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No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of [the sensation novelist's] work, beyond the market-law of demand and supply; no more immortality is dreamed of for it than for the fashions of the current season.--Henry Mansel 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.As Mark Knight noted in his 2009 review of trends in the academic study of the subgenre, "the critical appeal of sensation fiction and Victorian crime shows no sign of abating.If anything, the first few years of the twenty-first century have seen even greater levels of interest" (323). Since Knight's review essay appeared, these levels of attention have persisted, and the field is currently flourishing. This present essay is an attempt to identify Meredith, through to contemporary neo-Victorian fiction. As Gilbert suggests in her introduction, the Companion aims to "give the reader both the broad understanding of sensation and the specific information on the state of scholarship necessary to advance in the comprehension of the literature as well as the production of new scholarship" (9). In this objective the collection succeeds, as its extensive treatment of the genre will ensure it remains an invaluable resource for many years to come, while at the same time pointing the way towards, and providing the impetus for, new directions of enquiry. would echo Maunder's view of the benefits:One of the things which recent revisionist work has recovered and evaluated is a mass of fiction by women writers that was highly influential in the development of the novel in mid-Victorian Britain. There is a growing acceptance that reading these novels by women in their literary context, enriches our understanding and interpretation of Victorian fiction generally. (Maunder ix) 7In accordance with this belief, Tara MacDonald and I co-edited a 2013 special issue of Women's Writing entitled "Beyond Braddon: Reassessing Female Sensationalists." 1 Our motivation for the issue was a mutual desire to explore and showcase the current scholarly
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was indisputably the queen of the mid-Victorian literary marketplace. Following the phenomenal success of Lady Audley's Secret in 1862, each of Braddon's subsequent novels of the 1860s achieved impressive sales figures, running through numerous editions in swift succession, and for decades her name was a byword for all that was lauded and loathed about the female "sensation novelist".1 Braddon epitomised the extraordinary productivity of the Victorian popular writer and, in doing so, helped to fuel contemporary anxieties about the transition towards mass-production, the commodification of culture, and large, discrete readerships.2 This association with a shifting mode of literary production and consumption significantly affected Braddon's critical reputation, in her own lifetime and beyond. In 1911, as she was approaching the end of her long and prolific career, fellow novelist and friend, Lucy Clifford, pointed out what she saw as Braddon's greatest mistake as a writer:Your stories are all admirable, but you have written too many-or rather … you have put your name on too many. You might have had three reputations … People can't believe your work can all be on its highest level … because there is so much of it, so many good books, that they think it impossible that anyone could do so much that is good… [emphases in original] 3 At over eighty novels, if one includes the early anonymous serials, in addition to short stories, plays, and poetry, Braddon's extraordinary productivity was a key factor in the public construction of her as a commercially-driven writer striving only for "popular" success. Consequently, her positioning within the literary marketplace, as well as her critical reputation, was shaped, in large part, by the perception that she simply wrote too much. The issue of Braddon's productivity also fed in to wider debates of the mid-nineteenth century about the status of authorship and the nature of composition.The decade in which Braddon began her writing career was an important juncture in the critical perception and treatment of literature, particularly the novel. 4 It was a period of unprecedented expansion in the area of publishing, which saw a significant growth in the
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