3 The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern It brings a fresh psychoanalytical perspective to a text which has inspired many post-Freudian narratives in literature and film. Without giving too much away, I can say that this is a sly and thoughtful “revisiting” of a classic text of the period that succeeds in generating new insights into a story that has become iconic.

The girl is naive and trusting and only gradually does the reader start to work out who the doctor is, and what is really going on. This takes the form of a journal kept by a young servant-girl working for a kindly doctor in late 19th-century London. The treatment of class and sex is far more realistic than anything that either of those writers would have dared. (Great Expectations excepted!) We’re encouraged to make assumptions about the characters that are suddenly revealed as unfounded and we have to re-interpret everything we’ve read up to that point. The world of Dickens is superbly evoked in this vivid excursion into thieves’ kitchens, grand houses, and lunatic asylums, but the great achievement is the brilliant plot twist that is much more like the sort of trick played on the reader by Wilkie Collins at his cleverest than Dickens’s generally clumsy plotting. Here are 10 of the best exercises in the “neo-Victorian” genre which, to varying degrees, don’t merely use the 19th-century setting but exploit readers’ knowledge of the fiction of that period: 1 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

The quincunx palliser