Alison Case’s Nelly Dean (2016): An Exceptional Neo-Victorian Novel?

• Main Author: Isabelle Roblin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2020-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Nelly Dean; Wuthering Heights; servants in Victorian novels; contemporary rewritings; neo-Victorian novels; coquels
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/8399

Nelly Dean by Alison Case (2016) appears to be an exception within the numerous contemporary rewritings of Emily Brontë’s only novel Wuthering Heights. Hypotext and hypertext share the same basic narrator, Nelly Dean who, in the contemporary retelling, writes to Mr Lockwood about ‘the story [she] told [him] over those long, dark nights’, but also about ‘the story [she] didn’t tell’ (2). This could be a typical neo-Victorian ploy to fill in the blanks of the original narrative, centering on the main protagonists, Heathcliff and Cathy. However, it is not so: it is a truly ex-centric stand-alone as Nelly Dean focuses on … Nelly Dean. Even if there are indeed some dark secrets revealed, as well as a pinch of sex and incest (which makes the novel a contemporary one), the secrets are not the ones the readers of neo-Victorian fiction have come to expect. After a brief recapitulation of the usual features of neo-Victorian fiction, I shall dwell on the characteristics that make Nelly Dean a truly exceptional novel within this sub-genre, for now at least, as it may herald a new strand of neo-Victorian fiction.