Lady Audley's Secret Research Articles

The Reliability of Sensational Interpretation

Abstract: In this essay, I observe that scholarly attention towards sensation fiction has heavily relied on historicist readings while overlooking sensation fiction's status as a properly aesthetic phenomenon that immanently theorizes the act of novel reading. I argue that the absorbed reading that is commonly assumed to attend a sensation novel like Lady Audley's Secret (1862) is, paradoxically, sustained by the novel's self-consciously mediative qualities that hold the reader at bay from identification and immersion, instead of plunging her into sensational immediacy. What makes sensation fiction so gratifyingly readable is not the thrills of narrative suspense, but the reliability of the conventions by which it has been read over and again.

Unveiling Lady Audley’s Secret: Navigating Femininity, Autonomy, and Societal Constraints in Victorian Literature

The paper analyzes Lady Audley's Secret in the context of Victorian gender inequality. During this era, women faced societal expectations rooted in domesticity, limiting their access to education and public life. Braddon's novel challenges these norms, portraying a complex heroine, Lady Audley, who engages in criminal activities to navigate the constraints of her gender and social expectations. The novel explores themes of economic dependence, the limitations of marriage, and the use of madness as a societal tool. Lady Audley's character embodies paradoxes, reflecting the tension between societal ideals and individual desires. Braddon's portrayal of ordinary women's struggles provides a nuanced perspective on femininity, challenging the prevailing stereotypes of the time. The analysis examines the societal implications of madness and the consequences of resisting prescribed gender roles. Lady Audley's Secret emerges as a subversive work that addresses the invisible lives and personal conflicts of ordinary women, contributing to the broader discourse on female autonomy in the Victorian era.

Girls on Fire: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861), Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943), and the Adolescent Sublimation of Victorian Sensation

Abstract: This article argues that what I call the "slow psychology" of adolescence encouraged writers like Maud Hart Lovelace to transform Victorian sensation into serialization, offering young girls in the twentieth century a new temporality of growing up. Featuring an often-banal drama of sublimative experiences, serial stories like Lovelace's provided a modern antidote to old Victorian sensation tales of female psychological degeneration and madness. In Lovelace's fourth installment of her famous Betsy and Tacy series, Downtown (1943), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Victorian blockbuster Lady Audley's Secret becomes a crucial psychological intertext because it marks and maps all of the psychological dangers of sexual prematurity for teen girls. The feelings and emotions that Lady Audley's Secret ignites in its eleven-year-old girls readers must be exorcised, and Lovelace's novel carefully demonstrates how desire, passion, jealousy, rage, and even depression can be sublimated into family life and into forms of civic participation that allow the girls to vent their dangerous emotions in appropriate public spaces.

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass

Reviewed by: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace by Sean Grass David Vincent (bio) The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass; pp. xi + 279. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Sean Grass's The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace has an unusual structure. Following an introduction setting out the nature of the enterprise, the first chapter—which comprises more than a quarter of the book—is essentially a bibliographical exercise seeking to demonstrate that, from 1820 onward, the genre of autobiography was a major driver in the growth of Victorian publishing and reached a peak in the 1850s and 1860s. Making rigorous use of the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue and other bibliographical collections, along with a range of publishers' archives, Grass provides the most thorough statistical survey of the field. The analysis, which centers on graphs that show "Increases of 'autobiography' titles, 1841–1860," (24) "Autobiographical titles by year 1841–1869," (26) and "Titles [autobiographical and all] published by decade 1800–1860," (27) will comprise an essential point of reference for all future work on published nonfiction memoirs in the period as well as the broader dynamics of Victorian book history. This first chapter supplies fascinating detail on the range of autobiographies published in this period. However, the focus is not on the texts themselves but rather on the commercial enterprise of publishing. The basic point is that an increasing range of firms commissioned autobiographies because there was a growing market for them. They sought out narrative accounts of unfolding lives in order to make money. By this means, identity became a commodity, supported by the Victorian publishing industry and contingent developments in mass literacy, retail outlets, circulating libraries, and copyright law. These changes are linked to parallel developments in the bureaucratization of identity through the creation of the General Record Office in 1836, and other transitions from community to official constructions of personal identity. [End Page 474] At this juncture, the analysis moves away from nonfiction autobiography and its particular claims to truth. The remainder of the book focuses on the commodification of identity through separate chapters on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) together with Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863), and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). The final chapter revisits the drama of The Tichborne Claimant, which Grass describes as "a stunning parable of modern subjectivity" (213). Only the first of the texts takes the form of a fictional autobiography. The remainder move further away from the literary form which is examined at the outset, focusing instead on the convergence of textuality and commodity in the construction of identity, and the anxieties that this generated. There is a price to be paid for this change of focus. It would have been instructive for Grass to turn back to the classic Victorian autobiographies, armed with his new understanding of the dynamics of the genre. Likewise, the insistence on the interface between identity and the market could have been interrogated by an examination of the many memoirs in this period which were published in noncommercial outlets such as newspapers, or in journals connected to organizations and interests, or which remained in manuscript form, intended only as a private record for the author and perhaps his or her family. Those issues must be saved for another book, however. The conclusion of the opening chapter is that the 1860s represented a watershed in literary representations of the nature of identity, thus enabling Grass to make powerful connections between a set of novels which appeared in these years. The discussion of each in turn both draws from and interrogates a wide range of scholarship on a set of texts which, with the possible exception of Reade's Hard Cash, have already received substantial critical attention. In each case Grass is at pains to deconstruct any sense of the novels reaching a conclusion that satisfactorily reconstitutes...

Railway Fiction or Seaside Sensation? Journeys to the Sea in Lady Audley's Secret and No Name

Railway Fiction or Seaside Sensation?Journeys to the Sea in Lady Audley's Secret and No Name Carolyn W. De La L. Oulton (bio) Reading on the Rails If the seasoned traveller of the 1860s knew (long before Oscar Wilde's Gwendolen) the value of having "something sensational to read in the train" (The Importance of Being Earnest 40), the very act of reading could itself be sensationalized in the context of "rail travel as a time out from normal constraints" (Bailey 11). But while the now familiar image of sensational "railway fiction" is a powerful one in itself, it implies an important question that has attracted surprisingly little critical attention—where are all these readers going and are they likely to continue with the books that they have started (or at least taken with them) on the train? The link between the major circulating libraries such as Mudie's, the innovative W. H. Smith's railway bookstalls, and the success of 1860s sensation fiction is well established. But positioning the railway experience as a transitional or mid-point, and not necessarily as a defining context for the reading of sensation fiction, uncovers a second determinant in the writing and consumption of these novels: the Victorian seaside holiday. At a time when resorts were still catering to a significantly large number of invalids, the question of what and how visitors were reading was both vital and controversial. At the very least an over-indulgence in the latest novel could interfere with the health cure, as popular medical author Spencer Thomson explained: "one man goes to the sea-side, and lolls on the beach, or in the reading-room, and takes it easy, but gets half measure of the new air; whilst another exercising himself gets double measure and double good" (14). Possibly inappropriate reading forms a crucial link between travel and the seaside resort itself, but one that is largely predicated on a discourse of nervous debility in which the sea air was [End Page 232] prescribed as a restorative while "reading implied a transmissibility of emotions from text to reader that paralleled medical and psychological discussions of suggestibility" (Vrettos 97). In Kelly Mays's analysis, "While reading habits resembled the automatic motions of the machine, they were also and more consistently described with reference to bodily ingestion—eating, drinking, and drug-taking" (172). This threat to bodily integrity was of course exacerbated in the case of women, with reading appearing "as a topic within the literature of hysteria" (Flint 58). But despite concerns about the impact of sensation fiction on women in particular, periodicals of the time routinely advertised the latest titles to the seaside holiday market. Two major novels of 1862, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins's No Name, provide a test case for this difficult relationship. The increasing tendency from the 1860s to use "railway reading" and "seaside reading" as interchangeable terms has been largely overlooked in studies of the sensation genre and its contribution to debates about gendered reading. But Lady Audley's Secret and No Name use the trope of the coastal resort as a means of exploring affective responses in the context of wider debates surrounding physical and moral health and the proper function of the seaside holiday. Both writers insistently portray the sea as both sinister and overtly sexual, in what amounts to a deliberate assault on the nerves. In a strategic move these novels engage directly with the debate on the ill effects of sensation fiction. Both include seaside settings in the context of women's health, flagrantly playing to the preoccupations of female readers. But far from claiming that sensation fiction is beneficial to readers, these novels internalize the concerns widely expressed by critics, welding images of reading itself to themes of debility and breakdown between the railway and the coast. It has become almost a cliché that the types of fiction read on the train are mirrored by anxieties about rail travel itself. The organization of the journey may have, in Jonathon Grossman's phrase, "standardized time and space" (9), but it could not standardize social behavior. If travellers "found themselves in a fluid environment...

Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, by Helena Ifill

Reviewed by: Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction by Helena Ifill Tara MacDonald (bio) Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, by Helena Ifill; pp. viii + 232. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, £80.00, $120.00. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861–62), Lucy Audley claims that the "hereditary taint" in her blood caused her to cross "that invisible line which separates reason from madness" (edited by Lyn Pykett [Oxford World's Classics, 2012], 300, 301). Yet the doctor who sees her says, notoriously, that she is not mad but dangerous. Can Lucy's desperate actions be explained by heredity or simply by her impoverished circumstances? In Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction, Helena Ifill argues that sensation novelists were deeply invested in such questions. These writers, specifically Braddon and Wilkie Collins, were not merely interested in portraying good or evil characters but, rather, in detailing how characters came to be good or evil. This is a key way, Ifill suggests, in which sensation novels depart from melodrama: instead of simply being a villain, a character like Mannion in Collins's Basil (1852) might instead be diagnosed as a "dangerous monomaniac" (Collins qtd. in Ifill 35). Ifill demonstrates the ways in which Braddon and Collins were developing arguments about determinism and the influence of biological inheritance at the same time that a range of scientists and psychologists were. One of the more innovative aspects of her argument is that she places these discussions within the context of theories about degeneration and eugenics. While acknowledging that eugenic ideas were especially dominant in the 1890s, the book demonstrates the ways in which they emerged in the 1860s via notions of undesirable hereditary influences. The introduction devotes some space to defining sensation fiction as a genre distinct from realism, a topic to which later chapters might have returned. Ifill notes that [End Page 473] determinism has typically been linked to realism, specifically to the work of George Eliot (and we might add Thomas Hardy here, too). Yet she persuasively notes that sensation novels are attentive to the impact of irrepressible, external forces on characters' development. She claims that "sensation fiction's emphasis on plot can be interpreted as considering the human condition in a manner that acknowledges that a combination of internal and external pressures drive the individual through life, often precluding the possibility of truly independent action" (8). This is a persuasive point, and she notes further that degenerationist thinking and sensational plotting are linked in that every small action or weakness has great meaning. These ways of thinking about sensational plotting will be useful to critics working on the genre, especially since sensation fiction was (and perhaps still is) often thought to subordinate character to plot. Given the use of the term character in the book's title, it would have been helpful to hear more about the ways in which she sees Braddon and Collins as crafting ideas about literary character: did they understand character differently from Eliot or, say, Charles Dickens? Braddon's and Collins's letters and Collins's prefaces would have been potential resources here. The book is divided into three sections: part 1 discusses monomania as an exploration of the limits of free will, part 2 discusses biological inheritance, and part 3 departs somewhat to focus on education and environmental influences. Each section includes one chapter on Braddon and one on Collins. While the prodigious output of both authors means that Ifill has more than enough material to choose from, she could be more explicit about why the book focuses only on these two sensation writers. Ellen Wood's St. Martin's Eve (1866) is briefly mentioned, and indeed that novel, as well as others by Wood, is invested in upper-class degeneration, as well as the impact of possible hereditary madness. Throughout each section there are frequent quotations from Victorian doctors and philosophers like William Carpenter. In this way, Ifill follows in the footsteps of scholars who have been attentive to crossovers between psychological and scientific writing and sensation novels, such as Jenny Bourne Taylor and Laurie...

The Pocket-book and the Pigeon-hole: <em>Lady Audley's Secret</em> and the Files of Victorian Fiction

This article argues that the Victorian novel is governed by the logic of storage: the accumulation of data and the deferral of action. Focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), I demonstrate that the sensation novel is caught between the winnowing directive of the detection plot and the capaciousness of Victorian literary form. The novel's many objects register information and delay narrative, but they never quite get activated as clues. I track three kinds of paper objects—files, memoranda, and keepsakes—all of which linger in storage, declining in value and awaiting an opportunity for transmission that might never arrive. Disposable yet persistent, paper evokes the cultural confusion over how to save and what, if anything, to discard. I contextualize the novel with government records and journalism from the period, all of which express similar archival anxieties. Braddon's novel ultimately muddles the distinction between clue and litter, keepsake and junk, archive and hoard, as well as between significant and insignificant narrative information.

Serialization, Illustration, and the Art of Sensation

This essay explores the multiple intersections between text and image in the illustrated serial editions of Lady Audley's Secret (London Journal, 1863) and The Woman in White (Harper's Weekly, 1859–60). It argues the illustrations connect to political articles, biographical profiles, and the images accompanying other fiction serials. These lateral connections relate the text to current events, underscore the importance of some characters over others, and, most importantly, enhance the emotional resonance of texts and images. Ultimately, they reveal the reading of serialized sensation novels as a participatory process, where meaning and emotion are expanded through iterative and contextual readings.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, by Charlotte Mathieson

Reviewed by: Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation by Charlotte Mathieson Ruth Livesey (bio) Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, by Charlotte Mathieson; pp. viii + 217. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £58.00, $99.00. When I heard of the death last year of the geographer Doreen Massey, I thought of a passage in her work that encapsulated for me her wit and brilliance as a theoretician of place and space. Massey was adept at teasing out the significance of postmodern scholarship on place and mobility, and rooting it down into a politics of materiality and [End Page 139] experience. Amid "the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace," she argued, "most people still live in" inner suburbs crowded with old housing stock, "like Harlesden or West Brom," and "much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes" (Space, Place and Gender [Polity Press, 1994], 163). Charlotte Mathieson's welcome study of mobility and Victorian fiction—Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation—is, in its own way, a similar riposte to recent theorizations of nineteenth-century place and mobility. While influential studies by Jonathan Grossman and Jo Guldi, among others, have emphasized the agency of transport infrastructure in systematizing and speeding up networked ways of being in nineteenth-century Britain, Mathieson's careful illuminations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, places embodied subjects at the center of her account regarding the ways in which the Victorian novel thinks and writes about mobility. Drawing on the work of Massey, Tim Cresswell, and other cultural geographers, Mathieson traces mobility in the Victorian novel as a form of "socially produced motion" (13). The wider social structures that determine who is able to travel, when, where, and how, come to the fore in her analyses as a result of this materialization. A passenger, in Mathieson's study, is always an embodied subject whose relation to movement is defined by expectations around gender, class, and national identity. In this book, such instances of "embodied mobility" also become "lens[es] through which to re-perceive the negotiation between national and global concerns as they unfold in the structures of the novel" (17). Mathieson's departure from the actor network theory model that has influenced many recent accounts of nineteenth-century communications results in some significant rereadings of novels already well traveled by critics in this field. Her first chapter, on the figure of the pedestrian, for instance, is an attentive account of the alternative communities of place and nation that emerge through women walking in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Adam Bede (1859), and Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). For Grossman, Little Nell's walk from London to the Midlands represents a severing from a community connected by networks of public mobility. In a guarded critique of that analysis, Mathieson highlights the reality of pedestrian journeying for the poor in this period and Dickens's construction of "alternative forms of national understanding" through the act of walking through a landscape (27). Mathieson draws attention to the emphasis given to the physical strain of walking by Brontë and Eliot as Jane and Hetty drag their weary outcast limbs across the nation. In Adam Bede, Mathieson concludes, this foregrounding of Hetty's tramp makes the female body "a privileged site through which an exploration of the connection between the body and nation-space becomes acutely focused" (40). The later chapters of the book focus on railway journeys across Britain, the Continent, and a globalized Victorian modernity. So much has been written on these aspects of mobility in nineteenth-century fiction that Mathieson sets herself a hard task to craft an original contribution. Yet Mathieson alights on the glorious self-description of Robert Audley, in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), a character for whom to become a railway passenger involves transforming into a "perambulating mass of woollen goods" (Braddon qtd. in Mathieson 85). Out of this bundle of...

"It is only colour that you want": Lady Audley's Secret and Cosmetics as Discursive Fantasy

This article analyzes the under-discussed issue of cosmetics in Lady Audley's Secret , as well as in the periodicals that serialized her work, the Sixpenny Magazine and Robin Goodfellow . These periodicals highlight the controversy surrounding cosmetics use by featuring both advertisements for cosmetics and social commentary condemning the use of artifice. While never either overtly endorsing or critiquing cosmetics, Lady Audley's Secret highlights the discursive fantasies and patriarchal fears they engendered. Braddon sensationalizes the polarized views represented in the periodical press by depicting cosmetics as a secretive Gothic device that has radical potential for female transformation.

Entropy and the Marriage Plot in <I>The Woman in White</I> and <I>Lady Audley's Secret</I>

Entropy and the Marriage Plot in <I>The Woman in White</I> and <I>Lady Audley's Secret</I>

Harry Potter's Secret: The Rise of Publishing Sensations from Mary Braddon to J. K. Rowling

This article focuses on publishing sensations across time and culture by drawing a line between the publication of M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret in 1861–2 and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997–2007). In presenting case studies we draw out similarities in the production, reception and circulation of these texts and highlight their shared writing and reading contexts. We contend that these texts, although they were launched into discrete literary cultures and markets which seem worlds apart, shared significant elements in both their production and consumption, especially in relation to fandom and the ways in which new media were seized and used to recirculate and “own” both authors and texts. In thus looking longitudinally we uncover motifs of reiteration as well as alteration in literary cultures. This casts the long twentieth century in publishing, which is often represented in terms of a crisis-fuelled thrust towards literary innovation and new markets, as a time of concurrent change and continuity.

Robert Audley's Allusion to 'the "Chough and Crow" ... at Evans's' in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

Robert Audley's Allusion to 'the "Chough and Crow" ... at Evans's' in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

Lady Audley's Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotions

The relationship between gender, emotion and normative ideals is a prominent theme in British sensation fiction of the 1860s, and a central concern in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862). But despite critical assent concerning the importance of emotions in the text, there are no focused studies of their meaning and narrative function. This study explores how representations of anger and shame convey gender specificity, and how the way characters express and perform emotions interplays with constructions of social power in the novel. Braddon's work contains more examples of women than men exhibiting signs of anger and more instances of men than women showing shame, which means that anger might be understood as a female and shame as a male quality in the text. The contexts where these emotions occur indicate the opposite, however. Women displaying anger are shown to transgress gendered conduct codes, whereas men mostly experience shame because of women's misbehaviour and as their guardians. Although the distribution of instances when male and female characters show anger or shame could initially be understood as a manifestation of the disruptive qualities of the sensation genre, such an interpretation is undermined by the gendered relations between emotional expression, power and control in the novel.

Why Novels are Redundant: Sensation Fiction and the Overpopulation of Literature

Reinterpreting the controversy surrounding such bestsellers as Lady Audley's Secret , this essay shows how the unexpected problem of "redundant women" reshaped the Victorian novel. It argues that this peculiar hypothesis of female surplus population takes form in sensation narratives and permanently destabilizes domestic fiction. By overpopulating households and eroding qualitative distinctions among characters, these narratives created a new paradigm. The redundancy paradigm infiltrates realist classics (notably, George Eliot's novels) against which Mary Braddon's notorious novels were regularly contrasted. It further transforms critical discourse, which echoes sensation plots in representing popular fiction itself as a surplus that literary culture cannot contain.

The Gothic Sublime in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

This article argues that Virginia Woolf's theory and practice of the novel extends key elements of the gothic sublime shared by nineteenth-century sensation fiction and by contemporaneous psychiatric methods of diagnosis. In novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, sensation heroes find access to hidden mental reality through the psychologically revealing power of painted portraits. By doing so, they enact a distinctly gothic version of the sublime, offering a glimpse into the dark psyche by means of a subject's awed inability to conceive its magnitude. Similarly, by relying on the fantastic power of vision he found in paintings and photographs, Jean-Martin Charcot developed into medical knowledge the gothic sublime, which also aided the detective protagonists of sensation novels. Working to extend this tradition, Woolf in To the Lighthouse uses the logic of the gothic sublime as a model for exploring human character. The gothic sublime illuminates in Woolf's theory of consciousness a striking functional resemblance between the mimetic realism of photography and the abstract representations of formalist art. By virtue of the insufficiency of simple perception, both aesthetic modes offer, for Woolf, a window into the very depths of human psychology.

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism Helena Ifill (bio) Alberto Gabriele , Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: "Belgravia" and Sensationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2009), pp. xxvii + 275, $80 cloth. Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print is a wide-ranging exploration of the "trope of sensationalism" in the Victorian periodical press. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia is focussed upon as a "unique example in the history of miscellanies" (28), but also as a case study for considering the ways in which we can approach periodical research. Alberto Gabriele's work is especially important because few single issues of Belgravia complete with paratextual material exist, and he has attempted to piece together, as much as possible, the Victorian reader's experience. Although not all readers would have read "a single issue as a complete unit" (42) from cover to cover, Gabriele effectively argues that researchers should be attentive to the montage effect produced by reading a single issue of Belgravia containing stories, articles, advertisements, illustrations, and poetry. Connected to the notion of montage is the (sometimes oppositional) relationship between fragmentation and unity. The early chapters of this book associate both fragmentation and the periodical press with the shock of the sensational, modernity, and industrialization, and explore how periodicals are inherently fragmentary because of their diverse contents by different authors (including serialized novels delivered to the reader a fragment at a time). Yet Gabriele also argues for a sense of "symbolic cohesiveness that brings together the mosaic of perspectives and disparate stimuli that constitute the magazine" (35); he suggests this reflects the way in which late-Victorian society wove fragmentation "into a larger theory [End Page 99] of culture" (42). Included in this discussion is a consideration of the potentially disruptive influence of sensation fiction, which challenged the social status quo. Braddon's Belgravia as a whole is also shown to be at odds with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century aesthetic theories, such as E.S. Dallas's The Gay Science (1866), which tend "towards abstraction that dismisses and finally erases the episodic and the fragmentary from artistic appreciation" (53). Chapters three and four consider various relationships between readers, periodicals, and contributors. This includes an assessment of the way in which Belgravia's audience was "defined by the fascination for the controversial issues that the novels appearing in installments provoked" (70); debates over author anonymity; an examination of Victorian advertisements, showing the shift towards "brand-name advertising, which imagined—and created—target niche markets" (84); and "industrial journalism," which took the reader behind the scenes of the factories that produced the items she or he was intended to covet. Gabriele finds in the diversity of advertising "a hidden symmetry of recurrent phrases," speaking a language "of an increased availability of products, of purported thrilling novelties, and of fabled universal access to luxury" (90). Chapter four also considers the anonymously serialized Bound to John Company, or the Adventures and Misadventures of Robert Ainsleigh, started, and later revised, by Braddon into Robert Ainsleigh but finished (due to her nervous breakdown) by an unknown author (1868-69). Gabriele shows how this novel (concerning the East India Company) sensationalises the "telling of British history" (83). Chapter five explores the relationship between popular periodical fiction and pre-cinematic entertainment. Gabriele argues that both periodical literature and magic lantern shows present "episodic" information "as part of a somewhat coherent fragmentary genre" (116), and that Belgravia achieved "the ability to strike the optic nerve with a quick and strong impression," much like a magic lantern slide (120). The chapter concludes by showing how early silent film often directly adapted sensation plots such as Lady Audley's Secret or, like Louis Feuillardes's Les Vampires (1915-16), drew on the sensational. The final chapter, "Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Paris," jumps back to the 1870s and 1880s with the promise of a discussion of Braddon's 1873 feuilleton novel La Chanteuse des rues, yet Braddon is disappointingly only mentioned briefly. Instead we have a discussion of French sensation fiction and the pros and cons of genre distinctions, especially in relation to "sensation" and "detective" fiction. The book concludes with a useful index to Belgravia's contents...

Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary's Rewriting of <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i> in <i>Bedelia</i>

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century. A scandalous success during its own time, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1863 novel Lady Audiey's Secret was an inspiration for many writers who borrowed both its piot and sensational elements. 1 One adaptation that has not received sustained critical attention in this regard is Vera Capsary's 1944 novel Bedelia. Considering Bedelia as a reimagining of Lady Audley's Secret allows one to read against the grain of critical interpretation of Caspary's novel, which tends to see it as reinforcing traditional gender roles. On the contrary, in rewriting Bradd on's novel , Caspary brings Victorian-era concerns with female identity and women's limited opportunities into the twentieth century, providing a social critique of World War II America. In addition, the genres in which each author was workingnineteenth-century sensation fiction and twentieth-century crime fictionwere especially suited to questioning the cultural hegemonies of their respective time periods, particularly with regard to gender. Although Lady Audley's Secret has garnered much critical attention in recent yea rs, Bedelia, recently reissued by the Feminist Press, is likely less familiar to readers. Caspary's novel focuses on the relationship of a newly married couple, Charlie and Bedelia Horst. The novel is set in a Connecticut country house over a few days in 1913, as Charlie slowly discovers that his perfect wife has not only attempted to poison him but has killed several previous husbands as well. The novel ends with Charlie pressing Bedelia to commit suicide by drinking the very poison she had given him. Although there is no direct evidence that Caspary read Lady Audley's Secret, she was Laura Vorachek is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Dayton in Ohio, where she specializes in Victo rian literature and culture, and gender studies. CLUES • A Journal of Detection / Volume 28 . Number 2 I Fall2010 I pp. 69-76 I !SSN 0742-4248 (paper) I lSSN 1940-3046 (online) I DO!: 10.31721CLU.28.2.69 I(!:! 2010 McFarland & Company, Inc.

The Doctrine of Survivals, the Great Mutiny, and Lady Audley's Secret

The key principle of Victorian cultural anthropology, the doctrine of obsolescent “survivals,” had as its Gothic counterpart the implication that atavistic residues of early human stages could persist in modernity and might at any moment unexpectedly resurface. One crystallizing event in the evolutionary history of this theme was the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and one text that translated this lesson of the Mutiny most powerfully for popular thinking was Mary Elizabeth Braddon's famous sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret (1861-62).

Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Lana Dalley (bio) Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing by Krista Lysack; pp. 238. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2008. $26.95 paper. $46.95 cloth. In the opening pages of Come Buy, Come Buy, Krista Lysack asks a question that modern readers of Jane Eyre have undoubtedly wondered themselves: would Jane's trousseau shopping experience have been more enjoyable if she had been shopping "on her own terms" rather than Rochester's? In its rich interdisciplinary analysis of imaginative literature, cultural practices, and archival documents, Come Buy, Come Buy persuasively answers its opening question with a resounding yes. The book begins with one of the most memorable shopping scenes in Victorian fiction, in which Rochester takes Jane Eyre dress shopping at a silk warehouse in the neighbouring industrial town of Millcote. As Lysack demonstrates, Jane "proves an unwilling and resistant shopper" (1) as she renounces not only the extravagant gowns and diamond necklaces offered by Rochester but also the challenges to her autonomy represented by Rochester's consumer advances. Arguing that shopping can be a way for women to consolidate economic agency in a manner that incorporates rather than renounces consumer culture, Lysack's account of Jane Eyre's shopping practices charmingly introduces the book's analysis of consumer culture and female subjectivity in Goblin Market, Lady Audley's Secret, Middlemarch, Michael Field's Sight and Song, and the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women. Beginning with a theoretically informed opening chapter, Lysack grounds her argument with de Certeau's theory that consumer acts are a "potentially transformative form of cultural production" and thus everyday activities like shopping make "visible the ways in which the subject may respond to and even resist her condition under capitalism" (Lysack 7). Lysack contends that after mid-century, the cultural practice and discursive treatment of shopping shaped female subjecthood in forms "predicated on the possibilities of pleasure in the marketplace rather than disavowal" (8). She resists the critical tendency to characterize the Victorian woman shopper as enacting a cultural anxiety about unregulated consumption. Such approaches, she contends, hinge on the notion that for women, shopping represents an either/or binary, in which consumer activity signifies necessary excess, cast as either transgressive idleness or consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy, on the other hand, makes it clear that for Victorian women shoppers, the marketplace was not only a site of potential danger but also one of pleasure. The book is divided into two sections. The first three chapters examine the articulation of female urban consumerism in literary texts and cultural practices from the 1860s through the 1880s; the final two chapters treat the political and aesthetic negotiation of women's consumer culture from 1890s to World War I. One of the book's clear strengths is Lysack's treatment of shopping as not only a register for commercial economies, but also, in a more [End Page 168] symbolic way, a register for libidinal, imperial, and specular economies. In her nuanced treatment of Goblin Market, for example, Lysack argues that "gazing in an exotic goblin marketplace becomes the basis for women to formulate desires of their own" (29). By historically situating the poem within the emerging cultural practice of window-shopping, Lysack convincingly demonstrates that "within the marketplace"—goblin and otherwise—"desire is first produced ... through technologies of looking" (41). In the most excitingly original chapter of the book, Lysack examines the function of specular economies in Michael Field's Sight and Song. Lysack argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (as Michael Field) strategically arrange the poems within Sight and Song to produce the effect of "shared pleasure rather than possession," thus rejecting the gaze of masculine specular economies enacted in fin-de-siècle aestheticism (111). This sophisticated rendering of symbolic economies would have been a welcome framework for the chapter on Middlemarch, which seems less theoretically developed than the others. While any scholar who takes on Middlemarch is to be applauded for the undertaking, Lysack's connection between Eliot's terms for the publication of Middlemarch (although quite interesting...