Sensation Novels Research Articles

Illegitimacy and Laws in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and No Name

Victorian sensation novels, in addition to their scandalous topics such as fraud, murder, adultery, bigamy, and madness, refer to Victorian laws and their construction by social and cultural standards. As a significant sensation novelist, one of the most important subjects Wilkie Collins calls for attention is illegitimacy, a social, political, and literary topic he recurrently employs in his fiction. In his novels The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862), he dwells on this issue, motivating the characters’ crimes and scandalous acts. In both novels, illegitimate characters act illegally to reconstruct their identities by challenging Victorian norms especially about illegitimacy. Concerning his life and his critique of Victorian laws and moral certitudes, this paper explores how Wilkie Collins employs and questions the theme of illegitimacy about crime, sensations, and social and legal problems that influence illegitimate children. After briefly examining illegitimacy and laws about it in Victorian England, it explores how the concept of illegitimacy is shaped and influenced by Victorian conventions and gender ideologies in the two novels.

Wilkie Collins in Context, ed. by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari

Edited by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari, Wilkie Collins in Context is an extensive collection of essays that mark the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins’s birth by celebrating the multifaceted life of the author in four parts: life and works, critical response and afterlife, literary contexts, and cultural and social contexts. In the preface, Baker and Nemesvari put emphasis firstly on the treatment of Collins’s writing in his age as belonging to a second-class status, stemming from the fact that the most impact he had on the period’s culture has been through his sensation novels, especially The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins in Context makes an invaluable contribution to the current scholarship of Collins, especially by including an extensive context regarding Collins in the same place as knowledge of his life and critical reception of his work.

Alienated Heroines in Basil, Lady Audley’s Secret, and East Lynne: A Jaeggian Reading

Abstract While the term ‘alienation’ is frequently mentioned in criticism of sensation fiction, there is a lack of a stringent definition of this term. This article aims to address this gap with a focused examination of the depiction of alienation in three sensation novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by M. E. Braddon, East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood, and Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins. Borrowing a critical framework from contemporary philosopher Rahel Jaeggi, the article sees alienation as an obstructed relation of ‘appropriation’. According to Jaeggi, to appropriate is, briefly, to take oneself and one’s world at one’s own command. The relation of appropriation bespeaks a more profound relationship between the self and the world than ownership. Previous studies of sensation heroines often associate their alienation with their desires for material property. With Jaeggi’s critical framework, however, this article moves forward by identifying a parallel between the heroines’ troubled desires for material possessions and their problematic relationships in life. Through a Jaeggian lens, all three texts illustrate the heroines’ dispossession of the self and dispossession of property as profoundly, even structurally, linked. A Jaeggian reading of the novels also provides new insights into the genre’s ideological function, particularly in relation to the limited social roles and precarious hold on the material world faced by ambitious Victorian women.

“The mystery of the Myrtle Room”: Reading Wilkie Collins’ The Dead Secret as an Early Female Detective Novel

While Wilkie Collins’ novels The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60) have long been accepted as part of the early mystery canon, Collins’ earlier novel The Dead Secret (1857) is rarely included. The Dead Secret is here reconsidered as one of the earliest English female detective novels, revealing its heretofore unrecognised significance to the genre of detective fiction and the evolution of the literary female detective. The Dead Secret’s protagonist, Rosamond, is almost Holmesian in her methodical collection of evidence and tactical lines of questioning to arrive at the solution of the mystery, but she also employs techniques more often attributed to female detectives, demonstrating the importance of emotion, intuition, surveillance, and proximity. In solving the mystery, Rosamond also disrupts the status quo, as is more typical of sleuthing heroines of sensation fiction. The Dead Secret demonstrates Collins’ innovations to the emerging genre of detective fiction, before its tropes become typified by Sherlock Holmes, and reveals the overlap of tropes that originate with sensation novels.

“Sensation” India

Florence Marryat was a prolific author, as well as being renowned for both her involvement with spiritualism and her parallel career as an actress. In 1854, she married Thomas Ross Church, an officer in the British Army, with whom she travelled through India for six years. On coming back to England, she began her successful writing career. She specialized in popular (and lucrative) sensation novels, but she also capitalized on her residence in India by penning a travel memoir: Gup. Sketches of Anglo-Indian Life and Character, eventually released as a volume in 1868. By engaging in a close reading of the text, this paper sets out to demonstrate that, in crafting her account, Marryat concocted an imaginary, “sensational” depiction of India and its people, to please and entertain her readership, while serving her own social and political agendas.

The Mother-Sister of Victorian Fiction: Domestic Compromises and Replaceable Heroines

Abstract This article critically examines the figure of the “mother-sister” in Victorian popular fiction. Sisters whose main function in the household comprises mothering their siblings, combines several narrative possibilities in nineteenth-century fiction, while constructively complicating the representation of domestic work. Whereas canonical fiction depicts sisters taking care of motherless siblings more often than their general absence from critical discussion might suggest, for several Victorian women writers, the mother-sister’s experience offers an opportunity to detail everyday domestic labor, to validate homemaking without sentimentalizing it, and to express frustration without rejecting domestic ideals. After a general discussion of the significance of this hitherto neglected figure in Victorian culture, this article juxtaposes the mother-sister’s representation in novels by otherwise markedly different popular authors of the time: the religious writer Charlotte Yonge and Mrs. Henry Wood, one of the most successful sensation novelists of the time. Their contrasting portrayal of reluctant, resentful, and resented mother-sisters offers a different angle on expected depictions of capable homemaking as a sign of value in Victorian fiction.

Sensation Fiction: New Directions

2022 marks forty years since Patrick Brantlinger posed the question ‘What is Sensational About the Sensation Novel?’ Since then, scholars have continued to probe and extend early definitions of sensation fiction as a short-lived subgenre dealing with secret crimes taking place in genteel Victorian settings. Research on sensation fiction has developed apace, and scholars have developed approaches utilising methodologies from media studies, history of science, disability studies, and beyond. In doing so, they have greatly expanded the range of sensation novelists studied. Such research (benefitting from the enormous spread of digitisation since Brantlinger’s article) has also highlighted the significance of serialisation, adaptation, and experimentation in sensation fiction and the relationship between form and content has continued to be of interest. The past decade has also seen an interest in sensation as a global publishing phenomenon and this has led to scholars tackling more fully issues of race, racism, and national identity in sensation fiction. The articles in this issue build upon these recent interventions and seek to point out possible new paths in the study of sensation fiction.

A Study on the Embodiment of New Sensation Literature in Film Art

The novels of the New Sensation, which rose in the late 1920s and early 1930s, have brought fresh feelings to the new literature with their new, strange and strange characteristics. The discussion of the narrative art of the New Sensation plays a great role in correctly understanding the artistic value, style and characteristics of the New Sensation novels. The narrative development of the Suzhou Creek by Lou Ye is not only a structural reference and innovation, but also a practical behavior of the change of creative ideas. The new feeling of Suzhou Creek is characterized by the equal transformation of narrative perspective, the control of emotional rhythm and synchronic time and space. This paper starts with narration, and enters into the reading space of the novel from three aspects: narrative angle, narrative time and space, and narrative structure to capture and appreciate this "new feeling", so as to grasp the main artistic features of this novel genre.

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove

Reviewed by: Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove Diana Moore (bio) Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove; pp. x + 190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.94 ebook Patricia Cove's Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture forms an admirable addition to the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and skillfully fulfills the series' mission of re-evaluating Victorian literature, culture, history, and identity through close readings. In many ways, Cove's work treads a well-established path. Countless British authors wrote about Italy during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification. An equal, if not greater, number of scholars have subsequently shown how these authors fashioned and refashioned their selfunderstanding through their relationship with and depictions of Italy. Cove provides a fresh take on this British obsession with Italy, however, by moving away from the most widely celebrated and studied authors, like Lord Byron, in favor of lesser-known and more marginal figures, such as Italian patriot and exile Giovanni Ruffini. Cove claims that the voices of these "outsiders and figures of cultural hybridity—women, expatriates, exiles, Anglo-Italians and Anglo-Irish"—reveal more about the contradictory and varied British responses to the Italian Risorgimento and related ongoing debates about "selfdetermination, citizenship and political rights" (23). The book is comprised of a general introduction, four case study chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters chronologically trace "four concrete, political focal points of British engagement with the Risorgimento" from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation in 1861 of the Kingdom of Italy, and they show how throughout this period British authors increased their engagement with the Italian present rather than its idealized past (21). Chapter 1 examines Lady Morgan's travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley's historical novel Valperga (1823). Cove argues that, unlike many of their fellow Romantic authors, who wrote about an abstract version of Italy and only cared about how Italian affairs impacted British politics, Morgan and Shelley were attentive to the specific historical and political realities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, she claims, their status as outsiders made them more sensitive to issues of power and appreciative of Italy's resistance to the dominant post-1815 empires. [End Page 495] Chapters 2 and 3 move forward into the Victorian period, tracing the rise of leftwing Mazzinian politics, its eventual disappointment in the failed revolutions of 1848-9, and subsequent decline. In chapter 2, Cove focuses on two of Ruffini's English-language novels, Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), and reveals how Ruffini subverted the common trope of Italy as a place of exile, estrangement, and disorientation for British travelers by centering the sufferings of dispossessed Italian patriots instead. Chapter 3 then analyzes Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) in relation to both the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal and the emergence of the sensation novel. Cove demonstrates how the British public's discovery that their government had been opening Mazzini's mail and sending its contents to continental authorities prompted a crisis of mid-Victorian liberalism and uncovered hidden continental-style despotism underneath the façade of British freedom and modernity. In a parallel fashion, she claims, sensation novels like The Woman in White brought the themes of the gothic novel home from historic settings and foreign shores to the contemporary British domestic sphere. The final chapter looks at the trauma surrounding the 1859 Second War of Independence through an examination of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Cove shows how Barrett Browning, who was supportive of the Risorgimento, also acknowledged the costs of unification and "the silences and erasures imposed through violent, historical change" (126). Finally, in the conclusion Cove offers a brief glimpse at the period after 1870, when the Italian state reclaimed control over the city of Rome, through the writings of authors like Henry James, Vernon Lee, and George Meredith; these works "demonstrate the extent to which politics infiltrated post-Risorgimento, aestheticised Italy" (164). Overall, this volume reveals the benefits of studying nationalist movements...

Spoiler Alert: The Sensation Novel and Victorian Criticism

The spoiler, a persistent concern of the internet age, has roots in the mid-nineteenth century during the dawn of new media. In the early 1860s, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon asked periodical reviewers not to reveal the plots of their novels. These requests elicited responses ranging from begrudging compliance to outright refusal. Not only had critics become accustomed to providing summaries, but they were also inclined to disparage sensation novels. Charles Dickens, whose plots were also revealed by reviewers, adjusted his approach in Our Mutual Friend, his final complete novel, by introducing a mystery that was easily solvable, allowing him both to attract the audience for sensation fiction and to disguise more significant social commentary.

“I veer about between hope and despair”: Utopian Visions in Victorian Sensation Fiction

The following article questions what role the present moment can play on in our scholarship on Victorian popular fiction. More specifically, it argues that the feelings of lost or strange time associated with pandemic living find resonance in Victorian sensation novels. The genre is invested in describing the state of ‘the meantime,’ a period that is a mix of stasis and progress when one waits, wastes time, or meanders. This also describes the period when one is waiting for social change to occur. The article then situates sensation fiction within Victorian ideas about utopias, focusing especially on feminist utopias. It suggests that sensation novels present utopian visions, glimmers or partially realised forms of utopian existence, which are characterised by female opportunity, care communities, and happiness. Finally, case studies of two novels by Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife (1870) and The Fallen Leaves (1879), are presented to demonstrate how Collins crafted utopian visions for how to survive life in the meantime.

Reviewers and Reviewees: Margaret Oliphant’s Literary Criticism and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Sensation Novels

Reviewers and Reviewees: Margaret Oliphant’s Literary Criticism and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Sensation Novels

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ın Lady Audley's Secret Adlı Romanında Sansasyon, Toplumsal Cinsiyetler ve Kimlik Politikası

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), considered one of the best sensational novels in the Victorian age, offers a new space for re-considering identities, genders, and domestic ideals by demonstrating the transgression of the artificial boundaries established by the Victorian ideals. In doing so, the novel, with its questionings of marriage, home, and being woman and man, focuses on the protagonist Lady Audley’s nonconforming attempt to go beyond the Victorian domestic norms as she wears some masks to hide what she is. In this context, drawing upon gender studies, this article explores how gendered identities are produced and installed as the effects of discursive practices, and how Braddon breaks down the stability of genders in the novel by acknowledging gender performativity and gender fluidity. This destabilization raises broader questions about the female identity and identity politics of the Victorian age. In searching for some answers to these questions, the article scrutinizes how the novel challenges the trenchant patriarchal assumptions about genders and goes beyond hegemonic patriarchy.

Adam Grener. Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel.

Adam Grener. <i>Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel</i>.

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture

Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture

Sketching the New Man Out: Ellen Wood's Exploration of Victorian Masculinity

ABSTRACT In ways similar to other sensation novelists, Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood questioned some ideological foundations of the Victorian shaping of gender models. Besides exposing the discontents of women trapped into fixed roles, she interrogated models of Victorian masculinity to envisage the possibility of new masculine roles and behavioural patterns. Drawing on gender theories, this article explores Wood's thought-provoking characterisation of men, examining some strategies she adopted in her fiction to question dominant male figures, such as the authoritative husband and the strict paterfamilias. While raising doubts on the desirability of the strength and self-assurance associated with these figures, Wood sketched out alternative male characters endowed with “feminine” virtues like patience and gentleness, or liable to be dominated by assertive and commanding women. Examples from different Wood works are offered to explain this combined process of deconstruction and rethinking of the abstract category of man. The second part of the article focuses on Roland Yorke (1869), a novel that bears evidence of the author's exploration of problematic aspects of Victorian masculinity, of her effective use of irony and her efforts to delineate alternative figures which, though never well-wrought, pave the way to future conceptualisations of the New Man.

The Matter of Aesthetic Experience

The Matter of Aesthetic Experience

Ivan Bagriany — a painter of words and brush

Ivan Bagryany — a contender for the Nobel Prize, the author of the sensational novels “The Garden of Hetsimansky”, written about the Soviet camps long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the “Tigrolovs”, which was a real bestseller in the Western world and printed in many countries in millions of copies, is a unique multi-faceted figure in the history of not only Ukrainian, but also world culture. A writer, artist, politician, public figure, around whom forces of different convictions were grouped — this can be described as this person.Having received recognition abroad, he was not known in Ukraine for many years, and only almost thirty years after his death received real recognition at home: he was awarded the State Prize of Ukraine named after him. T. Shevchenko. A lot of popular science and monographic studies have been written about his literary work, which includes fiction and journalistic works, dissertations are protected. However, his artistic activity still remains “in the shadow”, the ways of becoming Bagryany as an artist have been little studied. To introduce works of Bagryany's fine art into his literary canvas, using original drawings from various funds, as well as a number of little-known materials, including the epistolary, is the purpose of this article.The sources of artistic talent Bagryany. His landscapes, portraits, illustrations for his own works, political satire are analyzed. The feature of the technique of drawings, graphic works and oil works of different genres is understood. The palette of verbal colors used in literary creation, in particular in poetry, is defined.

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction, by Heidi Logan

Reviewed by: Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction by Heidi Logan Vanessa Warne (bio) Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction, by Heidi Logan; pp. x + 267. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, £115.00, $140.00. While the significance of disability to Victorian culture is widely recognized, the ways in which disability is defined and studied remain works in progress. A trio of recent books, Jennifer Esmail’s Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture (2013), Karen Bourrier’s The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (2015), and Heather Tilley’s Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (2019), have productively explored clearly demarcated aspects of disability’s cultural history. These scholars have built on the foundational work of Martha Stoddard Holmes, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Mary Klages, which established disability’s [End Page 693] importance to Victorian literature and demonstrated the value of studying both the literary depiction and the lived experience of disability. In Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction (2019), Heidi Logan does not focus on a particular aspect of disability experience but instead analyzes the significance of disability, broadly defined, to sensation novels by two of the genre’s foremost authors, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Their depictions of disfigurement, cognitive and sensory difference, mental illness, and congenital impairment feature in detailed readings of nine novels, including well-known examples of the genre, such as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and less familiar novels, such as One Thing Needful (1886), from a later phase of Braddon’s career. Logan argues for the importance of these novels’ pairings of different kinds of physical, mental, or moral exceptionality or, to use the wording of her title, different kinds of deviance. In the case of Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), for example, Logan stresses the significance of Collins’s treatment of both blindness and epilepsy and, in the case of Hide and Seek (1854), she explores the paired depiction of deafness and a degenerative spinal condition. While genre matters to Logan, the strength of her project lies in its comprehensive and well-researched discussions of individual novels. Logan’s readings challenge existing assessments by arguing that Collins’s treatment of disability is progressive. Logan sees aspects of Collins’s exploration of disability, such as his portrayal of disabled characters as successful and content with their lives, as “surprisingly anticipatory of some approaches in modern-day disability studies” (26). Turning to Braddon, Logan again finds evidence of a progressive approach to disability, proposing that Braddon’s novels “display considerable originality and complexity in terms of recognizing and undermining assumptions about physical impairment” (158). Whereas Logan’s analysis of Collins’s novels is largely concerned with physical disabilities, her discussion of Braddon’s novels engages closely with ideas about moral insanity; Logan also prioritizes the importance of gender to Braddon’s representations of characters whose bodies and behaviors are non-normative. Logan’s decision to divide her book into two halves, each dedicated to an author, will benefit readers who are relatively new to the study of Victorian disability or who are interested in only one of the authors under discussion. Readers in search of a focused discussion of a specific text will also appreciate Logan’s dedication of chapters to individual novels. For other readers, Logan’s treatment of the four Collins novels in four separate chapters, organized by publication date, may feel like a lost opportunity to offer a more integrated discussion of both the novels and the ways in which they imagine disability. Logan does pair novels in her treatment of Braddon’s work. In her final chapter, she offers readings of The Lady’s Mile (1866) and One Thing Needful, but she reflects only briefly on connections between them at the chapter’s end. A chapter on Lady Audley’s Secret and John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863) helpfully pairs these two novels in order to explore Braddon’s complex “portrayal of unusual women” (192). In the case of all nine novels, Logan provides a comprehensive discussion of their representation of non-normative characters. Logan’s thoroughly researched chapters...