t the centre of
Kellie Holzer's book, Trans-imperial Feminism in England and India
(2024) is Marie Corelli's novel, The Murder of Delicia (1896), a text
that fictionalises aspects of Charles Dickens's marital break-up and
critiques imperial patriarchies as epitomised by the renowned Victorian
author. In 1922, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain created a Bengali-language version of the novel,
which enjoyed a fascinating after-life in colonial India, challenging both
colonial and Indian patriarchies. Holzer connects these narratives to
demonstrate how the circulation of women's stories throughout the empire
raised awareness of the trans-imperial nature of gender-based
oppression. In this way, she invites scholars to read "beyond the
Anglophone" (129). Enacting the theoretical principles of widening and
expanding Victorian studies, as articulated by Ronjaunee Chatterjee,
Alicia Christoff, and Amy Wong in their essay, "Undisciplining Victorian
Studies" (2020), Holzer's book is usefully steeped in the cross-cultural
connections of the late-nineteenth century and the ongoing critical
conversations of the twenty-first.
Since its publication, "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" has become a touchstone for inclusive approaches to our field. The essay certainly provides Holzer with a methodology for the kind of comparative work undertaken here. She successfully extends the temporal, geographical, and critical parameters of traditional Victorian studies to put texts into "new constellations," a metaphor taken from Chatterjee et al.'s essay (Holzer 15). In doing so, Holzer makes space for new encounters and new conversations, such as those forged between Catherine Dickens, Marie Corelli, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.
Holzer explains how the legal and imperial contexts of the mid-nineteenth century contributed to Catherine Dickens's experience of marital injustice, focusing specifically on the laws of coverture, according to which a woman's legal rights were subsumed by her husband's upon marriage. These laws, she argues, were subsequently critiqued by Corelli, who fictionalised elements of Catherine's story in The Murder of Delicia. One notable example of this critique is the "misdirected jewels" incident, when Catherine apparently learns of her husband's affair with Ellen Ternan via jewellery that was erroneously delivered to her instead of to the young actress. Unfortunately, as Corelli's novel makes clear, such infidelities without "cruelty and desertion" were insufficient grounds for divorce as women were bound within the oppressive institution of marriage (50). This element clearly resonated with Hossain who produced a Bengali-language version, Delicia Hatya, in 1922. In her so-called "fictive retelling," Hossain critiques Indian patriarchal traditions while also showing the potential for trans-imperial understandings of gendered oppression and modes of resistance (Holzer 71).
Elaborating on the cross-cultural constellations at work here, Holzer's Introduction helpfully sets out Sukanya Banerjee's definition of trans-imperialism as "a key heuristic for a global framework" (qtd in Holzer 3). As Holzer explains, a trans-imperial approach "lets us think 'beyond' the nation while allowing us to attend to asymmetrical relations in a way that a ‘global' analytic obscures" (3). In this case, the asymmetries in question are those faced by women throughout the empire. Nonetheless, Holzer suggests that there emerged gendered solidarities based on a shared understanding of, rather than experience of, different forms of oppression and a desire to challenge and resist trans-imperial patriarchies (11).
In Chapter 1, Holzer elucidates the nature of imperial patriarchies through the figure of Charles Dickens. She brings together biographical, historical, and literary material to argue that the tumultuous events of 1857 crystallised for Dickens an imperial authority in which racist and patriarchal ideas converged. She demonstrates that, in this year, Dickens' marriage declined as debates intensified about the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, and violence spread during the First War of Indian Independence. Dickens contemporaneously published "two fury-filled stories," "The Bride's Chamber," and "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" (Holzer 24). Holzer shows how this literary material evinces Dickens' fantasies of racial and gender violence and demonstrates an increasing imperiousness that Catherine experienced first-hand.
For the most part, Holzer outlines Dickens's imperial patriarchy with careful consideration. Very occasionally though, there are uneasy conflations, such as when she claims that his removal of Catherine to a separate bedroom, and then a separate household, resembled Indian practices of female seclusion: "Charles essentially set up a 'women's quarters' and dictated the terms on which he and his wife would interact" (24). As Holzer acknowledges elsewhere, seclusion cannot be directly mapped onto the practices of coverture, regardless of its devastating effects.
Undoubtedly Catherine Dickens' story, as told here, contains elements of a Victorian Sensation Novel, and it is little wonder that Corelli used aspects of it in The Murder of Delicia. As Holzer notes in Chapter 2, "sensation, a literary mode preoccupied with the dangers of conjugality, became an aesthetic response to shifting ideas of marriage and domesticity in both England and its colonies" (98).
The Murder of Delicia is, in many ways, a typical Corelli novel. The female protagonist is a celebrity authoress bullied by male reviewers and ill-treated by her feckless husband. The extent of his disregard is accidentally revealed in a plot-point that resembles that of "misdirected jewels"; however, in the fictional version, this moment is a turning point for the heroine who subsequently separates from her husband. Building on Sara Ahmed's work (2014; 2017), Holzer situates Delicia as "Corelli's most feminist figure" (48). But Delicia cannot divorce her husband, and her lack of freedom causes her physical and emotional decline, eventuating in the metaphorical murder of the title. Holzer acknowledges that Corelli scholars, such as Nickianne Moody, see this as an anti-feminist ending representative of Corelli's conservative moral code (52). Yet, as Holzer points out, Delicia manages to exercise some economic independence by ensuring her husband cannot materially benefit from her work, even after her death (53). This narrative arc, Holzer suggests, was inspired by Corelli's relationship with her half-brother Eric Mackay who happily relied on her earnings to fund his indolent and self-indulgent lifestyle.
In Chapter 2, Holzer once again weaves together biography, historical context, and literary analysis to build a compelling story. She shows how Corelli's own experiences combined with her awareness of other modes of female oppression, such as those experienced by married women like Catherine Dickens, to inscribe the potential for female solidarity. Holzer even goes so far as to suggest that Corelli links "the subjugation of women in England to the subjugation of other powerless groups" and thereby divests the British Empire of its primary modes of self-justification: benevolent paternalism and the civilizing mission (62). However, there is insufficient evidence here of any kind of colonial critique. Arguably Corelli is more concerned with ensuring better forms of governance, a paternal imperialism that seeks to elevate the condition of women as evidence of a civilised society, than addressing racial inequalities. Even so, as Chapter 3 makes clear, Corelli's conservative feminist critiques appealed to readers in the colonies.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that Corelli gained international popularity throughout the empire. Her books were reproduced (sometimes illegally) for audiences in Australia, New Zealand, America, and South Africa; they were also translated into Japanese, Thai, Urdu, and Bengali. As Holzer shows, Corelli's novels enjoyed high rates of circulation among Indian and foreign readers, and her novels and plays were translated and adapted by Indian writers. Holzer draws on a range of secondary material here to provide evidence of Corelli's reach, citing examples from Stephanie Newell (2002), Brian Masters (1978), and Priya Joshi (2002). It might also be worth noting that Corelli was by no means the only British writer widely enjoyed by colonial readers. Other popular writers, like G. M. Reynolds, were similarly celebrated, translated, and adapted, as shown in recent studies by Mary Shannon (2023) and Sucheta Battacharya (2008). There was clearly a widespread appetite for popular British genre fiction.
Holzer finds that Corelli appealed to Indian audiences specifically for her combination of social critique and moral didacticism. Her virtuous heroines exposed the problems of patriarchy while negotiating different kinds of femininity in ways that spoke directly to contemporary Indian debates about gender reform, Holzer argues. The complexities of women's roles in a changing culture and society featured prominently in Indian women's writing at this time, as Holzer shows through discussion of Hossain's Delicia Hatya and Debi Ghosal's An Unfinished Song (1913).
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was a feminist activist and social reformer.
She is perhaps now best known in the English-speaking world for the
utopian science-fiction story "Sultana's Dream" (1905). Interestingly,
Holzer's focus is on Hossain's lesser-known, fictive Bengali retelling of
The Murder of Delicia. Also discussed in this chapter is Ghosal's
English translation of her own novel
As these translations were part of a trans-imperial circulation of feminist ideas, Holzer argues, they thereby contributed to cross-cultural feminist solidarities while also responding to specific issues arising from the colonial locale. Holzer writes: "Both texts address the condition of women in the context of imperial power relations. Additionally, both translations differ significantly from their source texts as part of the authors' strategy to intervene in patriarchal and imperial ideologies" (72). This chapter makes clear the importance of translation in expanding Victorian studies and paves the way for subsequent discussions of form and genre in vernacular literatures.
Curiously, Holzer refers to the next chapter as an "Interlude'" even though it sets out important literary and historical contexts that paved the way for Hossain's 1924 novel Padmarag, and it is not entirely clear why this material is separated from Chapter 4's discussion of the text. This interim section traces the simultaneous rise of the Bengali novel and the Indian New Woman in the early decades of the twentieth century, folding in the history of vernacular prose fiction in India to show how writers like Hossain amalgamated these tropes to offer new scripts for women's lives. In so doing, Holzer challenges imperialist perspectives of the Indian novel as an imported, and therefore derivative, genre. As Holzer and other scholars have noted, while the New Woman discourse travelled throughout the empire, the genre of Indian New Woman writing is distinct from the Anglo-American literature, emerging as it does from specific networks and local traditions such as purdah and seclusion. The New Indian Woman was, in Tara Puri's words, "not as strident and or sartorially remarkable as the British New Woman, but still an independent, modestly fashionable, and intelligent figure who can hold her own both in the home and the world" (362).
In Chapter 4, Holzer continues to elucidate the debates around feminist reform in colonial India, especially those that influenced Hossain's Padmarag, such as nationalism, sectarianism, revivalism, and anti-imperialism. She also demonstrates that various aspects of patriarchal oppression were shared across England and India; this includes harmful marriage laws and women's lack of education and vocational training (108). But Holzer is careful not to read the novel solely through colonial contexts and Western genres. She also pays attention to Hossain's use of traditional literary elements derived from medieval Vaishnava poetry—particularly the tropes of romantic attachment (anurāga) and separation (biraha)—to explore modern feminist concerns about women's welfare and the dual colonization of Indian women (109).
In Padmarag, the heroine Siddika, flees domestic danger to find shelter in a ‘Home for Downtrodden Women', a safe space for Indian and British women seeking refuge from abusive marriages and families (14). Interestingly this refuge provides sanctuary to both English and Indian women. As the women from various walks of life share their stories, the novel emphasises the power of shared storytelling as a form of/precursor to activism. Holzer argues that, in this way, the novel invites us to reframe white western sisterhoods that are based on a shared sense of victimhood; instead, drawing on bell hooks, she sees these women as united through shared strengths and resources (118). Thus, in both form and content, Padmarag provides a fascinating example of how critiques of patriarchy could transcend the borders of empire (108). In the Afterword, Holzer maps this trans-imperial impetus onto the "renewed obligation of Victorian Studies" to reach beyond national boundaries (125).
Holzer concludes by showing how Victorian marriage laws were emblematic of a system of dominance exercised throughout the empire and that this was evident to women writers of the time. Consequently, she argues, "the trans-imperial circulation and citation of women's stories contributes to the rescripting of women's lives by staging constructive encounters between Self and Other and imagining new constituencies" (125). Perhaps just as importantly, Holzer also insists that such work must continue today, that scholars must tell new and different stories in the hope of improving the quality of all women's lives and remaining relevant in the contemporary moment (131).
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
[Book under review] Holzer, Kellie. Trans-imperial Feminism in England and India. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. ISBN 9781666930054. 160 pages.
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
---. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Banerjee, Sukanya. "Transimperial." Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 925–928.
Battacharya, Sucheta. "G.W.M. Reynolds: Rewritten in Nineteenth-Century Bengal." Humphrey and James eds. G.M.W. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction Politics and the Press, 247-258. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, Alicia Christoff, and Amy Wong. "Undisciplining Victorian Studies." Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org /article/undisciplining-victorian-studies/
Corelli, Marie. The Murder of Delicia. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896.
Ghosal, Swarnakumari Debi. An Unfinished Song. Edited by C. Vijayasree. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Motichur: Sultana's Dream and Other Writings. Translated by Ratri Ray and Prantosh Bandyopadhyay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
hooks, bell. Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics. New York: Routledge, 2015.
---. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, 2nd ed. Boston: South End Press, 2000.
Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
Masters, Brian. Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.
Moody, Nickianne. "Moral Uncertainty and the Afterlife: Explaining the Popularity of Marie Corelli's Early Novels." Women's Writing 13 (2006): 188-205.
Puri, T. K. "Kamala Satthianadhan and the Indian Ladies' Magazine: Women's Editorship and Transnational Print Networks in Late Colonial India." Victorian Periodicals Review 55 (2023): 340-372.
Created 17 November 2025
Last modified 24 November 2025