The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski

Happy Persephone Week, everyone! In case you’re going “huh?”, Persephone Week is being hosted by Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files, and the goal is to read and celebrate Persephone Books, a publisher of neglected and forgotten twentieth-century classics, most by women. This morning, I read my very first Persephone. And no, I didn’t pick it because it happens to the shortest book on the Persephone catalogue, but rather because Claire recommended it to me, and because I can’t resist the words “Victorian” and “time-travel”. Of course, the fact that I finished it in a little over an hour was a plus.

Originally published in 1953, The Victorian Chaise-Longue is the story of Melanie Langdon. Early in her pregnancy Melanie was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but thanks to the care of her doctor both she and her child are doing okay. But she hasn’t been allowed to leave her bedroom in months, nor to touch the baby since its birth. The book opens with good news for Melanie – as she’s beginning to recover, she is to finally leave her bedroom and be moved to the living room.

There, she falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue she found at a vintage furniture store. When she wakes up, she realizes she has been transported from the 1950’s to the 1860’s, into the body of someone by the name of Milly Baines. Sounds just like a nightmare, right? But try as she might, Melanie can’t wake up.


The Victorian Chaise-Longue is a chilling, atmospheric and suffocating novella. Melanie’s helplessness and entrapment felt all too real, and it was easy to transport the emotions she was experiencing to things other than being stuck in the past. I want to share a passage that, to me, is at the core of what this story is about. Addressing Milly in her thoughts, Melanie says:

We seem to be together now, she explained, you and I, both hopeless. I think we did the same things, she told her, we loved a man and we flirted and we took little drinks, but when I did those things there was nothing wrong, and for you it was a terrible punishable sin.

As we read on, we (along with Melanie herself) find out more about Milly’s life: why her sister treats her with such contempt, why the Vicar keeps asking her if she doesn’t want to confess, why everyone acts as if the illness that is killing her is a just punishment. The things Milly is supposedly guilty of are all things Melanie has done herself. The two women are in fact very similar, but in Milly's time, her circunstances were enough to turn her into someone who was hopeless and pitiable in the eyes of some, and wicked and despicable in the eyes of others.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue's greatest strength is that it brings the weight of history to life. The device that it uses to place someone with twentieth-century sensibilities in the past is effective (though I have no doubt that a similar novella could be written today with a woman going back to the 1950's, and optimistically I believe that the same will be true in fifty year's time). As a result, readers get to truly feel the oppressiveness of Victorian sexual mores.

This is a fantastic and very unsettling book, and my first experience with Persephone was most definitely a successful one. I thought I’d leave you with the covers to a few other editions of the book – unsurprisingly, they’re a lot more dramatic than the sober Persephone cover, but what I thought was interesting is how they seem to change the reader’s expectations of the book:


I actually like them, though, especially the middle one. What do you think?

Favourite bits:

She said, Perhaps Milly Baines died here. Then – Milly Baines must surely be dead now, she said blankly, Milly and Adelaide and Lizzie, all dead and rotten long ago. This body I am in, it must have rotted filthily, this pillowcase must be a tatter of rag, the coverlet corrupt with moth, crisp and sticky with matted moths’ eggs, falling away into dirty crumbling scraps. It’s all dead and rotten, the barley-water tainted, the nightgown threadbare and thrown away, these hands, all this body stinking, rotten, dead. She shuddered, and knew she was shuddering in a body long ago dead.

I have got to prove myself to Mr. Endworthy, prove that I really come from the future. I should know what is just going to happen – but what is? If I was one of those educated women, she thought angrily, an old resentment, long buried in marriage, rearing its head again. I know what the Victorian age was like, of course I do, except that being here, it isn’t like that at all.

Other Opinions:
A Book A Week
Farm Lane Books
Green Road Books

(Did I miss yours?)