Winifred Notty: The governess who arrived at Ensor House knowing that in three months they would all be dead

It is early fall when an open phaeton leaves Winifred Notty in front of Ensor House, a grim mansion on the English moors. The driver, a servant of her new master, has patted her thigh during the ride. From an upstairs window, a stern woman watches her. Winifred is unmoved: as she climbs the steps, she tells the reader that in three months everyone living in the house will be dead. So begins Victorian Psycho (2025), the novel by Madrid-born Virginia Feito, published in the United States by Liveright. Winifred is the new governess to Drusilla and Andrew, the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pounds, and she will keep her promise. Feito also wrote the screenplay for Zachary Wigon’s film, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and opens in Spanish theaters on November 13, with Maika Monroe as Winifred, Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds and Thomasin McKenzie as Miss Lamb. (From here on, this file reveals the novel’s ending.)

// The theoryWickedness, need and temptation

In 2008, criminologist Santiago Redondo Illescas, a professor at the University of Barcelona and formerly a prison psychologist and governor, published the Triple Risk for Delinquency Model in the Revista Española de Investigación Criminológica, and developed it in 2015 in El origen de los delitos (“The Origin of Crimes”). His starting point is that for centuries criminology has chosen among three answers, wickedness, need or temptation, when crime actually appears where all three meet. Redondo sorts every known risk factor into three sources: personal risks (A), such as impulsivity or lack of empathy; deficits in prosocial support (B), meaning what family, school and community failed to provide; and opportunities (C), such as accessible victims or unguarded targets. A and B produce antisocial motivation. C turns it into a real risk of offending.

// The subjectThe governess who winks at the reader

Winifred narrates her own story, and from her very first introduction she winks at the reader, whom she treats as an accomplice. The first signs come early: on a walk with the children she stones to death a barely injured deer and presents it as an act of mercy. At a tea party with Mrs. Pounds’s friends she is left alone with a guest’s baby, William Fancey, and kills him with a straight razor that once belonged to her father. She then steals a baby from a peasant cottage, dresses it in the dead child’s clothes, returns it to the mother, who does not notice the swap, and mails the corpse to a convent in a doll box. Later, the portraits in the gallery are found mutilated: someone has cut out their eyes. It is Winifred, who wants to compare them with her own to confirm her lineage, and Mrs. Pounds accuses a sixteen-year-old housemaid, who ends up transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Mr. Pounds, a devotee of phrenology, has already measured her skull and declared it identical to his own. Winifred writes “Winifred Pounds” on a slip of paper and eats it.

She also kills Miss Lamb, a maid she desires who threatens to expose her, and hides her body in a secret garret. Later she kills a young servant boy she mistakes, in the dark, for a portrait. Guests and servants become convinced the house is haunted. On Christmas Day, in the library, Winifred tells Mr. Pounds that she is his daughter and shows him the painted eyes of his ancestors as proof. He rejects her in disgust and orders her to leave. Then the massacre begins: with a meat cleaver and later a crossbow from the armory, she kills guests, Andrew and Mrs. Pounds. When the wounded Mr. Pounds tries to stab her, Drusilla runs him through with a rapier. The two live for days among the corpses, until a scullery maid who escaped alerts the police. Drusilla ties herself up, presents herself as a victim and accuses Winifred, who is tried and goes to the gallows laughing.

// The crackA risk model facing a vocation

The Triple Risk model deals in probabilities: it says who is more likely to offend, not why a particular person kills a baby at a tea party. In Winifred, source A weighs so much that the other two look like scenery. The novel itself plays with that suspicion. Feito gives her a motive, the father who abandoned her, but Winifred kills long before the moment of revenge arrives, and she kills people who have nothing to do with her, like a guest’s baby. She is also an unreliable narrator: at one point she wakes on the stable floor with no memory of what she has done. It is the standard criticism of the model: it is so broad that any case finds its drawer, and here any reading of Winifred fits inside it.

Drusilla complicates the scheme further. She grows up in the same house, under the same father and with the same opportunities, and ends up running him through with a rapier. The model can explain her, because prosocial support does not mean having parents at home but receiving something protective from them, and Mr. Pounds, who boasts at dinner of caring for factory children while hundreds have died in his own mills, is hardly a protective father. But the case is a reminder that the model describes risks, not destinies, and that to explain is not to excuse: no one at Ensor House had to die.