The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel by Lyn Pykett

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
Max Fincher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sensation Novel

Lady Audley’s Secret

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Conventional Picture

It only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.’ When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley’s past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael’s nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert’s darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley’s Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon’s portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked.

The Lighting Design of Hardy's Novels

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Lighting Design ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
The City ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This essay argues that the phenomenology of light in Thomas Hardy's novels affords a key to his representation of subjectivity. The lighting of most scenes in nineteenth-century fiction is never specified. But from the spectacular lighting effects of Hardy's early sensation novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), to the futile quest for the "City of Light" in Jude the Obscure (1895) and the burned-out pyrotechnics of his last narrative, The Well-Beloved (1897), the light of Hardy's fiction is marked in a double sense——both described in detail and registered as exceptional. Rather than a figure for enlightenment, as in the realist novels of George Eliot and others, Hardy's light is the medium of subjectivity, and it characteristically occludes and distorts as much as it illuminates. Like the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art the novelist excitedly recognized as an analogue of his own, Hardy represents light not as an absence to be looked through but as something to be looked at and closely observed in all its varieties.

ON THE TRACK OF THINGS: SENSATION AND MODERNITY IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON'S LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Badowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Moment

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

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