyed it” – and, besides, writing in English also offers the opportunity for some entertaining back and forth with her translator, Gemma Rovira. “It’s always fun to get these emails, like: ‘When you’re slashing the baby’s neck, is it penetrating the skin or is it going around it?’”
More seriously, it allows Feito to read her own work from a distance. “It transforms it. It’s another animal, so to speak,” she says. “I see myself in there, but then there are other things that make me sound way smarter, which I appreciate very deeply.”
With Mrs March being developed for the screen by Elisabeth Moss, and a film of Victorian Psycho, starring Margaret Qualley, also on the way, she has no regrets about her decision to leave a job in advertising a few years ago to write full time. Now she is thinking about her third novel, listening out for another arresting narrator.
“When I started Mrs March, I had a few other ideas that were much more developed and I knew where they were going,” she says. “But I chose Mrs March because of the voice.” It was the same with Winifred. “It came to me in the middle of the night and it’s at the beginning of the book, where she says, ‘My breasts jiggling in my corset.’” With that one line, Feito had her protagonist and knew exactly who she was. Given Victorian Psycho’s body count, carnage and general air of barely corseted ultraviolence, does she see it as a feminist, revisionist take on the 19th-century novel? As a parody? A homage?
“I think it’s all those things,” Feito says. “It’s an ode to the Victorian literature that I love so much but it’s also subverting it. To be fair, there was a lot of death and violence and the grotesque in Dickens. But he ended it in a hopeful way and he didn’t delve into the most graphic aspects because readers weren’t really ready. But I think we’re ready now.”
• Victorian Psycho is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
