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.

Understanding the Victorian Unfeminine

My project traces concepts of the unfeminine from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1860) to Victoria Cross’s New Woman fiction in Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903). Both texts feature female characters who defy Victorian standards of femininity. Marian Halcombe of The Woman in White is regarded as “ugly,” with “almost a moustache,” yet Walter Hartright (the narrator) admits to the “rare beauty of her form” when he meets her. Marian is also extremely intelligent, using her wits and courage to help protect her half-sister. The unnamed male narrator of “Theodora” from Six Chapters of a Man’s Life meets a similar female character (Theodora), who also has a mustache and looks “like a young fellow of nineteen.” Nonetheless, Theodora is highly educated, even advocating for sex for sex’s sake. Though Theodora is unconventional in her appearance and character, the narrator grows more attracted to her. In defiance of their conventionally unfeminine physical and mental characteristics, both women are regarded as striking by their male narrators. I examine these characters’ unfeminine appearance and heightened intelligence in combination with their radical desirability, suggesting that parallels between Marian and Theodora establish a firm connection between these two Victorian genres as they construct concepts of attraction and the “unfeminine” woman.

‘The End is No Longer Hidden’: News, Fate and the Sensation Novel

Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel--a sub-genre known for fast-paced plots drawn from real life--as symptomatic of the newspaper’s growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Mansel conflated this new novelistic form—which he called ‘The Newspaper Novel’--with crime news. This chapter argues, however, that the sensation novel makes the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion, one that problematises similar exclusions practiced by Dickens and Trollope. By experimenting with newspaper time and form, as well as the temporal structure of narrative, these sensation novels highlight characters whose experience of time and community is not presentist, as Anderson suggests, but rather more akin to dynastic time and a sense of history beyond the nation. Throughout Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels, the newspaper becomes a part of the mysterious, the uncanny, and ‘atmospheric menace’ for which the sensation novel is so famous. Rather than drawing upon newspapers for a sense of realism, as critics have argued, these novels make their newspapers integral to their providential plots.

The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady

From the point of view of the British juridical system, The Law and the Lady can be interpreted as a sensation novel whose crucial albeit indirect message must be read in the context of Collins’s legal reformism. As well as challenging the Scottish verdict of Not Proven, the heroine of the novel, Valeria Brinton, presents herself as a woman detective who is anxious to prove her husband’s innocence before both the court and public opinion. Underlining the peculiarity of her mission is a destabilising tension which, in its social implication, is aimed to challenge the conformism and love of orthodoxy typical of the Victorian ethos. In this sense, Valeria’s gendered autobiographical writing, while giving full evidence to her resourceful womanhood, dramatises the blurring of the confine between masculinity and femininity and, at the same time, offers a representation of the old-fashioned and abstruse protocols of British law.