Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers
Edited by Anne-Marie Beller, Tara MacDonald
Routledge – 2014 – 132 pages
Scholarly understanding of the Victorian literary field has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. Yet until very recently, work on sensationalism has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention.
This collection examines the fiction of women sensation writers who were immensely popular in the Victorian period but remain critically neglected today – writers such as M.C. Houston, Amelia Edwards, Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat and others. The Victorian sensation novel was categorically associated with women by Victorian reviewers and this collection extends our current understanding of this sub-genre by showing that female sensation writers were often sophisticated in their textual strategies, employing a range of metafictional techniques and narrative innovations. By moving beyond the novelists who have come to represent the genre, this book presents a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that constructed the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics.
The book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
1. Introduction Anne-Marie Beller and Tara MacDonald 2. Sensation Intervention: M.C. Houstoun’s Recommended To Mercy (1862) and the Novel of Experience Tabitha Sparks 3. Strange Sympathies: George Eliot and the Literary Science of Sensation Mary Beth Tegan 4. Sensational Ghosts, Ghostly Sensations Nick Freeman 5. The False Clues of Innocent Sensations: Aborting Adultery Plots in Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) Tamara S. Wagner 6. Experimental Medicine, Marital Harmony and Florence Marryat’s An Angel of Pity (1898) Greta Depledge 7. Embodying Agency: Ouida’s Sensational Shaping of the British New Woman Lisa Hager 8. ‘‘Romans Français Écrits En Anglais’’: Ouida, the Sensation Novel and Fin-de-siècle Literary Censorship Jane Jordan
Anne-Marie Beller is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, UK. She has published on Mary Elizabeth Braddon and other sensation novelists. Recent publications include chapters for A Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013). Anne-Marie is the Editor of The Wilkie Collins Journal.
Tara MacDonald is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has published on sensation fiction, Victorian masculinity, and neo-Victorian fiction. She recently contributed to Other Sensations (special issue of Critical Survey, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013).