Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well and the Art of Sensation

Abstract

‘Not wisely but too well’: Othello’s words are so familiar that the title of Rhoda Broughton’s first novel is easily overlooked. Yet, read with its original context in mind, the title points to more than conventional borrowing from a pre-eminent master. Broughton’s unwise lover is Kate Chester, who plays Desdemona’s role of enthralled victim to the dangerously attractive (literally murderous in the first version) Dare Stamer. What happens when Desdemona takes over Othello’s words? When blackamoor becomes blackguard? When a woman rewrites a male plot? The title in fact initiates an extensive series of allusions which raise questions like these about gendering and narrative. Some of Not Wisely But Too Well’s hundreds of quotations, allusions, references and echoes are undoubtedly, as Michael Sadleir complains, ‘silly ostentatious swagger’ (Sadleir 1944, 102) but modern criticism which ignores them and reads Broughton’s early novels simply as sensation fiction, or rather through definitions of sensationism derived principally from the narrative practices of Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood, can often do little except praise the assertive sexuality and deplore the conventional moralising. Even Lyn Pykett, whose 1992 study of the ‘improper’ feminine could provide a strong argument for reading Broughton as sensationist, adds little to Elaine Showalter’s dismissive verdict in A Literature of Their Own.1