Girls on Fire: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861), Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943), and the Adolescent Sublimation of Victorian Sensation

Abstract

Abstract: This article argues that what I call the "slow psychology" of adolescence encouraged writers like Maud Hart Lovelace to transform Victorian sensation into serialization, offering young girls in the twentieth century a new temporality of growing up. Featuring an often-banal drama of sublimative experiences, serial stories like Lovelace's provided a modern antidote to old Victorian sensation tales of female psychological degeneration and madness. In Lovelace's fourth installment of her famous Betsy and Tacy series, Downtown (1943), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Victorian blockbuster Lady Audley's Secret becomes a crucial psychological intertext because it marks and maps all of the psychological dangers of sexual prematurity for teen girls. The feelings and emotions that Lady Audley's Secret ignites in its eleven-year-old girls readers must be exorcised, and Lovelace's novel carefully demonstrates how desire, passion, jealousy, rage, and even depression can be sublimated into family life and into forms of civic participation that allow the girls to vent their dangerous emotions in appropriate public spaces.