Ladies' Maids, Governesses, and Companions: Serving Women in the Great Houses of Sensation Literature (original) (raw)

“The Fashions of the Current Season”: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2017

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.

Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

International Journal of Language and Literary Studies

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

‘Let them be quiet’: Patriarchy and Rebellion in Lady Audley’s Secret

Wordsworth Editions Blog, 2020

When the category of ‘Sensation Fiction’ was first applied as a genre label in the Literary Budget periodical of November 1861, it coined a term for a new species of narrative that was at once innovative, soon-to-be hugely influential, and at the same time the next logical step in a long literary tradition. Much like the opening scene of a bestselling novel, something had happened, was happening, and was going to happen. In publishing terms, the ‘hook’ had been well and truly set, addicting and titillating readers with a chain of withheld secrets and startling revelations. As the name suggests, these books were intended to excite the senses, piling shock after naked shock. For readers, who were overwhelmingly in favour, and critics, who were not, the concept of the ‘novel of sensation’ coalesced around three English authors. The serialisation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White in Dickens’ All The Year Round from 1859 to 1860 (and its subsequent publication as a novel) had quite literally caused a sensation, with readers desperate for the next instalment besieging booksellers. All manner of unlicensed merchandise quickly followed, as well as fashion lines inspired by central characters and even themed tea-rooms. Ellen (‘Mrs. Henry’) Wood’s East Lynne (1861) – a tale of seduction, infidelity, dual identities and murder – was similarly popular and trailblazing, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon, already active in the genre with novels such as Three Times Dead (1860), was shortly to begin her breakthrough serial and masterpiece, Lady Audley’s Secret...

Mapping the Victorian Sensation Novel: Some Recent and Future Trends

Literature Compass, 2005

The past twenty years has seen a growing interest in the phenomenon of the sensation novel which is no longer regarded as indisputably unimportant or devoid of interest in studies of Victorian literature. Arguing that research into the genre has reached a crossroads, this article ...