# ‘What’s wrong with us?’ : Novelist Virginia Feito on our morbid obsession with true crime

  


Any time I watch true crime, I see them all together, and I wonder if I might be getting a little morbid. The screams and the gasping; the kids that get crushed and the adults that get cut open. But then I’m like: Eurrgh! Why are we so morbid? These are real people who died, and their loved ones, and their friends. I just want to find out what happened. I want to find out if I was right to think she was a monster, or if she was really just a child. There was a lot of violence, of course, but I was also interested in what happened to the people who were killed. I wanted to know who killed them and why, and what they had done before they died.

This was the inspiration for Virginia Feito’s debut novel, Mrs March, which explored a wealthy, Upper East Side woman’s descent into suffocating paranoia. Like her predecessor, the novel is written in English and has already been snapped up for a screen adaptation. But it’s a radically different book.

The novel, whose title is a hat-tip to both Bret Easton Ellis and the 19th-century literature Feito grew up on, chronicles the homicidal thoughts and deeds of Winifred Notty, a government agent who arrives at a remote country house in Yorkshire with rather more than the imparting of a traditional education in mind. “Ever since I was little, I’ve loved gothic horror and I think there’s a lot in the children’s literature that I was reading from a very young age, like ,” says Feito in the flawless English that is the product of her time in an American school in Paris and a British school in Madrid. “That book starts with a cholera epidemic that’s killed everyone and Mary is alone in her bungalow in India, which is the most gothic thing I’ve ever read. And then there’s a bit of gothic in Roald Dahl, who is a huge inspiration – especially his short stories.”

Feito also loved the Brontës and Dickens, but with Victorian Psycho, she says, she wanted to creep into the darker recesses of the 19th century. So parts of the book are inspired by the crimes of killers such as , who slit the throat of her half-brother and threw his body down a privy, and , the “baby farmer” thought to have murdered as many as 400 infants placed in her care.

If her debut was a deeply disturbing satire on social conventions, Feito turns up the volume in the new novel, “because it was fun, but also because they did drip belladonna into their eyeballs!” (A poisonous Victorian beauty hack to make your pupils dilate.)

“It’s not that I was limiting myself with Mrs March, but this one felt like it had to be a _rage_,” says Feito. She notes that the new book’s publication comes at a time when issues of female anger and physicality are being explored in films such as  and . Victorian Psycho plays with the era’s demure Angel in the House stereotypes by giving the reader a protagonist without inhibitions, filters or limits.

“I guess I was kind of poking at that: what if the evil psychopath were female this time?” she says. “What does that mean? And will readers justify her because she’s female?” Feito wants to see how far she can push things before the reader begins to lose sympathy for the abused and vengeful Notty.



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### I watch loads of true crime. I sit there cheering them on. But then I’m like: Eurrgh! Why are we so morbid?

Today’s culture, she argues, seems to have lost its fear of psychopaths, with some – such as TV serial killer Dexter Morgan – even moving from antihero to hero. “You root for them because you secretly want them to get revenge against the people who wronged them,” says Feito. “I wanted to avoid that. Sure, you can feel empathy because Winifred has had an awful childhood, but I’m very explicit about the violence she’s committing against children.”

All of which raises a question: isn’t she feeding the reader’s appetite for Grand Guignol and depravity – only to reproach them for gobbling up all the gore? Feito laughs and pretends to scold one of her readers: “You love it, you sick fuck!” But she admits she is equally guilty. “I watch loads of true crime, freaking out over shows like ). It’s fun and I sit there cheering them on. But then I’m like: ‘Eurrgh! What’s wrong with us? Why are we so morbid? These are real people who died.’”

Feito, who studied English and drama at Queen Mary University in London, says it was always inevitable that she would write in English rather than Spanish. The four years she spent at the American school when the family moved to Paris for her father’s work proved formative. “I was reading and writing and speaking at school and watching television in English because I didn’t understand French very well,” she says. “So I clung to English and I found that I took to it really, really well. You can almost add an ‘-ing’ to anything and it’ll exist, probably. And if not, nobody will be mad. It’s so playful.”

[](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/11/femgore-romcoms-womens-fiction-romantasy-genre)

### It’s an ode to the Victorian literature that I love so much, but it’s also subverting it

“When I started Mrs March, I had a few other ideas that were much more developed and I knew where they were going,” she says. “But I chose Mrs March because of the voice.” It was the same with Winifred. “It came to me in the middle of the night and it’s at the beginning of the book, where she says, ‘My breasts jiggling in my corset.’”

With that one line, Feito had her protagonist and knew exactly who she was. Given Victorian Psycho’s body count, carnage and general air of barest corseted ultraviolence, does she see it as a feminist, revisionist take on the 19th-century novel? As a parody? A homage?

“It’s not that I was limiting myself with Mrs March, but this one felt like it had to be a _rage_,” says Feito. She notes that the new book’s publication comes at a time when issues of female anger and physicality are being explored in films such as  and . Victorian Psycho plays with the era’s demure Angel in the House stereotypes by giving the reader a protagonist without inhibitions, filters or limits.

“I guess I was kind of poking at that: what if the evil psychopath were female this time?” she says. “What does that mean? And will readers justify her because she’s female?” Feito wants to see how far she can push things before the reader begins to lose sympathy for the abused and vengeful Notty.

### Victorian Psycho is published by 4th Estate.

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