ABSTRACT
Edith Jemima Simcox’s story collection, Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882), was not, upon publication, a text that scandalized its readers. While many of the vignettes dramatize unrequited love, frustrated passion, and even jouissance, they do so within the conventional frames of Victorian mores. In her private diary, Simcox expressed a canny awareness of the need to encode her queer desire in Episodes. While the queerness of its content was cloaked to Victorian readers, the complete publication in 1998 of Simcox’s diary enables scholars to observe how nonnormative Episodes is. Further, the renewal of queer formalism invites us to retrospectively read the text’s queerness on the level of form as well as content. The text is scandalous once we excavate the queer structure of feeling beneath the normative content in many vignettes. Because of her association with George Eliot, Simcox has become a familiar figure in lesbian historiography, and her writing is typically analyzed in relation to Eliot’s influence. Supplementing the biographical criticism, this essay recontextualizes Episodes as a Victorian manifestation of queer formalism. If we understand scandals not just as public transgressions but as tests of norms, this retrospective reading of Episodes as formally scandalous reveals how Simcox exploited the fragility of Victorian gender and sexual norms and registered objections to compulsory heterosexuality.
