Victoria Cross

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Standard Name: Cross, Victoria
Birth Name: Annie Sophie Cory
Self-constructed Name: Vivian Cory Griffin
Self-constructed Name: Vivien Cory Griffin
Self-constructed Name: V. C. Griffin
Pseudonym: Victoria Cross
Pseudonym: Victoria Crosse
In the course of a forty-year career that began in the final decade of the nineteenth century, the pseudonymous Victoria Cross published nearly two dozen novels, three collections of short stories, and several plays, and saw some of her works adapted for film. Her work, controversial in her day for its treatment of transgressive sexualities and emphasis on physical passion as well as extravagant romance, repeatedly challenges social mores, and gender and sexual conformity. She confronts conventional attitudes towards such matters as race, imperialism, animal rights, and medicine, although not always in a fashion that accords comfortably with twenty-first-century tastes. The moral ambiguity and discomfort provoked by her works—perhaps particularly her representations of race, her simultaneous reliance on and reversal of conventions, and her tendency to cap apparently utopian stories with unsettling conclusions—may explain the extent to which this once immensely popular novelist remains largely unknown.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Elma Napier
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN devoured every book she could get...
Family and Intimate relationships Laurence Hope
Isabel Edith Cory , LH 's elder sister, who was born and died in India, assisted their father with the Sind Gazette and then edited it for eight years after his death. Isabel committed suicide...
Fictionalization Laurence Hope
Hope's subject-matter and reputation have made her the template for a number of fictionalisations and literary tributes. In 1906 O. R. Howard Thompson wrote a poem for The Critic on seeing her portrait, which praises...
Occupation Rudyard Kipling
He worked for five years in Lahore (then in India, now in Pakistan) as assistant editor at the Civil and Military Gazette (to which both his parents contributed and whose editor was Arthur Cory
Residence Laurence Hope
With her education complete at the age of sixteen, Adela Florence Cory (later the poet LH ) travelled to Lahore in India (now in Pakistan) to be with her parents.
Charlotte Mitchell in her critical...
Textual Features Ouida
The collection included essays on The New Woman and Female Suffrage, the first of which provides an oft-quoted passage: there are conspicuous at the present two words which designate unmitigated bores: The Workingman and...
Textual Production Laurence Hope
She assisted her father in his work on the Civil and Military Gazette when the family lived in Lahore, and when he fell ill she (presumably along with her sister Isabel , if not...
Textual Production Hélène Barcynska
A short novel at 40,000 words, it was serialised in The Winning Post (edited by Robert Standish Sievier ) and published in volume form the same year through John Long (a firm which also published...
Textual Production Evelyn Sharp
Lane accepted the novel in November 1894 for his series called after George Egerton 's Keynotes.
John, Angela V. Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869–1955. Manchester University Press, 2009.
13
It appeared on the recommendation of Lane's readers John Davidson and Richard Le Gallienne , with Aubrey Beardsley
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ella D'Arcy
This memoir presents extended word-pictures of Henry Harland and Frederick Rolfe (who satirised her in his Nicholas Crabbe, which was as yet unpublished during her career, but circulating in manuscript). She writes touchingly about...

Timeline

February 1895: Grant Allen published his best-selling novel...

Writing climate item

February 1895

Grant Allen published his best-selling novel entitled The Woman Who Did; it was Keynotes Series no. 8.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002, 2 vols.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Annie Sophie Cory
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Annie Sophie Cory

Texts

Cross, Victoria. A Girl of the Klondike. Macaulay.
Cross, Victoria. A Girl of the Klondike. Walter Scott, 1899.
Cross, Victoria. Anna Lombard. John Long, 1901.
Cross, Victoria. Anna Lombard. Editor Cunningham, Gail, Continuum, 2006.
Cunningham, Gail, and Victoria Cross. “Introduction”. Anna Lombard, edited by Gail Cunningham and Gail Cunningham, Continuum, 2006, p. vii - xxv.
Cross, Victoria. Jim. T. Werner Laurie, 1937.
Cross, Victoria. Life of My Heart. Walter Scott, 1905.
Cross, Victoria. Life’s Shop Window. T. Werner Laurie, 1907.
Cross, Victoria. Martha Brown, M.P. T. Werner Laurie, 1935.
Cross, Victoria. Paula. Walter Scott, 1896.
Cross, Victoria. Six Chapters of a Man’s Life. Scott, 1903.
Cross, Victoria. Six Chapters of a Man’s Life. Macaulay, 1920.
Cross, Victoria. The Girl in the Studio. T. Werner Laurie, 1934.
Cross, Victoria. The Life Sentence. John Long, 1912.
Cross, Victoria. The Life Sentence. Macaulay, 1914.
Cross, Victoria. The Woman Who Didn’t. J. Lane, 1895.
Cross, Victoria. “Theodora. A Fragment”. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Broadview Press, 2001, pp. 70-90.
Cross, Victoria. “Theodora: A Fragment”. The Yellow Book, Vol.
iv
, pp. 156-88.