A. S. Byatt -->reviewed by Richard Tillinghast -->

One of the glories of English fiction in the past few decades or so has been a spate of big novels about Victorian England by some of the country’s most imaginative authors. Though none of these books sets out precisely to imitate Victorian originals, Sarah Waters’s masterpiece Fingersmith is a gripping story that begins among the crime-ridden slums of Oliver Twist. The title of Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White quotes Tennyson’s line, “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white” from his mock-epic, “The Princess,” and the novel enters the milieu of the later Victorians, Trollope, James, Meredith, Hardy, and George Eliot. The American-born Charles Palliser’s...

 

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