Sensation Fiction

Abstract

“Sensation fiction” comprises a range of Victorian novels depicting the disturbance of a contemporary and supposedly normative domestic sphere by individuals whose conduct or presence there is detrimental to its integrity and whose own identity is often ambiguous. The genre achieved particular notoriety in the 1860s and its features are exemplified, to an extent, by three novels published at the beginning of that decade. Wilkie Collins'The Woman in White(1859–60) relates the struggle to preserve its heroine, Laura, from the machinations of her husband, Sir Percival Gylde, and his associate: the corpulent, amiable, but sinisterly effective Count Fosco (seecollins, wilkie). Their plot to incarcerate Laura in an asylum while her sickly double, the eponymous woman, dies under her name is countered by the hero's painstaking reconstruction of a narrative chain that reaffirms her identity. In Ellen Wood'sEast Lynne(1861), Isabel Carlyle undertakes an adulterous affair with an aristocratic suitor. Subsequently abandoned and disfigured, she covertly re‐enters the family of her husband (now remarried) in the guise of a governess. In Mary Braddon'sLady Audley's Secret(1862), the title character is revealed to be a bigamist from a lower‐class background who, when threatened with the reappearance of her first husband, preserves her new status through an impulsive attempted murder (seebraddon, mary elizabeth).