Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

England 1800s, Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to begin her position as a goveness. She tries her best to be the dutiful teacher her role requries but the longer she has to put up with the houses’s dreary interior, the dour Mrs Pounds, who clearly dislikes her and the lecherous master of the house, the more her sanity is tested.

Feito glorious and bloody dark comedy shares comparisons with Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, with the main protagonists struggling to keep their homicidal alter egos from breaking to the surface but failing miserably. And often we can sympathise with Winifred who has the job of dealing with two rather precocious and unpleasant children and the detestable mistress of the house. There were several times,that I wanted to grab hold of a nearby poker and swing it violently around my head. 

Victorian Psycho is Jane Eye gone mad, though Winifred really has very little in common with the meek and humble Jane, bar the fact that the pair share a job title. Gradually we realise that Winifred is on a mission, she has hatched a plan and has wormed her way into the lives of the despicable Pounds family for a reason. 

As the novel progresses so does Winifred mental state and it becomes horribly apparent that she will be unable to keep herself from holding back the madness within. There is a interesting back story in Winifred’s own childhood, which would make an excellent novel in itself and perhaps explains the governess’s unhinged thoughts. Though I also feel the novel also explores the social divide in Victorian society and how the social classes often treated those that served them.

Feito uses language in a macrabre way and even the most mundane sentences would not be out of place describing a gory murder scene. 

So, if you like your Victorian fiction dark, dripping with malevolent prose and your heroine ready to scoop out the eyeballs of anyone who gets on her wrong side, then Victoria Psycho is certainly the novel for you. The most fun I’ve had for a long while!