Virginia Feito’s 2025 novel, Victorian Psycho, is a work of satirical historical fiction and femgore horror. The novel was a national bestseller and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, and Time. Presented as a pastiche of 19th-century literature, the narrative follows Winifred Notty, a governess whose prim exterior conceals a deeply psychopathic worldview. She arrives at the grim estate of Ensor House to tutor the children of the wealthy Pounds family, secretly believing that the master of the house is the aristocratic father who abandoned her. Her arrival sets the stage for a violent and darkly comedic unraveling of the household’s corrupt and hypocritical world.

Victorian Psycho uses its protagonist’s bloody rampage to explore The Normalization of Systemic Violence, portraying her actions as the grotesque but logical extension of the cruelty she encounters. Winifred’s clinical detachment and macabre humor guide the reader through a world built on The Commodification of Human Bodies. The novel viciously satirizes The Absurdity of Class Superiority, exposing the Victorian elite as an intellectually and morally bankrupt class. The novel was adapted to film in 2026, starring Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty, Thomas McKenzie as Ms. Lamb, and Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds.

This guide refers to the 2025 Liveright Publishing Corporation hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, death, sexual harassment and violence, racism, child abuse, child death, gender discrimination, animal cruelty and death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, self-harm, death by suicide, mental illness, illness, sexual content, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Winifred Notty, a governess whose prim exterior conceals homicidal thoughts, arrives at the grim estate of Ensor House to tutor the children of the wealthy Pounds family, Andrew and Drusilla. Winifred harbors a secret obsession: She believes the master of the house, the pompous Mr. Pounds, is her long-lost, aristocratic father who abandoned her and her mother. Her tenure as governess begins with tense interactions; she meets the cruel and insecure Mrs. Pounds, who punishes Winifred for a minor infraction by forcing her to sleep in the dog kennel. Mr. Pounds, a devotee of the pseudoscience of phrenology, is fascinated by Winifred, declaring their skulls to be identical and thus proof of a spiritual kinship. Winifred’s violent urges quickly surface when she takes the children on a walk and, upon finding a deer with a minor injury, bludgeons it to death with a rock in front of them, framing the brutal act as one of mercy.

Winifred’s depravity escalates in a series of shocking and grotesque acts. During a tea party with Mrs. Pounds’s society friends, Winifred is left alone with an infant guest, William Fancey. After she hallucinates an argument with the baby over her illegitimacy, she calmly kills him with a straight razor that once belonged to her father. To cover up the crime, she steals a peasant baby from a nearby cottage, dresses it in the dead infant’s clothes, and returns it to the oblivious mother. She then packages the original baby’s corpse in a doll box and mails it to a nunnery. Her behavior grows more erratic as she vandalizes the family portraits in the gallery, cutting out the eyes to compare them with her own and confirm her lineage. A young housemaid is wrongly accused of the crime and deported to a penal colony. Winifred also develops a predatory obsession with another maid, Sue Lamb. When her advances are rejected and Miss Lamb threatens to expose her, Winifred murders her and hides her body in a secret garret.

The household slowly descends into chaos, which fail to alarm the self-absorbed Pounds family and their various guests. To undermine Mr. Pounds’s affection for Andrew, Winifred orchestrates an “accident” in the stables, provoking a horse to kick out and knock Andrew’s front teeth loose. This incident, combined with Mrs. Pounds’s growing jealousy of Winifred’s rapport with her husband, leads to her dismissal. However, Winifred is permitted to stay through the Christmas holiday to chaperone Drusilla, who has become frustrated with life after a failed romance with an opportunistic painter. In the interim, Winifred begins to terrorize the estate at night. After Winifred kills a young hall boy she mistakes for a portrait in the dark, the terrified guests and servants become convinced that Ensor House is haunted, attributing the strange noises, misplaced objects, and atmosphere of dread to a supernatural presence.

The narrative reaches its bloody zenith on Christmas Day. Winifred confronts Mr. Pounds in his library, revealing her belief that she is his daughter and presenting the stolen, painted eyes of his ancestors as proof. Horrified and disgusted, he vehemently rejects her and orders her to leave immediately. This final rejection causes Winifred to embark on a massacre of the estate. Armed with a meat cleaver and later a crossbow from the house’s armory, she chops off a guest’s hand as she plays the piano, murders another with a mourning brooch, and shoots Andrew and Mrs. Pounds with arrows. When the wounded Mr. Pounds tries to lunge at Winifred with a knife, his daughter Drusilla appears and impales him with a rapier, revealing herself as Winifred’s silent accomplice.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Winifred and Drusilla live among the decaying corpses of their victims. They host macabre dinner parties with the dead, pillage the house, and let the horses roam through the blood-soaked halls. Their reign of terror ends when an escaped scullery maid alerts the police. Upon their arrival, Drusilla stages a scene of survival, tying herself up and tearfully betraying her partner by naming her the sole murderer in the house. Winifred is arrested and put on trial, where she becomes a public sensation. Unrepentant and laughing, she is led to the gallows before a cheering crowd. Her execution cements her legacy as an anti-heroine of folklore, immortalized in the penny dreadfuls that her violent, repressed society so eagerly consumes.