Virginia Feito: Victorian Psycho

Overview

Join novelist Virginia Feito for a conversation about her acclaimed novel, Victorian Psycho, and its journey from page to screen ahead of the film’s release.

A murderous Victorian governess, a deeply dysfunctional household, and a Christmas no one is likely to survive: Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho was practically begging to be made into a movie. Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of the year’s best books by The New Yorker and TIME, Victorian Psycho follows Winifred Notty, newly installed as governess at the gloomy Ensor House, who finds herself increasingly preoccupied with her employer’s hypocrisies, perversities, and petty cruelties — while struggling to keep her own decidedly murderous impulses in check. Darkly funny, gleefully gruesome, and wickedly subversive, Feito’s novel turns the conventions of Victorian literature inside out, transforming the dutiful governess into an antiheroine with an appetite for destruction.

Now, with Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs bringing its macabre world to the screen, Feito discusses the pleasures and perils of adapting Winifred’s singular voice for film. Hear her on bringing literary horror to the movies, making comedy out of carnage, and what happens when a character who has lived inside a reader’s imagination suddenly steps onto the screen.