Popularity and Proliferation: Shifting Modes of Authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864) and Vixen (1879)

Abstract

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

“Challenging the Divisions between Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sarah Grand: Conceptions of Authorship in The Beth Book (1897) and The Infidel (1900)

“…Taking a directly comparative approach offers a new angle from which to consider Grand's and Braddon's careers and the professional literary marketplace at this point in the century. Among the novels gaining prominence in Braddon scholarship are those containing fictional writers (Beller 2016;Costantini 2015;Palmer 2011). Recent research has uncovered new dimensions to Braddon's career in the final decades of the Victorian era, notably Palmer (2021) unveiling Braddon's final novel Mary (1916) and Hatter's work celebrating Braddon's short stories (2014).…”