The Original by Nell Stevens review – queering the Victorians

This flamboyant tale of fakers and forgery, straddling the turn of the 20th century, is a smart and witty investigation into love and authenticity

We become ourselves by copying others, whether dutifully or audaciously, in acts of homage or appropriation. What is education if not a prolonged process of copying, and isn’t the same true, Nell Stevens asks in her latest novel, of falling in love? Suddenly besotted with another young woman, her protagonist Grace begins to wear her scarf at the side of the neck as her lover does, and to feel “clearer and more deliberate and more like myself” as she does so. “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.”

At its heart The Original has two& strands of copying: both are preoccupations of the late-Victorian era the book is set in. There are the pictures made by Grace when she’s brought, penniless, to her uncle’s house aged 10 after her parents are sent to lunatic asylums (though her uncle and aunt may well be more dangerously mad than her loving parents). She copies her cousin Charles’s paintings so well that he declares her a magician – or possibly a machine – and then she makes her way to secret independence by creating clever forgeries and then successful copies of famous works of art, from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. And there is cousin Charles himself, who is lost at sea only to return 13 years later, possibly as a brilliant fake, his jaw a little too heavy but his voice and manner so perfectly attuned to the original that his mother welcomes him delightedly back into the household. All this is playing out in a book that is at once a fake – a copy of the Victorian sensation novel – and distinctly idiosyncratic, the& original the title proclaims.