Authors

Discussion

With her debut novel, Mademoiselle Ixe (1890), Lanoe Falconer (Mary Elizabeth Hawker) entered the world of late Victorian fiction and took part in the forming of a growing body of anglophone works that focused on Russian nihilism. Inspired by an unidentified heart-wrenching “Russian air played upon the zither,” Falconer turned her attention to the works of the writer Ivan Turgenev and the Russian revolutionary Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, as well as news stories published in the British press that told of socio-political inequality and of injustice within the Russian penal system. Following the novel’s publication, Falconer donated a large part of her royalties to the Russian exiles and received gratitude from the Ukrainian and Russian revolutionary, as well as a journalist and writer, Felix Volkovsky. Yet why was the novel difficult to publish in the first place? Why was it a great success once published? How does Falconer’s heroine—a governess-turned-nihilist—fit into what at the time was an ongoing conversation about religious faith? And most importantly, how does the novel contribute to the creation of a mythical image of a Russian nihilist?