The Cosmopolitan Wife: (Self-)erasure and (Self-)empowerment of Isabel Burton and her Neo-Victorian Representations

Abstract

Isabel Burton, née Arundell, was a model cosmopolitan wife to her famous explorer husband Richard Francis Burton for thirty years. Yet, two pieces of twenty-first-century neo-Victorian Burton-biofiction –  The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder – write her clean out of their core narratives. Having explored these conspicuous absences, my article turns to the historical Lady Burton's life writing, focussing on The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, in which she narrativizes the couple's transnational lives. Two of its stylistic devices are discussed in detail – paratexts and the peculiar use of first-person narration – in order to trace in them a double-gesture by which Isabel Burton combines self-erasure with self-empowerment. The detailed analysis of six paratexts, as theorized by Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette, supports the claim that Isabel, from the text's fringe, constructs for herself a role that combines elements of the scribe, editor/curator, narrator and author. Looping back to the neo-Victorian biofictional texts, I propose that, in Life, the historical Isabel Burton fuses self-erasure (which Troyanov picks up) with self-empowerment (which Hodder picks up), to forge a female writerly identity compatible with her self-fashioning as the wife/widow of a Victorian transnational cosmopolitan.