“There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting,” Richard Holmes writes in ‘A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting’, “Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death” (95). It is hard to avoid the Victorian Mnemosyne, who makes regular guest appearances in the period’s photography and art (Julia Margaret Cameron and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both produced works with the title Mnemosyne), but we should also remember her shadowy twin. For if the nineteenth century was busy with writers exploring memory’s lurking tenacity and shaping force, the same writers were equally attracted to its unpredictable lapses and blind spots. Throughout the period these twin powers worked closely together, quarrelling or collaborating, and for many writers this was not only a matter of psychological or philosophical enquiry. It was also a matter of style.
