Richard Henry Cresswell’s (1846–1925) first novel, A Modern Greek Heroine, was published anonymously in 1880 by Hurst and Blackett in three volumes. Cresswell had given up his curacy at Christ Church, Clapham that same year and turned to writing fiction. His later novels gained increasing popularity and were advertised as written ‘By the author of A Modern Greek Heroine’. He wrote eighteen novels and two plays during his literary career. In his later years, he served as a curate at St. John the Baptist Church in North Kensington where he died on 16 March 1925.
A Modern Greek Heroine was applauded as ‘one of the most clever and original works of fiction of the year’ (John Bull, 426) and is a significant exception to a series of Victorian novels using the Greek woman as a representation of modern Greece set in the years of the Greek revolution. As Anna Despotopoulou and Efterpi Mitsi note, in popular Victorian fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s, a Greek woman’s precarious life was usually staged in an ‘1821’ setting, during the rebellion of the Greeks against the Ottomans (2021, 183). Cresswell’s novel, on the other hand, is set in Victorian Britain and his heroine, Bourbachokátzouli, named after a real-life female warrior from Sfakia, is employed as a French governess and received as an untruthful Greek. She discovers heroism in self-abnegation, exposes Victorian society’s limitations, subverts Greek stereotypes, and finally finds herself in a position of power. As the Morning Post asserted in August 1880, ‘this is not, as might possibly be supposed from its title, the biography of any champion of Hellenic independence, but a novel of English life’ (3).
Discover more about this unconventional heroine, this ‘most fascinating, perplexing, irritating, and delightfully unintelligible young lady who ever filled the part of heroine’ likened to Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp (John Bull, 1880, 426) in the article ‘Bourbachokátzouli: A Greek Governess in Victorian England‘ (Georganta 2024).
References
Anon. ‘A Modern Greek Heroine’. Morning Post. 19 August 1880: 3.
Anon. ‘Modern Greek Heroine’. John Bull. 03 July 1880: 426.
Cresswell, Henry. A Modern Greek Heroine, 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1880.
Despotopoulou, A. and E. Mitsi. ‘Real and Imagined Greek Women in Victorian Perceptions of “1821”’. Journal of Greek Media & Culture, special issue “‘1821’: Mediations, Receptions, Archives”, 7.2 (2021): 171–186.
Georganta, K. Bourbachokátzouli: A Greek Governess in Victorian England. Victoriographies: A Journal of the Long Nineteenth Century, 14:3 (2024): 237-251.