Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

Abstract

Critics have long considered the Victorian sensation novel a difficult genre to define. The thread that connects these seemingly disparate works is class: the sensation novel may be defined as a genre that disrupts a middle-class perspective. The sensation novel forces readers to attend to multiple class perspectives; it aligns the act of reading and piecing together clues with the surveillance of a servant; and it revalues femininity while suggesting that what is perceived as gender is actually a function of class privilege.