Reading Novel Experience, Sensational Fictions, and The Impressionable Reader in M. E. Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter

Abstract

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was on the frontlines of defense against the critics of the sensation novel, a genre she defended as both influential author and editor. This article argues that Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter (1876), her final novel to appear in Belgravia under her editorship, actively challenges the criticism of the sensation genre. Braddon incorporates new elements to her defense of sensation fiction by engaging in the same cultural discourse used by the genre’s critics, the discourse of physiological psychology, and dramatizing multi-faceted models of novel-reader relationships. Braddon subverts audience and literary expectations by drawing on contemporary theories of reading and psychology to suggest positive benefits could be gained through novel reading and reversing the gender of the supposed impressionable reader. Joshua Haggard’s Daughter reveals the prevailing criticism of the sensation genre to be gendered, reductive, and ultimately nothing more than a sensational fiction itself.