The Victim and the Worm

The Victim and the Worm by Phyllis Bottome

The Victim and the Worm follows Oliver P. Brett, a shrewd, ailing American inventor living in England, and the two very different daughters he has raised. His younger daughter Elise, gentle and self-effacing, marries his devoted secretary John Sterling; his elder daughter Hermione, the "Princess Girla," is a beautiful, self-dramatizing invalid whose broken marriage to a Roumanian prince masks a lifelong pattern of using illness, sentiment, and manipulation to dominate everyone around her, including the child she abandoned. Brett alone sees through her, and spends the novel's first movement trying to shield Elise and John's new marriage from Hermione's corrosive influence—warning John before the wedding, banning Hermione from Mambles until after the ceremony, and finally confronting her directly. When Hermione, invited to stay by the newlyweds' well-meaning but naive goodwill, nearly wrecks their peace through petty tyrannies (over lawns, dogs, servants, and Elise's divided loyalties), Brett delivers a devastating private indictment of her whole character, precipitating a genuine breakdown—less physical than moral, a collapse of her practiced self-deception. In the aftermath he exacts John's promise that Hermione will never again live with the young couple, then sacrifices his own declining years by taking Hermione to Paris himself, deliberately absorbing the burden he has just proven no one else can safely carry, so that Elise's marriage can survive intact. The second part of the novel shifts to a new, parallel study of tyranny and devotion in a smaller key. In the village of Little Ticklington, Miss Onoria Strickland—a domineering, self-righteous music teacher and confirmed spinster—has spent years commanding fierce, if bruising, loyalty from those close to her, especially her downtrodden, unattractive pupil Elsie Andrews, nicknamed "the Worm" for her cringing awkwardness, and her long-suffering neighbor and worshipper Peter Gubbins, a fussy bachelor content to remain useful rather than beloved. Elsie's whole inner life is organized around pleasing Onoria, whose casual cruelty and rare tenderness alike become the weather of the girl's existence; a disastrous concert breakdown and its aftermath deepen the bond into something like religious devotion. When Elsie and Peter form a small, secret alliance of their own—rehearsing forbidden duets, then sneaking off together to hear Handel's Messiah—Onoria's jealous fury exposes the same instinct for possessive control that drives Hermione, though on a pettier, more comic domestic stage. Confronting her own wounded pride and loneliness after the humiliating public discovery of their deception, Onoria wavers between vindictive severity and a reluctant, self-interested tenderness, ultimately resolving to appeal to Elsie's parents rather than relinquish her grip. The novel thus builds two mirrored portraits—one grand and tragic, one provincial and wryly comic—of possessive, self-justifying personalities (the "Worm" that gnaws) set against their patient, self-sacrificing victims, with Bottome's sharp, ironic narration exposing how vanity, sentimentality, and the language of love and duty can become instruments of quiet domination.

By Phyllis Bottome · First published 1920 · Genre: Psychological Fiction, Character Study, Domestic Fiction · 20 chapters · 57,282 words

First lines

Oliver P. Brett sat under the shade of a giant yew and regarded a hedge of red and purple fuchsias with thoughtful eyes.

"These bees," he said to himself, "(if they ain't wasps which is just as likely), make the calmest sound in the universe.

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psychological-drama · family-conflict · post-war-fiction · character-study · grief-and-loss · moral-ambiguity · guilt-and-revenge · interpersonal-dynamics · human-nature · introspection · emotional-depth · estrangement

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