Focusing on East Lynne (1860–61) and Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864) and referring to Victorian advice manuals for pregnant women, this article argues that Ellen Wood centered pregnancy and childbirth as critical experiences of women's lives. In East Lynne, Isabel gives birth to her first child in a difficult labor that nearly kills her; her future adultery originates in the lying-in room; and the final section heightens Isabel's torture as she witnesses Barbara's second pregnancy. Lord Oakburn's Daughters reuses elements of East Lynne while intensifying its focus on pregnancy, postpartum vulnerability, and lying in. The novel opens with an explicit childbirth scene; its murder plot is set in the lying-in room; and its central metonym, a locket, stands for women's bonds established during childbirth. While pregnancy and childbirth are thought to have remained largely unrepresented in Victorian fiction, both novels use contemporary vocabulary and codes to represent these experiences. Moreover, Wood created her particular brand of gestational sensation by featuring women in white as figures of maternal loss, longing, and postpartum trauma. Studying these novels thus not only provides evidence of how Wood represented pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal feeling but also models a narratological method for analyzing such representations in mid-Victorian fiction generally.

This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's 1884 science fiction novel, Flatland, engages Victorian theological debates about the dimensionality of spiritual beings to reexamine the epistemological relationship between readers and literary characters. Liberal theologians at the fin de siècle turned to mathematical models of higher dimensions to reconcile the existence of immaterial spirits with a rational framework. Abbott's novel, set in a ghostly plane world populated only by polygons, imagines characters as analogous to spiritual forms in both their immateriality and their resistance to empirical modes of perception. Yet where theologians turned to higher dimensions to render immaterial entities scientifically knowable, Flatland uses its protagonist's higher-dimensional explorations to defamiliarize realism's techniques for making characters knowable—specifically, its spatialization of characters as beings with an accessible, dimensional interiority that grants readers a feeling of omniscience. Dismissing this omniscient relation to character as a posture that invites a dangerous epistemological complacency, Flatland uses its dimensional conceit to dramatize instead the strenuous imaginative work a reader must perform to temporarily inhabit a character's limited perspective—work that Abbott conceives as uniquely theological. For Abbott, theology thus acts not as a discourse of certainty and doctrinal closure but rather as a vital imaginative resource for rethinking fictional form.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) offers the reader fantastical versions of two seemingly realistic office technologies: shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries. In both cases, Stoker’s changes allow the reader to see varieties of spoken language in ways that the real technologies would not have allowed. Representing dialect through shorthand, as Mina Harker does, would have been impossible with Pitman shorthand as well as antithetical to the principles behind that writing system. And no books existed that could have enabled the translations that Jonathan Harker claims to make with his polyglot dictionary. However, Stoker uses standard English spelling when representing characters of higher status, such as Van Helsing, Morris, and Dracula, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The novel therefore exhibits two contrary tendencies: Stoker uses nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and he avoids it when he could easily have used it. We place that contradiction in Victorian debates about spelling reform and language purity. We argue that the novel uses standard spelling to reinforce an alliance of Anglo-Teutonic elites, whereas the heteroglossia and polyglossia of these language technologies undermine that trajectory.

This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn, through representations of late Victorian gardeners, Silko suggests that British horticulture was also informed by colonial and capitalist ways of thinking about plants. At the same time, however, the novel locates an animistic strain running through Victorian gardening discourses, which I demonstrate through readings of Victorian garden books depicting plants as agentic and enspirited. Silko, I argue, invites us to revisit the late nineteenth century as characterized by a cultural revival of animistic thought, even as this period also saw the racist stigmatization of animism in the field of Victorian anthropology. I connect this fraught discursive moment in British history to an inherited hesitation toward animism in contemporary Victorian studies and ecocriticism, a hesitation that has contributed to uneven engagement with Indigenous thought in both fields. In response, this essay explicates and emulates Silko's critical methodology for an undisciplining engagement with animism in white-authored, ecocritical Victorian studies.

In the epilogue to Serial Forms, Clare Pettitt identifies key elements of the “form” she investigates in her massively detailed, deeply original study: