Riffs and remakes are the subject of Cora Kaplan's Victoriana, five essays on contemporary fiction, biography, criticism, and film that deal with the legacy of Victorian writing. While definitions and labels of what constitutes an encounter with Victorian culture may vary, Victoriana has, by any yardstick, become a sizable body of work. Kaplan does not attempt anything like a survey; her choices are eclectic, even idiosyncratic, and may leave some readers disappointed that their favorite neo-Victorian novel or film is omitted. What interests Kaplan is the affective investment involved in appropriating Victorian narrative forms, beliefs, and histories. She is insightful, unsparing, and especially trenchant in pointing a finger at current political contexts that reveal the many ways in which the Victorian past rouses and serves us. At times, Victoriana fulfills the function of whistle-blowing: “Houseproud but slatternly Britain deliberately sweeps [her less than glorious historical moments] under the carpet, leaving the task of retrieving these key moments in its hidden history of Empire to its novelists” (161). But in blowing the whistle on the past, we may also unwittingly draw attention to our own problems and ideological blind spots. Throughout this book the appropriation of the Victorian past for an array of present purposes is shown to be a rich, troubling, and complex business.

Victoriana is never simply nostalgic or innocent. It may seem uncannily atemporal, but Kaplan is everywhere alive to its cultural work, helping to constitute the way we live now, what Kaplan calls “this time—yours and mine—of late Capitalist modernity” (6). As the phrase “yours and mine” suggests, Kaplan does not exempt her own complicated investment in Victorian culture from critical scrutiny, likening herself to “a stick of Brighton Rock” written through with the contradictions inscribed on her critical encounters (5). Stock-taking and reflective about her own situatedness and political allegiances, Kaplan's essays have obviously been written over a period of some time—on one occasion the author refers to herself as “this late-twentieth century Londoner” (112). The Brighton Rock pattern one discerns running through Kaplan's work is a commitment to feminism and questions of class—the stratifications, inequalities, and clashes of the class system—which she regards as possibly the most significant aspect of the nineteenth-century's legacy to modern Britain.

The first chapter, “Jane Eyre and Her Critics,” explores Brontë's text as a lightning rod for diverse critical energies from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar to Gayatri Spivak and Nancy Armstrong. Once a cult text for second-wave feminism in the 1970s, Jane Eyre became a “much more tarnished and controversial cultural emblem of Western feminism's ambiguous political legacy” capable of amplifying the “dissonances within and among contemporary feminisms” (17). Concluding her discussion of the high degree of affect in Jane Eyre criticism, Kaplan turns briefly to the “bulging archive” of imitation, pastiche, spin-off, and look-alike, focusing on only one example: Paula Rego's unsettling illustrations of the novel, which do seem wonderfully to exemplify Kaplan's main point—that emotion “circulates” among the text, its audience, and interpreters and cannot be pinned down on any one of these exclusively (34).

The current ascendancy of biography is the topic of a subsequent chapter, where it is figured as the return of the repression of late-twentieth-century-theory's “death sentence on both authors and subjects” (37). Memorable here is the tart appraisal of Peter Ackroyd's Dickens, which despite its hagiographic orientation to its subject is shown to reveal the envy and competitiveness of the biographer: “Within Ackroyd's creepily adulatory tone one can hear the hiss of a peculiarly rivalrous subtext” (57). Turning her attention to Jamesiana, a robust subspecies of Victoriana, Kaplan considers the efflorescence of James as a subject in contemporary biofiction, discussing mainly Colm Toibin's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author, and, more briefly, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Both Toibin and Lodge display a fascination with James's dedication to the writing life, both focus on the humiliation of James at the opening of his play Guy Domville in 1895, and both deal with questions of James's sexuality. Rather more appreciative of Toibin's work, Kaplan points out that if James erred in thinking he could write for the theater, Lodge, an otherwise successful novelist, errs too in thinking he can write “biofic” (68). Toibin's more subtle and open approach outclasses Lodge's bossy dismissal of James's queerness.

A chapter on historical fictions begins with that early and staple exemplar of the neo-Victorian novel, John Fowles's French Lieutenant's Woman, unpacking what is at stake in the ambivalent representation of the enigmatic Sarah Woodruff. The unbridgeable psychic gap between Charles (and the narrator) and Sarah in the novel is prescient, Kaplan argues, of the second wave of the Women's Movement. She also explores the use of literary theory in Fowles's novel, A. S. Byatt's Possession, and Lodge's Nice Work, developing an argument about the relation of the academy to the reading public in the context of changes in higher education in Britain in the 1980s. Other highlights in the book are the sections on Sarah Waters's lesbian historical novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, and on Jane Campion's The Piano, which has a rich and detailed chapter devoted entirely to it.

The scant “Afterword—The Empire at Home” left this reader wishing the discussion of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs had been more fully developed. Concluding with a perceptive analysis of racism and Englishness in Julian Barnes's Arthur and George, Kaplan unmasks Barnes's desire for an unraced and chosen British national identity. She measures this ideal against the realities of a post-9/11 world of contracting civil rights, where coercion rather than choice may be dominant in constructing Englishness. This is a timely book that crackles with critical intelligence. If Kaplan is intent on exposing the political implications of neo-Victorian texts, her analyses are always nuanced and psycho analytically astute. The product of a mature and assured literary sensibility, these essays make for a provocative and pleasurable reading experience.