Neo-Gothic Sensations

Abstract

Despite its contemporaneousness, the sensation novel’s reworking of the Gothic evidences its interest in the past: it is the crimes and secrets of the past which return to haunt the characters’ present (Percival Glyde’s illegitimate birth; Aurora Floyd’s marriage to her father’s groom). This interest in the past is echoed in the neo-Victorian novel, with its more insistent focus on history via its reimagining of the Victorian age. Both genres, then, evince a concern with the manner in which the past impacts on the present. This chapter explores the complex relationship between Gothic, sensation, and neo-Victorian fiction. It considers the manner in which Victorian sensation writers rewrote the Gothic novel and the subsequent reimagining of Gothic sensation fiction in twentieth-century writing, via an examination of two pairs of texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951); and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1993).