Ellen Wood, Religious Feeling, and Sensation

Abstract

Chapter 3 shows how Ellen Wood negotiated her way through the two seemingly conflicting discourses of sensationalism and pious Christianity. Like Braddon, Wood came under fire as a sensationalist but her critics also felt that she was opportunistically performing a Christian rhetoric. From the very beginning of her career the religious aspects of her work gave feeling a moral purpose that is borrowed from evangelical writing. It is Wood's author-editorship of Argosy, though, that demonstrates best how she refused to cow-tow to critics but used religious rhetoric and ideologies in complex ways, particularly when set in sensational stories. This chapter attempts to re-formulate some of the ways in which we examine religious writing in ‘popular’ sensation texts.