Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-29289-8, 978-3-030-29290-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction: The Victorian Sensation Novel—Afterlives and Legacies (Jessica Cox)....Pages 1-37
Front Matter ....Pages 39-39
Neo-Gothic Sensations (Jessica Cox)....Pages 41-72
Criminal Sensations: Neo-Victorian Detectives (Jessica Cox)....Pages 73-102
Repackaging the Sensation Novel: Neo-Victorian Young Adult Fiction (Jessica Cox)....Pages 103-137
Front Matter ....Pages 139-139
(Re)Presenting (Sexual) Trauma (Jessica Cox)....Pages 141-163
Excavating the Victorians: Digging Up the Past (Jessica Cox)....Pages 165-192
Sensational Legacies: Tropes of Inheritance (Jessica Cox)....Pages 193-217
Conclusion: ‘Substantial Ghosts’—Sensational Continuities and Legacies (Jessica Cox)....Pages 219-226
Back Matter ....Pages 227-251

Citation preview

Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction Jessica Cox

Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction

Jessica Cox

Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction

Jessica Cox Department of Arts and Humanities Brunel University London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-29289-8    ISBN 978-3-030-29290-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Hulton Archive / Stringer This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mum and Dad, with love and thanks

Acknowledgements

This work has had a very long gestation: my interest in neo-Victorianism and sensation fiction began as a side project whilst I was working on my doctoral thesis on Wilkie Collins over ten years ago and has evolved slowly but steadily since then. Inevitably, it has incurred many debts in that time. I must, firstly, thank everyone at Palgrave who has supported this project, especially Ben Doyle and Camille Davies—not least for their patience whilst I juggled babies, house moves, work, and writing. Additional thanks to the anonymous Palgrave reader, who provided helpful and constructive feedback at all stages. Ann Heilmann supervised my Ph.D. all those years ago. Since then, she has remained a constant source of support and encouragement—not least on this project—and I cannot thank her enough. More than anyone else I have met, she embodies the notion that a Ph.D. supervisor is for life, not just for thesis. Thanks to Brunel colleagues and friends, past and present, for all their support. I must here recognise the wider support of my Department and University: I am very lucky to work at an institution that supports family life and flexible working. Without this support, I would have given up trying to juggle an academic career and three children a long time ago. My thanks also to Brunel English students, for enthusiastic and stimulating discussions of all things Victorian. Fellow neo-Victorianists have provided valuable advice and suggestions along the way. In no particular order and with apologies to anyone I’ve missed, thanks to Alexia Bowler, Claire O’Callaghan, Nadine Muller, Mel vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Kohlke, Rosario Arias, Patricia Pulham, Nadine Boehm-Schnitker, Susanne Gruss, and Mark Llewellyn. I am eternally grateful to my parents—for always believing in me, and encouraging me, and for endless support with childcare. Thanks too to my brothers, Sam and Joe, for the annual getaways. Special thanks to my mother for proofreading duties—any errors are, of course, hers. To Murray, for everything, always. And finally to Keir, Tam, and Effie, without whom this work would have been completed long ago, but who remain my greatest outputs— even if not eligible for the REF.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Victorian Sensation Novel—Afterlives and Legacies  1 Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction   5 Women in White: Wilkie Collins’s (Neo-)Sensational Afterlives  13 References  34

Part I Reinventing Victorian Popular Fiction: Genre and Neo-Sensationalism  39 2 Neo-Gothic Sensations 41 Sensational Cousins: Repurposing the Female Gothic in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951)  47 Women, Art, and (Neo-)Gothicism in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994)  58 References  70 3 Criminal Sensations: Neo-Victorian Detectives 73 The Victorian Sensation Novel as/and Detective Fiction  76 Neo-Sensation Detectives  84

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CONTENTS

The Widow in the Library: Sensational Tropes in the Neo-­ Sensation Detective Novel  90 References 101 4 Repackaging the Sensation Novel: Neo-­Victorian Young Adult Fiction103 YA Fiction and the Sensation Legacy 106 The Victorian Sensation Novel as YA Literature 112 YA Fiction and the New Literary Marketplace 115 Sensation and Symbolism in Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) and Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace (2010) 118 References 135

Part II Neo-Sensational Tropes 139 5 (Re)Presenting (Sexual) Trauma141 Neo-Victorian Trauma 144 Wilkie Collins’s Trauma Narratives 148 Revisiting/Reimagining Trauma in Adaptations of The Woman in White 152 References 162 6 Excavating the Victorians: Digging Up the Past165 Neo-Sensational Excavations 171 Archaeology and Cultural Value in Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975) 178 Historical and Personal Pasts in Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969) 184 References 191 7 Sensational Legacies: Tropes of Inheritance193 The Inheritance Theme in the Victorian Sensation Novel 195 Literary Legacies: The Inheritance Motif in Neo-­Sensation Fiction 199 Neo-Victorian Scholarship and the Language of Inheritance 203

 CONTENTS 

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Anxieties of Influence/Anxieties of Origin in Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989) 207 Literary Inheritances: Mapping the Genealogy of the Neo-­ Sensation Novel 213 References 215 8 Conclusion: ‘Substantial Ghosts’—Sensational Continuities and Legacies219 References 225 Bibliography227 Index239

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Victorian Sensation Novel—Afterlives and Legacies

Once upon a time, there was a heroine. She was beautiful and bewitching, and enchanted everyone she met, from servants to royalty. But, despite her attractions, this heroine, people said, was BAD, and exerted a dangerous, poisonous influence on those around her. Nevertheless, her star shone bright, for a short time at least, until eventually she died, and was replaced by other, more worthy heroines. For a long time—over a hundred years— she lay hidden in an unmarked grave, until eventually her name was once again brought into the light, her true worth recognised, and the memory of her deeds restored. So goes the oft-told tale of the Victorian sensation novel and its fate. It is one of resounding commercial success in the mid-nineteenth century, accompanied by critical disdain, followed by a fall into obscurity a few decades later, before its subsequent revival in the late twentieth century when sensation fiction once again became the focus of critical and cultural attention. And so, it seems, the sensation novel will live happily ever after, its cultural significance and popular success now firmly established. But this is not quite the full story. The genre’s revival in the late twentieth century is a critical misperception, for it never truly disappeared. Rather, like the heroines that populate its pages, the sensation novel adopted a series of disguises, and, concealing its true identity, went out into the world in a variety of different forms, exerting its influence on popular and ‘high’ culture throughout the twentieth century. Some of these disguises barely concealed their roots: radio, screen, and stage productions of © The Author(s) 2019 J. Cox, Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4_1

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sensation fiction have appeared regularly—from Victorian theatre productions through to twenty-first-century adaptations1; several of Wilkie Collins’s novels remained in print, and he was the subject of critical attention throughout the twentieth century, although in the early decades critics preferred to emphasise his relationship with Dickens rather than his affinity with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and other sensation writers. Other disguises proved more effective: a range of popular fiction genres (especially detective fiction) and radio and television serials drew heavily on the conventions of the sensation novel, whilst rarely referencing it explicitly, and several of the genre’s key texts served as intertexts for new cultural productions. Meanwhile, the critical debate around popular culture and its value, begun by Victorian reviewers critiquing the sensation novel, continued throughout the twentieth century, with notable early contributors including Q.  D. Leavis and Margaret Dalziel.2 All of this preceded the genre’s subsequent alleged ‘revival’ from the 1980s onwards, which has seen a marked increase in scholarship and in cultural productions influenced by the genre. The emergence of neo-Victorian studies in the last twenty years has further highlighted the afterlife of Victorian fiction, and it is a primary contention of this book that neo-Victorianism continues the legacy of the sensation novel, both explicitly and implicitly. This study traces the diverse and complex legacy of sensation fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day, and in doing so seeks to address two significant gaps in scholarship to date: the pervasive and wide-­ ranging influence of the sensation novel on twentieth- and twenty-first-­ century literature and culture, and the role of sensation fiction within neo-Victorian literature, culture, and critical discourses. I consider a diverse range of writers, works, and forms, including popular fiction of the early- and mid-twentieth century by writers such as Agatha Christie and Daphne Du Maurier, contemporary historical detective novels, the literary fiction of authors including Charles Palliser and Joanne Harris, recent 1  An exhaustive list is not possible here, but examples pre-dating the supposed revival of the sensation novel include film adaptations of East Lynne in 1916 (Fox; directed by Bertram Bracken) and 1931 (Fox; directed by Frank Lloyd), a 1930 stage production of Lady Audley’s Secret at the Cambridge Festival Theatre (directed by Tyrone Guthrie), and a 1947 adaptation of The Moonstone for NMB Radio. 2  Q.  D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (New York: Random House, 2011); Margaret Dalziel, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexplored Tract of Literary History (London: Cohen and West, 1957).

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Young Adult (YA) works, as well as stage and screen productions, in order to demonstrate the hitherto unacknowledged diversity of the legacy of Victorian sensation fiction. This work represents the first extended study of the afterlife of sensation fiction.3 It is concerned with intertexutality, metatextuality, adaptation, influence, and genre, but also with notions of literary hierarchy, with the role of popular fiction within critical debates, and with the emergence and development of neo-Victorian critical thought. It explores the tensions between popular and literary fiction in relation to cultural reimaginings of the sensation novel, which range from Sarah Waters’s Booker-nominated Fingersmith (2002; a part-reworking of Collins’s The Woman in White [1860]) to popular historical detective series by authors such as Tasha Alexander and Emily Brightwell, as well as considering multiple stage and screen adaptations of sensation fiction. This study maps out in more detail than has hitherto been attempted the range and diversity of the sensation novel’s legacy, and in so doing offers an important new angle on the growing body of literature which challenges earlier critical dismissals of the sensation novel as a ‘minor subgenre of British fiction’.4 It also seeks to expand the critical debate around neo-­ Victorianism by arguing for the central role of popular fiction and culture in establishing and defining the relationship between contemporary and Victorian culture. To this end, then, this study marks a significant intervention into both Victorian and neo-Victorian studies. Whilst the study encompasses discussion of a wide range of works, there is a particular focus on forms of popular culture. The reason for this is two-fold: to demonstrate the extensive legacy of sensation fiction within popular culture (in contrast to prevailing critical emphasis on its legacy within neo-Victorian literary fiction); and to illustrate the role of popular culture within neo-Victorianism (and in doing so call for a more expansive definition of the form). There is some discussion of what might be termed ‘traditional’ neo-Victorian literary fiction (Palliser’s The Quincunx [1989], Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister [1994]) but this is limited— 3  Several works, including Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980) and Lyn Pykett’s The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel (2011), explore briefly the influence of sensation fiction on later genres, but this work represents the first extended study on the subject, as well as the first expansive exploration of the relationship between Victorian sensation fiction and neo-Victorianism. 4  Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”’, NineteenthCentury Fiction, 37:1 (June 1982), p. 1.

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in part because the scholarship on sensation fiction and neo-Victorianism which has appeared to date tends to privilege ‘literary’ reworkings. Though this speaks to the diversity of the sensation novel’s legacy, and its transformation from popular fiction into something more ‘respectable’, it also functions as a means of cultural appropriation, and in this respect reflects the sensibilities of neo-Victorian criticism: ironically, in the early years of the discipline at least, only ‘highbrow’ reimaginings of sensation fiction were considered appropriate forms for critical investigation. This study seeks to address this hierarchical approach to the sensation novel’s legacy, and to consider its influence on a much wider range of cultural forms, including detective and Gothic historical fiction, and popular stage and screen adaptations. Though, as the title indicates, this work is concerned with neo-Victorianism, one of its central aims is to challenge the chronological and cultural conceptual boundaries of the discipline established in some of its key critical works. This introductory chapter begins the process of unpicking the relationship between sensation fiction and the emergent discipline of neo-­Victorian studies, and attempts to refine the idea of what exactly constitutes a neosensation text, before illustrating the diversity of the genre’s legacy via an exploration of the afterlife of one of its key texts: The Woman in White. The chapters that follow consider some of the key genres and tropes associated with the cultural afterlives of sensation fiction. Part one is broadly concerned with issues of genre, opening with a discussion of the perennial influence of the Gothic novel on (neo-)sensation fiction, before moving on to an examination of the neo-Victorian detective novel and neo-sensation YA fiction. As a whole, this section of the book considers the processes of transformation from Victorian to neo-Victorian (specifically neo-sensational), and examines the diversity of the generic afterlife of the sensation novel, in order to substantiate the premise that the conventions of neoVictorian subgenres offer useful metaphors for our engagement with the Victorian past. Part Two examines some of the tropes which play a central role in both Victorian and neo-Victorian sensation fiction, specifically trauma, archaeology and history, and inheritance. It considers the manner in which contemporary cultural productions rework key aspects of the Victorian sensation novel to provide insights into issues frequently obscured in Victorian literature, such as sexual abuse. Through a consideration of these tropes, the study further develops its exploration of cultural engagements with the Victorian past, and its examination of the diversity and range of the afterlives of the sensation novel.

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Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction The discrepancies which are apparent in the critical narrative of the history of sensation fiction are similarly reflected in critical discourses which seek to map the history of neo-Victorian literature and culture. According to the dominant narrative in this field, the close of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of literary modernism and a new breed of writers who rejected the conventions of Victorian literature. These were epitomised by Ezra Pound, who declared, ‘the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant […] that we are content to leave the past where we find it’.5 This attitude, according to this discourse, remained largely unchallenged in literary circles until the 1960s, when several postmodern novels drawing on Victorian literature and culture appeared—notably Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). These texts, so the story goes, inaugurated the genre of neo-­ Victorian fiction, which grew rapidly and has subsequently come to be represented by the literary fiction of authors including Graham Swift, A. S. Byatt, and Sarah Waters. This reading of the emergence and development of neo-Victorian fiction depends on a definition of the form which privileges the notion of a text’s ‘self-conscious engagement’ with the Victorian period and its literature.6 As an academic discipline, neo-­ Victorianism initially focused predominantly on ‘highbrow’ literary art, largely excluding or dismissing popular middlebrow and lowbrow texts—those which mimic in a more literal sense Victorian sensation novels. This trend towards excluding certain fictional works from scholarly discussions is evident in critical attempts to define neo-Victorianism and to set the parameters for the genre. These have tended to emphasise the importance of the ‘knowing’ text, which engages in a deliberate way with Victorian literature and history and hence with the ‘knowing’ reader. In her foundational article ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’ (1997), Dana Shiller defines the neo-Victorian novel as ‘at once characteristic of postmodernism 5  Quoted in Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 1. The quotation is the starting point for Mitchell’s study. Other neo-Victorian critical works begin with a similar evocation of early twentieth-century attitudes towards the Victorians, as is the case in Louisa Hadley’s Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, which opens with Lytton Strachey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 1). 6  See Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the TwentyFirst Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4.

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and imbued with a historicity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel’.7 Daniel Bormann, in The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel (2002), similarly emphasises the importance of the text’s active engagement with the Victorians: A neo-Victorian novel is a fictional text which creates meaning from the background of awareness of time as flowing and as poised uneasily between the Victorian past and the present; which secondly deals dominantly with topics which belong to the field of history, historiography and/or the philosophy of history in dialogue with a Victorian past[.]8

The definition of neo-Victorianism offered by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn in their work, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-­ First Century (2010), is another case in point: … a series of metatextual and metahistorical conjunctions as they interact within the fields of exchange and adaptation between the Victorian and the contemporary. … [T]he “neo-Victorian” is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. … [T]exts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians.9

These—and other—critical definitions of neo-Victorianism emphasise the importance of the text’s active engagement and dialogue with history, and hence the necessity of an informed and critical understanding of the period. Popular historical fiction, which is less likely to engage with metatextual strategies, has thus been largely excluded from the neo-­ Victorian debate. At the same time, many of the literary descendants of The Woman in White—works like Fingersmith, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), and Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister—like Walter Hartright, have climbed the social ladder and undergone a transformation into something more ‘respectable’. To this end, then, the neo-Victorian ‘canon’ seems to mimic the con­ struction of the wider English literary canon in the early twentieth century: 7  Dana Shiller, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29:4 (1997), p. 538. 8  Daniel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel (Bern: Lang, 2002), p. 62. 9  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 4, emphasis in original.

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privileging ‘literary’ writers, and excluding popular fiction.10 In the last few years, these boundaries have begun to shift, and popular fiction and culture now play an increasingly prominent role in neo-Victorian critical debate. Recent neo-Victorian scholarship has encompassed historical detective fiction, Doctor Who, The Wire, and the steampunk movement, amongst other contemporary cultural interventions on the nineteenth century.11 Marie-Luise Kohlke has argued for a more expansive definition of the genre, which encompasses ‘the full range and diversity of neo-Victorian writing’,12 asking ‘Why should romances by Fowles, Byatt, and Waters be admissible as neo-Victorian “literature”, whereas mass market historical fictions about the same period are dismissed a priori as not making the grade[?]’13 Heilmann and Llewellyn have also revised their earlier emphasis on ‘selfconscious engagement’ and identified the significance of ‘trace elements of potential engagement with the concepts behind neo-Victorianism’,14 which allows for the inclusion of a much wider range of texts within the neo-Victorian genre. Despite these proposed boundary shifts, popular ­ fiction continues to receive comparatively little attention within neoVictorian studies. Kohlke, whilst arguing for the expansion of the neoVictorian canon, is nonetheless somewhat dismissive of such narratives. Briefly referencing the popular historical fiction of Emily Brightwell and Elizabeth Peters,15 she concludes they ‘struck me as rather light/ light-hearted, seeking to entertain rather than promote serious historical insight or revision’, although she acknowledges that they do ‘revisit 10  For a more detailed analysis of this, see my article ‘Canonisation, Colonization, and the Rise of Neo-Victorianism’, English, 66:253 (2017), pp. 101–123. 11  See Catriona Mills, ‘“Such a Dazzling Display of Lustrous Legerdemain”: Representing Victorian Theatricality in Doctor Who’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6:1 (2013), pp.  148–179; Matthew Kaiser, ‘From London’s East End to West Baltimore: How the Victorian Slum Narrative Shapes The Wire’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds., NeoVictorian Families: Gender, Sexual, and Cultural Politics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp.  45–70; Rachel A.  Bowser and Brian Croxall, eds., Steampunk, Science, and (Neo) Victorian Technologies, Special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 3:1 (2010). 12  Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal’ in Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, eds., NeoVictorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 25. 13  Ibid., p. 29. 14  Heilmann and Llewellyn, ‘The Victorians Now: Global Reflections on Neo-Victorianism’, Critical Quarterly 55.1 (April 2013), pp. 24–42 (p. 24). 15  For a discussion of Brightwell’s Mrs. Jeffries series, see Chap. 3. On Peters’s Amelia Peabody books, see Chap. 6.

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­ ineteenth-century class and gender issues in ways that readily mesh with n existing neo-Victorian criticism on these topics’.16 Kohlke’s description of these works is significant: it suggests a tension between her desire to expand the neo-Victorian canon and a perceived lack of critical value in these types of texts. Particularly relevant to this study is that it also suggests the parallels between the Victorian sensation novel and popular historical fiction: both are ‘light’ rather than ‘serious’ literature, but both exhibit a particular concern with questions of gender and class. It is clear, then, that a significant part of the sensation novel’s legacy lies in the popular fiction traditionally overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant by neo-Victorian scholarship. This complex relationship between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction reflects, in some respects, Victorian literature: whilst the sensation novel was repeatedly constructed as a form of popular or ‘light’ literature—appealing to a mass readership and lacking ‘literary’ qualities—sensational tropes are persistently employed in more ‘respectable’ Victorian fiction, including the work of George Eliot (Adam Bede [1859]), Charles Dickens (passim), and the Brontës (Jane Eyre [1847], Wuthering Heights [1847], The Tenant of Wildfell Hall [1848]). The work of the Brontës, in particular, anticipates later sensation fiction, employing many of its central tropes, include domestic abuse, family secrets, bigamy, and (upper/middle-class) criminality. Victorian sensationalism, then, is not exclusive to popular cultural forms, just as neo-Victorian sensation fiction exists beyond highbrow, ‘literary’ fiction. This blurring of the boundary between popular (sensation) and literary fiction is also evident in the contemporary literary marketplace. Whilst the notion of ‘popular’ fiction might evoke the types of texts which typically feature in the Richard and Judy Bookclub, and ‘literary’ fiction suggest those which find their way onto the Booker shortlist, providing a definitive list of distinguishing features of each of these ‘types’ is not straightforward. The primary aim of popular fiction is often to entertain, but literary fiction also seeks to do this in varying degrees. Literary fiction may be said to exhibit an overarching concern with narrative art—with how the story is told—whilst popular fiction is typically plot-driven. This distinction forms the basis, broadly speaking, for the manner in which the terms are employed in this study, but, as is demonstrated in the critical readings of neo-sensation fiction, narrative participation in the genre of popular fiction does not preclude an engagement in metatextual games. Similarly,  Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein’, p. 34.

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‘literary’ fiction—as evident in the neo-Victorian novels of Sarah Waters, and Michael Cox, amongst others—often draws on the conventions of (Victorian) popular fiction. Much also depends on the reader: the critical, academic reader approaches a text in a different manner to the general reader whose primary aim may be entertainment or diversion. Critical expertise may enable the academic reader to understand subtle allusions to earlier narratives and histories. The meaning of a text, then, is dependent on the reader’s ability to interpret it. In the Afterword to his epic neo-Victorian novel The Quincunx (1989), Charles Palliser observes that a novel, in his view, represents ‘a structure of possible meanings which the reader is entitled to interpret in any way that is appropriate’.17 For Palliser, then, reader response is crucial in determining narrative meaning. Reader response theory might also be usefully employed to address the thorny issue of identifying neo-Victorian narratives, and defining the problematic and much disputed term, by shifting the emphasis from the ‘knowing’ text to the ‘knowing’ reader, so what becomes pertinent is not the narrative as self-consciously engaged text, as Heilmann, Llewellyn, and others have argued, but the reader, as self-consciously engaged interpreter of that text. For the ‘unknowing’ reader, unfamiliar with the Victorian literary and cultural landscape, the distinction between a ‘self-consciously engaged’ narrative, and one which is not rooted in historical accuracy or replete with intertextual references to Victorian texts, is not necessarily clear, so the distinction which Heilmann and Llewellyn draw between neo-Victorian fiction, and ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’ is rendered redundant: it depends entirely on the reader being able to respond to these different narratives in a particular way. For the ‘knowing’ reader, that distinction is, of course, evident, but what also becomes clear is the extent to which fictions seemingly lacking in historical accuracy may nonetheless be informed by literary traditions and narrative conventions which are indebted to the Victorian (popular) novel, even when the authors themselves may be unaware of this. Though not necessarily articulated as such, critical responses which emphasise the ‘self-conscious’ engagement of narratives represent a particular reader response to those narratives, and this then informs the critical construction of the wider genre. Such constructions are problematic, because the extent of a text’s ‘self-conscious engagement’ with the period 17  Charles Palliser, ‘Author’s Afterword’ in The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 1205.

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which would render it ‘neo-Victorian’ is difficult to both qualify and quantify, depending necessarily on a subjective perspective. What, then, is the relationship between sensation fiction and neo-­ Victorianism? Those works which rework the sensation novel and engage self-consciously with their Victorian forebears, thus fitting neatly into early critical definitions of neo-Victorianism, have, inevitably, received the most attention to date: Fingersmith, The Thirteenth Tale, Sleep, Pale Sister, and James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001), which all rework elements of The Woman in White, have been subject to neo-Victorian critical analysis, although much of this is not directly concerned with the narratives’ relationship to the Victorian sensation novel. Within Victorian sensation studies, there has been some limited exploration of the genre’s afterlife, although most of this criticism is not explicitly concerned with the genre’s influence on neo-Victorianism. Grace Moore’s contribution to Blackwell’s A Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011), ‘Neo-Victorian and Pastiche’, is a notable exception to this. Moore claims, crucially, that ‘neo-Victorian fiction has been in an almost constant dialog with the sensation genre since its inception’18 and posits ‘neo-sensationism’ as a subgenre of neo-­ Victorianism.19 However, the works Moore identifies as belonging to this subgenre, including Palliser’s The Quincunx, Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009), and Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006), all fall into the category of literary fiction, and thus her definition appears to implicitly exclude those works of popular fiction which draw on the conventions of the Victorian sensation novel: historical novels focused primarily on plot whose central aim is to entertain the reader. This trend is also evident in one of the only other studies to date to identify neo-sensation writing as a potential subgenre: Kelly A. Marsh’s ‘The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Genre in the Victorian Tradition’ (Philological Quarterly, 1995). Marsh similarly identifies authors of literary fiction, including Byatt, Swift, and Margaret Drabble, as the proponents of this form, again excluding works of popular fiction. A more recent article by Rosario Arias, ‘Neo-Sensation Fiction, or “Appealing to the Nerves”: Sensation and Perception in Neo-Victorian Fiction’ (2016), also examines Fingersmith, alongside John Harwood’s The Asylum (2013)—the latter being a work which in some respects bridges the gap between ‘literary’ and popular 18  Grace Moore, ‘Neo-Victorian and Pastiche’, in Pamela Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 627. 19  Ibid.

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historical fiction.20 Arias’s focus is distinct from mine, in concentrating on revisions of ‘the perception and sensory aspects of the Victorian sensation novel’.21 Mariaconcetta Costantini identifies Charles Palliser’s Rustication (2013) as an example of neo-sensation fiction22—another work which fits easily into critical definitions of self-consciously engaged neo-Victorian fiction. Beth Palmer, in her exploration of the legacies of the sensation novel in contemporary fiction (in relation to the literary marketplace) also privileges Waters, alongside Michel Faber’s epic neo-Victorian novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).23 Whilst these various works do indeed represent part of the sensation novel’s afterlives, there is a significant irony in the idea that its primary legacy lies in the award-winning literary fiction of writers such as Waters and Byatt, given the genre’s own position as a key form of Victorian popular culture. Amongst other things, this study seeks to address this process of exclusion, and to posit a more expansive definition of neo-sensationalism. This, then, necessitates an attempt to critically define ‘neo-­ sensationalism’. In its broadest sense, this might refer to any work which draws implicitly or explicitly on the workings (plot, characters, tropes, themes, structure, effect) of the Victorian sensation novel. This definition, though, is in danger of becoming obsolete as a consequence of its expansiveness, so it is worth establishing some clearer generic parameters. Drawing on definitions of either sensation fiction or neo-Victorianism in order to assist this process is problematic, as both terms are the subject of intense critical debate, with no agreed definition. Nonetheless, some of the central concerns of the sensation novel must also feature prominently in neo-sensation narratives: crime, secrets, identity, transgressive women, the family, and the apparently ‘respectable’ home. Paradoxically, the blurring of different generic conventions might also be seen as a defining feature of the form: the sensation novel combines elements of melodrama, the Gothic, the Newgate novel, detective fiction, and literary realism, and  See Chap. 7.  Rosario Arias, ‘Neo-Sensation Fiction, or “Appealing to the Nerves”: Sensation and Perception in Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Mariaconcetta Costantini and Saverio Tomaiuolo, eds., Neo-Victorian Deviance, Special Issue, RSV, 40 (2016), p. 14. 22  Mariaconcetta Costantini, ‘When Deviance Becomes the Norm: Neo-Sensational Excess, Pastiche, and Textual Manipulation in Charles Palliser’s Rustication’ in Costantini and Tomaiuolo, eds., Neo-Victorian Deviance, pp. 51–68. 23  Beth Palmer, ‘Are the Victorians Still With Us? Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century’, Victorian Studies, 52:1 (Autumn 2009), pp. 86–94. 20 21

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generic instability is also a feature of neo-sensation narratives. Those texts which explicitly adapt specific sensation novels are easily identifiable as examples of neo-sensationalism, but other works engage more subtly with these conventions—popular historical detective series, for example. Much neo-Victorian writing draws heavily on the conventions of the Gothic, and indeed this is a key influence on the sensation novel itself. Sensation fiction, though, transforms the Gothic in several key ways, as  discussed in the following chapter, but most importantly for a definition of neo-­ sensationalism is the undercutting of supernatural elements in favour of a rational explanation, although notions of fate and destiny do feature in the work of Wood, Collins and their contemporaries. With this in mind, an additional feature of most neo-sensation texts is the absence of the supernatural. The question of ‘when’ is also pertinent here. At what point do neo-­ sensational cultural forms emerge? The 1960s is widely acknowledged as a key period in the emergence of neo-Victorianism, although some earlier works, such as Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953), have been identified as neo-Victorian.24 As the opening of this work evidences, contrary to dominant critical discourses, the Victorian sensation novel is never relegated to obscurity: rather it survives in multiple and various guises. Indeed, it appears in what we might term its ‘original’ form until at least 1916, the year in which Braddon’s final novel is published. At what point, then, does the sensation novel become the neo-sensation novel? Sensation fiction as a genre is constantly adapting not only other literary forms and texts, but also itself. Both Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) rework elements of The Woman in White, whilst all three of these genre-defining works owe something to Charlotte Brontë’s proto-sensation novel Jane Eyre (1847). Read as a reimagining of The Woman in White, then, does Lady Audley’s Secret become a neo-sensation novel? Although this suggestion seems slightly preposterous, I argue that neo-sensation fiction did appear in the nineteenth century: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), which draws on Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), is one potential example, whilst a clearer representative of the form is evident in Austin Fryer’s A New Lady Audley 24  See Marie Luise Kohlke, ‘Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection’ in Marie Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds., Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 221–250.

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(1891), which satirises Braddon’s work.25 This study, then, does not restrict the definition of ‘neo-sensation’ to works appearing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but argues that the legacy of sensation fiction begins, paradoxically, shortly after the genre’s first emergence in the midnineteenth century. In the final section of this chapter, I begin the process of evidencing this, as well as considering the diversity of that legacy, via an exploration of the cultural afterlives of The Woman in White—the narrative which serves most frequently as an intertext for subsequent works. Whilst the conventions of the sensation genre more generally obviously inform its afterlives, and other narratives—notably The Moonstone and Lady Audley’s Secret—are also employed as intertexts, it is Collins’s most successful novel that remains the dominant reference point in cultural reimaginings of sensation fiction.

Women in White: Wilkie Collins’s (Neo-)Sensational Afterlives In Tim Kelly’s 1975 stage adaptation of The Woman in White, advertised as an ‘astonishing and inspiring melodrama’26 and  entitled Egad, The Woman in White, the woman of the title, Anne Catherick, is rendered speechless. She appears on stage at the end of Act One, Scene 3, ‘points a damning finger after [the villain] Percival and starts to condemn him, but all that comes out of her mouth is incoherent gibberish’ (35). She re-enacts the same performance in the following scene, ‘points her finger at Percival, and, again, gives out with vindictive gibberish with the single word “villain” clear every now and again’ (42). She dies shortly after this, Percival having placed her next to an open door during a blizzard in order to exacerbate her final illness. Her inability to speak her experience is suggestive of the problem of articulating the past in the present: she represents something which cannot be clearly expressed, can only be understood through a range of discordant, fragmented, and not necessarily representative voices and narratives. In a departure from Collins’s novel, via a convoluted plot, in Kelly’s version Anne’s mother is imprisoned in an asylum, and encouraged to act out the role of Queen Victoria. The reference leads Marian to question Walter Hartright: ‘has Percival locked up the real Victoria and placed a look-alike on the throne of England?’ (59) Though  For further discussion of Fryers’s work, see Conclusion.  Tim Kelly, Egad, The Woman in White (London: Samuel French, 1975), p. 1.

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part of the production’s comic melodrama, the question nonetheless highlights the complexity of the relationship between Victorian and neo-Victorian cultural iterations: neo-Victorian writers and producers are engaged in a process of masquerade, disguising their cultural productions as Victorian narratives, presenting audiences with idiosyncratic images of the past and encouraging them to look beyond the imitation. This is evident in contemporary reworkings of the Victorian sensation novel, and particularly in the plethora of adaptations of The Woman in White, which, via its central tropes of haunting, doubling, and detection, provides a series of metaphors for the wider neo-Victorian project. This study explores these tropes at length: in part one, via an exploration of the genres of Gothic, detection, and YA neo-sensation fiction, and in part two through a detailed examination of some of the key themes and motifs of the contemporary genre—specifically (sexual) trauma, historical investigation, and inheritance. The influence of Victorian sensation fiction is ubiquitous, infiltrating contemporary cultural forms from ‘literary’ fiction to soap opera, and rendering neo-sensationalism a varied and disparate genre, resistant to critical definition and containment. Haunting this literary and cultural landscape is the figure of the woman in white. The most self-evident and identifiable descendants of the sensation novel are works which explicitly rewrite, reimagine, or adapt specific Victorian sensation narratives, and The Woman in White has proved particularly influential in this respect, spawning an increasing number of literary, stage, and screen adaptations, as well as other multimedia, including a computer game and an online reading project.27 The apparent return from the dead of Collins’s heroine, Laura Fairlie, suggests an apt metaphor for the novel’s repeated literary and cultural returns. It seems apposite that Collins’s woman in white, Anne Catherick, whose ghostly appearance in the middle of a moonlit road in the dead of night enthralled Walter Hartright and a generation of Victorian readers, should continue to haunt the literary and cultural imagination, providing the starting point for a neo-Victorian return to a past which remains a spectral presence.28 She exerts a particular appeal for what 27  The online reading project presented the novel in its original parts for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its publication (see http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/ wilkie/etext/womaninwhite/twiw_front_00.htm). Big Fish Games produced a hidden object computer game based on Collins’s novel in 2010. 28  Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham’s edited collection, Haunting and Spectrality in NeoVictorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), explores the Victorian past spectral presence in contemporary fiction at length.

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Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss term that ‘collective imagination’ which ‘keeps appropriating the Victorian age, and keeps turning it into a contemporary phenomenon (or phantom)’.29 The remainder of this chapter considers the afterlife of Collins’s seminal sensation novel via an examination of its literary and cultural reiterations, as a means of initiating an exploration of the broader legacy of sensation fiction. The focus is on works which specifically adapt and appropriate plot and character from Collins’s novel—what Kohlke terms ‘self-conscious appropriations of prior nineteenth-century sources’.30 In this sense, the discussion is concerned with texts which Julie Sanders  defines as ‘adaptations’ (those texts which specifically adapt The Woman in White) and ‘appropriations’ (works which ‘affect a more decisive journey away from the informing source’,31 but which are nonetheless clearly indebted). In line with Sanders’s definitions, adaptations include screen and stage versions of Collins’s novel, which largely maintain Collins’s plot and character, while appropriations refer to (particularly literary) works which appropriate elements of the text (for instance, the doubling of Anne/ Laura and the consequent false imprisonment in the asylum), but create a distance with the source text by introducing alternative characters and settings. The discussion includes an overview of re-visitations to the novel from the 1860s to the present day, and examines some of the contemporary concerns and contexts which shape these returns. The novel’s place as a key source text for both neo-Victorianism and neo-sensationalism is explored, in relation to the multitude of media, forms, and genres which have laid claim to the narrative. The final part of the chapter considers The Woman in White and its legacy in light of the wider neo-Victorian ­project through an exploration of the narrative tropes and motifs which represent both a focal point for literary and cultural returns to the text, and a series of metaphors for the relationship between past and present. Victorian Literary Afterlives Along with a select number of other Victorian works, The Woman in White stands as a key source text within the neo-Victorian genre. Notable 29  Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, ‘Introduction: Fashioning the NeoVictorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions’ in Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 15. 30  Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein’, p. 24. 31  Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 26.

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amongst these narratives are Jane Eyre,32 Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights (1847),33 Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861),34 and, from the fin de siècle, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),35 and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).36 Linda Hutcheon, employing the language of evolution, observes: Some [stories] have great fitness through survival (persistence in a culture) or reproduction (number of adaptations). […] Stories do get retold in different ways in new material and cultural environments; like genes, they adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation—in their “offspring” or their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive; they flourish.37

Why, then, do some Victorian narratives ‘flourish’ more than others, despite parallels in reception, popularity, and critical attention? Why do certain stories appeal so strongly to contemporary writers, producers, and audiences? Sally Shuttleworth notes that ‘In the looser arena of what is now most commonly termed neo-Victorian fiction, the presiding genius seems less George Eliot and more Wilkie Collins’.38 A brief consideration 32  Notable adaptations include director Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 film version, artist Paula Rego’s lithographs (2002), and, most famously, Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. 33  Although a popular neo-Victorian source text, Wuthering Heights has resulted in fewer adaptations and appropriations than Jane Eyre. In her 1996 work, Brontё Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Patsy Stoneman (1996) identifies over forty novels influenced by Jane Eyre, compared to less than twenty inspired by Wuthering Heights, though additional works related to both have appeared since. 34  Dickens’s novel has been subject to at least twenty screen adaptations, and inspired several works of fiction, including Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), and Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2014). 35  The character of Dracula features in over two hundred film and television productions, while literary adaptations include Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) and Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula: The Un-Dead (2009). Theatrical and computer game adaptations also proliferate. 36  The cultural afterlife of James’s novella includes an opera (Benjamin Britten, 1954), ballet (Royal Ballet, 1999), several notable films including The Innocents (1961) and The Others (2001), multiple stage adaptations (most recently, Tim Luscombe’s 2018 production), and a plethora of neo-Victorian novels including John Harding’s Florence and Giles (2010) and A. N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005). 37  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 32. 38   Sally Shuttleworth, ‘From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries’ in Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss, eds., Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 182.

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of these neo-Victorian source texts supports this: as works of popular fiction, their appeal extends far beyond academia and scholarship—indeed beyond their own textual boundaries, as many who encounter these narratives do so through adaptations rather than via the original. While all these works now frequently appear on university syllabuses, as works of Victorian popular fiction, they were not (with the exception of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights) part of the traditional academic canon. Sensation and Gothic fiction were excluded from university syllabuses for much of the twentieth century until new theoretical directions—in particular, the emergence of feminist literary criticism and cultural studies—led to the dramatic expansion of the canon. Despite this, these works have remained perennially popular with a wider public. It is inevitable that those works whose popularity with readers has endured should prove attractive to those adapting Victorian fiction for page, stage, or screen. In their literary and cultural afterlives, these texts function as ‘genre-benders’: they spawn not only popular adaptations, but works spanning the cultural spectrum from ‘lowbrow’ to ‘highbrow’, encompassing a diverse range of media and genres, including erotica, period drama, literary fiction, horror films, and computer games. Certain shared features of these narratives offer further insights into their appeal. Generically, they are associated with one another through their relationship to Victorian sensation fiction. While The Woman in White is a defining example of the form, both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre represent proto-sensation novels.39 Though published some years before the genre was widely recognised (in the 1860s), they exhibit many of its identifying features, including a concern with family secrets, class and gender relations, madness, and the domestic gothic. Jane Eyre in particular, with its would-be bigamist and imprisoned madwoman, is an important urtext for Victorian sensation writers, influencing both The Woman in 39  Both Victorian and later critics have acknowledged the relationship between Jane Eyre and sensation fiction. Margaret Oliphant cites Brontё’s novel as a key influence on the genre (Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1867, p. 258), whilst Winifred Hughes suggests it is a ‘direct ancestor of the sensation novel’ (The Maniac in the Cellar [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], p. 8). More recently, Lyn Pykett has argued that ‘the Brontёs might […] be seen as early sensation novelists’ (‘Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel’, Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], p. 219).

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White40 and Lady Audley’s Secret.41 As a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre, James’s The Turn of the Screw is also associated with the sensation novel. Great Expectations is concerned with domestic secrets and class hierarchies, and, significantly, is the only one of Dickens’s novels included in Andrew Maunder’s exhaustive bibliography of sensation fiction.42 While Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula are distinct from the sensation novel as a consequence of their emphasis on the supernatural,43 they nonetheless evince similar concerns: with the secrets which lie at the heart of respectable society, and the potential for appearances to deceive. Dracula additionally resembles the sensation novel— and The Woman in White in particular—through its epistolary structure and multiple narrative perspectives (features shared by Wuthering Heights).44 These neo-Victorian source texts are similarly engaged with the gothic genre.45 The narratives are ‘haunted’ by figures both natural and supernatural: Bertha Mason and Miss Havisham ‘haunt’ Thornfield and Satis House, respectively; Heathcliff is tormented by Cathy’s ghost; Collins’s ghostly Anne Catherick is a spectral presence in his narrative46; James’s narrator is plagued by the ghosts at Bly, which may or may not be a figment of her imagination, while in Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde, extreme supernatural forces are at work. Gothic settings mark another point of similarity, and the generic links between these texts and their subsequent adaptations evidence the con­tinuing

40  The plot of Collins’s novel appears to be loosely based on Jane Eyre: the governess is replaced by the figure of the art tutor; like Jane, Walter Hartright is appointed to work at a grand house, where he falls in love, but is prevented from marrying by an earlier betrothal. As in Jane Eyre, the ‘impediment’ to Walter and Laura’s marriage is removed through Sir Percival Glyde’s fiery death, echoing the death of Bertha at Thornfield. 41  Lady Audley’s Secret also features a poor governess who significantly improves her social position through marriage, as well as touching on the themes of madness and bigamy. 42  Andrew Maunder, ‘Bibliography of Sensation Fiction’ in Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), Vol. 1, p. 308. 43  Supernatural events are an occasional, rather than dominant feature in sensation fiction, and tend to take the form of premonitions rather than representations of supernatural beings. 44  For a discussion of some of the parallels between The Woman and White and Dracula, see Katrien Bollen, ‘An Intertext That Counts? Dracula, The Woman in White, and Victorian Imaginations of the Foreign Other’, English Studies, 90:4 (Aug 2009), pp. 403–420. 45  This is explored at greater length in the following chapter. 46  The Woman in White may have influenced Dickens. Robin Gilmour suggests Collins’s novel ‘anticipates the preoccupation with disguise and secrecy, with the figure of the white woman and the dead-yet-alive character in Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend’ (‘The Novel in the Age of Equipoise’ in Harold Bloom [ed.], The Victorian Novel [New York: Chelsea House, 2004] p. 109).

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popularity of both Gothic and sensation fiction in contemporary literature and culture. Additionally, these narratives exhibit an overarching concern with issues of identity—a concern central to the neo-Victorian project. As Shuttleworth observes: neo-Victorian ‘Plots and preoccupations focus more on the slippery nature of identity than crises of conscience’.47 Jane Eyre and Great Expectations present traditional Bildungsroman narratives, tracing the protagonists’ development from childhood to adulthood. Elements of Bildung are also evident in The Woman in White, in which Walter Hartright, like Jane, ultimately rises in status through marriage, but only after successfully overcoming a series of obstacles. To this end, Collins’s novel can be read as a quest narrative (also emphasised by Walter’s trip to central America, where he escapes ‘Death by disease, death by the Indians, [and] death by drowning’ [415]), and thus it exhibits further parallels with Stoker’s later work, in which Van Helsing and his ‘Crew of Light’ embark on a quest to destroy Dracula and save Mina. Questions of morality, and of the relationship between self and society permeate all the texts, while (nervous and fluctuating) states of mind and the blurred boundary between sanity and madness are also central. The double, or Doppelgänger, is a recurrent feature—most notably Jane and Bertha, Anne and Laura, and Jekyll and Hyde. The centrality of the theme of identity in both Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction supports Sarah Waters’s suggestion that the Victorian period is frequently constructed as ‘a psychological landscape’,48 and further suggests the reasons behind the popularity of these narratives in contemporary literature and culture as a means of exploring not only Victorian identities, but modern ones as well. What, then, can the literary and cultural descendants of Collins’s novel tell us about the encounter between Victorian and subsequent literature and culture, and our understanding and perceptions of the past? A review which appeared shortly after the novel’s publication in three volumes noted: ‘Each of [Collins’s] stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume […] Nobody ever leaves one of [Collins’s] tales unfinished. […] But then very few feel at all inclined to read them a second  Shuttleworth, ‘From Retro- to Neo-Victorian’, p. 182.  Abigail Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”: Sarah Waters on neo-Victorian narrative celebrations and why she stopped writing about the Victorian era’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), p. 45. 47 48

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time’.49 The enduring popularity of Collins’s novel some one hundred and fifty years after its first publication contradicts this: it is a text to which readers and writers repeatedly return. These insistent cultural returns offer useful metaphors for the ‘puzzle’ of the relationship between the Victorians and ourselves, and their tropes and motifs serve not only as a mirror for contemporary concerns, but enable a particular construction of the relationship between ‘then’ and ‘now’. The familiar view of The Woman in White as a defining work of sensation fiction risks obscuring its generic complexity, mirrored by Collins’s own ambivalent position in the Victorian literary marketplace. Sensation fiction was not widely recognised as a distinct genre until after the publication of Collins’s novel,50 so he was not working intentionally within defined generic boundaries. The relationship between his work and that of other sensation authors is complex. Persistently compared to other writers, Collins was variously praised and criticised by Victorian critics. An 1860 article in the Saturday Review suggested that ‘Collins is an admirable story-teller, though he is not a great novelist’.51 Another critic proposed that ‘a writer like George Eliot may look down from a very far height on such a dweller in the plains as he who wrote The Woman in White’,52 while Algernon Charles Swinburne concluded simply ‘Collins was not a Dickens’.53 Elsewhere, Collins was credited with being ‘the ablest representative’54 of the sensation school, and frequently cited as superior to his female contemporaries. Henry James, referring to Mary Elizabeth Braddon as ‘the founder of the sensation novel’, proposed that ‘Mr Collins’s productions deserve a more respectable name’.55 Collins, then, occupied the hinterland between critically acclaimed, respectable ‘literary’ author, and writer of popular fiction for the masses.56 This is significant in terms of his literary and cultural legacy and the contemporary  Anon., review of The Woman in White, Saturday Review (25 August 1860), p. 249.  The term ‘sensation novel’ appeared in American journals in the 1850s, but was not commonly used in British publications until the early 1860s. 51  Anon., review of The Woman in White, p. 249. 52  Anon., ‘Recent Popular Novels’, Dublin University Magazine (February 1861), p. 200. 53  Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Wilkie Collins’, Fortnightly Review (November 1889), p. 599. 54  Anon., review of No Name, Reader (3 January 1863), p. 15. 55  Henry James (Unsigned), ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation (9 November 1865), p. 593. 56  While Dickens was undoubtedly a popular writer, he avoided the label ‘sensation novelist’, frequently used pejoratively, and was more successful than Collins in garnering critical praise for his work. 49 50

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works which adapt and reimagine his fictions, which themselves frequently inhabit the space between ‘highbrow’ and popular narratives, mirroring The Woman in White. This assessment is similarly suggestive in terms of the broader sensation genre—also marked by generic ambivalence: although certain novels are clearly identified as sensation fiction, as previously noted, many of the conventions of the genre permeate throughout Victorian literature, from the proto-sensation narratives of the Brontёs to the realist fiction of Dickens, Gaskell, and Eliot, in which family secrets, fallen women, crime, and madness frequently play a role. As Lyn Pykett observes, ‘sensation plots, sensation types, sensation themes and sensation machinery belonged to the general store of conventions on which all novelists drew’.57 The ubiquitous legacy of sensation fiction is thus linked to the ubiquity of sensationalism in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace—even before the emergence of sensation fiction as a specific genre. The intertexts for The Woman in White are varied and its generic engagements diverse. The latter includes Gothic fiction, melodrama, silver fork and Newgate novels, the Victorian popular press,58 the epistolary novel, and folklore. In addition to Jane Eyre, other specific works which may have influenced Collins’s most successful novel include Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1321),59 Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacobo Ortis (1798–1802),60 Maurice Méjan’s Recueil des Causes Célèbres (1808),61 whilst the epistolary narrative employing multiple narrative voices is reminiscent of various earlier works including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The narrative’s generic diversity contributes to its popularity as a neo-Victorian intertext, in which role it has influenced similarly diverse literary, screen, and cultural adapta­ tions. The Woman in White thus stands as an exemplar of the sensation novel’s broader generic indeterminacy: initially perceived as a relatively 57  Lyn Pykett, ‘The Sensation Legacy’ in Mangham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 211. 58  On the influence of the popular press on sensation fiction, see Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 59  See Peter Caracciolo, ‘Wilkie Collins’s ‘Divine Comedy’: The Use of Dante in The Woman in White’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25:4 (March 1971), pp. 383–404. 60  See Shifra Hochberg, ‘Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacobo Ortis and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White: A Case for Possible Influence’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal, 11 (2012), n.p. 61  See Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press (2005), p. 16.

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insignificant subgenre of the Victorian novel associated primarily with the 1860s, its chronological, narrative, and generic boundaries—as well as its legacy—have increasingly been reappraised in recent years.62 It is in part the indeterminacy of Collins’s novel which has fuelled repeated returns to the narrative and thus contributed to its status as a neo-­Victorian urtext. Victorian Women in White The process of revisiting The Woman in White began shortly after its initial publication, and thus originates with Victorian, rather than neo-Victorian adaptations. The novel’s overwhelming success demonstrated the economic potential for this ‘type’ of fiction, and imitators soon followed. East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret, both of which were to become defining texts of the sensation genre, drew on general and specific themes and tropes of The Woman in White. Questions of identity, secrets of domestic life, and the role of women lie at the heart of all three narratives, and in each the female protagonist is presumed dead and subsequently reappears under a false name. In the years following the publication of Collins’s novel, a spate of sensation novels featuring characters wrongly imprisoned in asylums appeared, including Terence Doyle’s The Two Households (1860), Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), Dutton Cook’s The Trials of the Tredgolds (1864), and F. Devonshire’s Emily Foinder (1866). The plot of false imprisonment remained popular throughout the nineteenth century: later examples include Henry George Churchill’s Puttyput’s Protégé (1872), Albert Evans’s Revealed at Last (1873), and Annie Bradshaw’s Wife and Slave (1890).63 Several stage adaptations appeared soon after the novel’s publication. The first of these was J. Ware’s The Woman in White: A Drama in Three Acts, performed at The Surrey Theatre in London in November 1860 following the conclusion of the serialised novel in All the Year Round in August 1860.64 Ware made several significant alterations to 62  Maunder’s 2004 ‘Bibliography of Sensation Fiction’, for example, includes works published between 1855 and 1890, while in their 2006 collection, Richard Fantina and Kimberly Harrison contend that ‘a full understanding of [sensation] fiction requires that we look throughout the Victorian period and not just to the “sensational sixties”’ (Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre [Columbus: Ohio State University Press], p. xiii). 63  This element of Collins’s plot also plays a central role in later literary adaptations, including Waters’s Fingersmith and Harwood’s The Asylum. 64  See Karen E.  Laird, ‘“No paste-and-scissors version”: The Woman in White’s Stage Debut’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 36:2 (2014), pp. 179–199.

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Collins’s narrative, omitting some scenes (including Walter’s initial midnight encounter with Anne Catherick, despite its obvious dramatic resonance) and introducing others. Fosco’s role as sensation villain is further emphasised via the inclusion of scenes in which he poisons Anne Catherick and threatens Laura with a gun. Two further theatrical versions of The Woman in White were licensed by the Lord Chamberlain in 1861,65 and Collins’s own stage adaptation of the novel was first performed at the Olympic Theatre in London in 1871.66 By the mid-1860s, the popularity of sensation fiction, and The Woman in White in particular, was inspiring satires and parodies, including Watts Phillips’s The Woman in Mauve: A Sensation Melodrama, which opened at the Haymarket theatre in London in 1865. Described by one reviewer as ‘a satire on sensation productions in general’,67 it mocks the contemporary craze for the sensational through its portrayal of Frank Jocelyn, a man obsessed with sensation novels. It opens with him absorbed in The Woman in White, before being interrupted by his friend, Lancelot Harvey, a medical man who suggests that ‘Frank’s absurd love of romance begins to unfit him for our commonplace, matter-of-fact every day life’, and who advises his friend to ‘Try a vegetable diet, cut the circulating libraries, by never cutting the leaves of a novel, and avoid the theatres’.68 A series of improbable events follows, including the appearance of a mysterious Count (a caricature of Count Fosco) and a fall into an old well, from which he subsequently manages to escape (an allusion to Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret). Jocelyn eventually abandons sensation novels, and consequently affirms, ‘My sensations are all pleasant ones’ (22). Reviewers were unimpressed with Phillips’s production. Punch described it as ‘a joke in three acts […] [A] well-meaning, but very unsatisfactory and somewhat vulgar attempt to ridicule sensational literature’.69 Reviewers’ objections 65  See Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1852–1866, ‘1861’ (https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ dramaandtheatre/documents/pdf/lcp/playslicensedin1861.pdf). 66  Collins adapted several of his novels for the stage, including Armadale (1866; adapted into Miss Gwilt, 1876), Man and Wife (1870, adapted 1873), and The New Magdalen (1873; adapted the same year). 67  Anon., Review, The Athenaeum (March 25 1865), p. 428. 68  Watts Phillips, The Woman in Mauve: A Sensation Drama in Three Acts (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, n.d.), p. 11. The scene anticipates Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, in which Margaret Lea is advised by the doctor to avoid works such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and read Sherlock Holmes instead (Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale [London: Orion, 2006], pp. 338–340). 69  Anon., ‘The Stage from the Front’, Punch (April 1 1865), p. 134.

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to the play lay partly in the focus of its satirical attack. The Saturday Review argued that ‘Utterly to deprive plays of the “sensational” element would be neither more nor less than to make them ineffective’,70 while The Examiner wrote: ‘If plays and stories turning with strong interest upon incidents of crime are to be put down as “sensational”, let us bury our Shakespeares […] and burn half the best novels in our language’.71 This was not a defence of sensation fiction—many of the same journals regularly mocked and condemned the genre—but an acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of sensation which rendered any wholesale condemnation invalid. The success of sensational incidents in literature and drama depended, reviewers suggested, on the manner in which they were deployed. The Examiner review continued: ‘The same tale of bigamy and murder that excites a merely vulgar curiosity when told in the Braddonian way of kitchen thought and kitchen English might be exalted into an immortal work of genius by the mere difference of mind through which it comes to us’, and described Collins’s novel as ‘a work of incomparably more genius than Mr Watts Phillips’s play’.72 The significance of Phillip’s play, then, lies less in its content than in its role as a contemporary response to Collins’s novel and the wider genre of sensation fiction. The reaction it elicited provides a valuable insight into Victorian attitudes towards the sensational, and an acknowledgement of the ubiquity of the sensational in multiple cultural forms which, in turn, contribute to its ubiquitous legacy. Collins’s own theatrical adaptation of The Woman in White, like Ware’s earlier  production, introduced new scenes and alterations. Indeed, particularly in the early revelation of a number of the story’s secrets and the final scene, Collins’s version contains strong echoes of Ware’s play. The source text for Collins’s play, then, appears to be not only his own novel, but its subsequent unauthorised adaptation, emphasising the complexity of the adaptation process and what Hutcheon terms ‘the politics of intertextuality’.73 In the Prologue to Collins’s drama, several key pieces of information are revealed, including Glyde’s illegitimacy, his attempts to alter the marriage registry, and the possibility that Laura and Anne are half-sisters. As in Ware’s production, the figure of Laura Fairlie is more assertive and spirited than in the original. Christiana Salah observes,  Anon., ‘The Theatres’, Saturday Review (April 15 1865), p. 442.  Anon., ‘The Theatrical Examiner’, The Examiner (April 8 1865), p. 216. 72  Ibid. 73  Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. xii (emphasis in original). 70 71

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‘[a]lthough still victimised, Laura is no longer a passive figure but rather an observant and rebellious subject’.74 This tendency to alter the original narrative in order to grant Laura a greater degree of narrative agency is evident in many subsequent adaptations: in Constance Cox’s much later stage adaptation, for example, Laura proposes that Sir Percival release her from their marriage in return for ten thousand pounds, and her identity is eventually restored when she agrees to pay Count Fosco the same for his statement of events which will prove she is not Anne Catherick. As Laird observes, Ware’s Laura is ‘a more active heroine than the weak heroine of Collins’s novel’.75 This significant alteration points to another reason behind the popularity of certain narratives, including The Woman in White, as neo-Victorian source texts: adaptation enables revision, thus those narratives which contain unsatisfactory elements (in this instance, the insipid nature of Collins’s heroine) can be ‘corrected’. Further parallels are evident between Ware’s and Collins’s adaptations. In both, the final scenes depict Fosco’s murder—an incident reported but not directly witnessed in the original narrative. Ware’s play concludes with a duel between Walter and Fosco, which is interrupted by the arrival of a member of the Brotherhood who shoots and kills Fosco. Similarly, Collins’s adaptation ends with Fosco’s murder at the hands of the Brotherhood: he is stabbed in the heart as he prepares to leave England.76 The final line of Collins’s play is spoken by Madame Fosco who, knocking on the door of the room where the Count lies murdered, calls out, ‘Count! May I come in?’77 The violent dénouement to both plays stands in stark contrast to the vision of domestic happiness which closes the original novel, suggesting theatre audiences required a more dramatic conclusion and reflecting the widespread popularity of melodrama (the taste for which, Michael R. Booth observes, was ‘ubiquitous and classless’).78 Laird notes that Collins’s ‘playscript retracts the neat closure of his novel by refusing to provide an iconic final image of domestic bliss and giving us, in 74  Christiana Salah, ‘“This picture always haunted me”: Dramatic Adaptations of The Woman in White’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 3:2 (Spring 2010), p. 35. 75  Laird, ‘No paste-and-scissors version’, p.  185. The same is true of the BBC 2018 adaptation. 76  This may have influenced Fosco’s fate in the most recent BBC production, in which he has his throat cut by Pesca. 77  Collins, The Woman in White: A Drama (London: British Library, 2011), p. 88. 78  Michael R.  Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 152.

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its place, the spectacle of murder’.79 Nonetheless, both Ware and Collins’s adaptations adhere to Victorian narrative conventions in terms of their conclusions, providing retribution for the villain of the piece having already established the necessary circumstances for the hero and heroine’s happy union: while the ‘image of domestic bliss’ is absent from the conclusions of the plays, previous events have already assured it. The final line of Collins’s play brings to the forefront an issue central to the novel: the question of the inequality of marriage and women’s submissiveness to their husbands. This is explored in both novel and play through the marriages of Glyde and Laura, and Fosco and the Countess. In the original text, Marian comments on Eleanor Fosco’s transformation from advocate of the ‘Rights of Women’ to submissive wife80—a transformation which Fosco explains thus: ‘I ask, if a woman’s marriage obligations, in this country, provide for her private opinion of her husband’s principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honour, and obey him. That is exactly what my wife has done’ (604).81 In the play, the power which Fosco exerts over his wife is similarly emphasised. When she attempts to interrupt him, he speaks aggressively to her, and the stage directions further indicate the nature of their relationship: Fosco ‘Silence, madam! Are you master or am I?’ (He looks sternly at his wife.) Madame F. (humbly) You are master. (Her head drops. She stands submissive and trembling before her hus­ band.) (39)

The ‘private rod’ with which he rules his wife in the novel, and which ‘never appears in company’ (244) is thus in greater evidence in the play, rendering visible what is only alluded to in the narrative. At the close of the play, Madame Fosco’s ‘banal question is left unanswered, lingering in the air, in a purposefully disquieting style’.82 In ending his dramatic version with the figure of Madame Fosco, Collins again raises the spectre that haunts The Woman in White: that of the dangers of marriage for the Victorian woman. In this and other respects, Collins’s own adaptation of The Woman in White, along with other Victorian reworkings, laid the groundwork for later neo-Victorian transformations.  Laird, ‘No paste-and-scissors version’, p. 191.  Collins, The Woman in White (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2006), p. 256. 81  These words also appear in Collin’s play (The Woman in White: A Drama, p. 86). 82  Laird, ‘No paste-and-scissors version’, p. 192. 79 80

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Post-Victorian Women in White: Neo-Sensational Returns This ongoing process of revisiting The Woman in White renders the point at which these transformations become neo-Victorian illusive, the only clear point of transition being the arbitrary conclusion of the Victorian period. Notable post-Victorian theatrical adaptations include Kelly’s Egad, The Woman in White, an adaptation by Constance Cox (published posthumously in 2005), who adapted several other Victorian novels for the stage, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Lady Audley’s Secret, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical production. These productions are indebted not only to Collins’s novel, but to Victorian melodrama,83 musical theatre, and satires such as The Woman in Mauve. Egad, The Woman in White draws on the basic plot of Collins’s novel to create a parody of Victorian melodrama. The unhappy marriage between Laura and Sir Percival is played for humorous effect: Sir Percival, in his role as exaggerated comic villain, declares, ‘My wife and I are compatible. We both dislike each other’ (32). This, and other comic interventions indicate the influence of the stand-up comedy of the 1970s, thus the play represents a composite production, blending its central intertext with other Victorian and contemporary influences. Evidence of the influence of both sensation fiction and melodrama is found in the introduction of bigamy into the plotline (echoing the bigamy novels of the 1860s—a notable subgenre of sensation fiction). Unlike in Collins’s original narrative, in Kelly’s production Sir Percival’s secret is bigamy, thus the novel is used as a vehicle for a broader parody of the sensation novel—at a time when the genre languished in relative (critical) obscurity. The spectre of bigamy also appears in the 1940 film adaptation, Crimes at the Dark House, in which Sir Percival seemingly marries both Mrs Catherick and Laura Fairlie; however, in between these two marriages, the real Percival has been murdered by an imposter, thus the second marriage is not, in fact, bigamous. Cox’s adaptation also raises the possibility of a bigamy plot: Walter Hartright speculates that this may be Glyde’s secret, although ultimately the play remains true to the original in portraying him as illegitimate. Kelly’s engagement with the central themes of both The Woman in White and sensation fiction more generally is indicative of the popular legacy of the genre, evident in a wide array of cultural manifestations, and 83  On the relationship between melodrama and the sensation novel, see Andrew Maunder, ‘Sensation Fiction on Stage’ in Mangham, The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, pp. 52–69.

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with a far longer history than the critical legacy which represents a relatively recent development. Theatrical adaptations of the novel are thus not only reliant on the original narrative as source text, but also draw substantively on subsequent adaptations, reflecting an increasing trend for adapting adaptations, a process which potentially renders the original source text less ‘visible’. Sanders notes the frequency with which ‘adaptations adapt other adaptations’: ‘There is a filtration effect taking place, a cross-pollination’.84 Heilmann and Llewellyn ask, ‘what are we adapting: the Victorians/Victorian text or the mediation they/it have already undergone in popular culture?’ and note that ‘in an age of adaptation, what comes into play is not only the dialogue between new text and old but also the intertexts and interplays between different adaptations in their own right’.85 The adaptive afterlife of The Woman in White is a case in point: only ten years after the publication of the novel, Collins’s own stage version was inflected by both his original narrative and Ware’s earlier theatrical adaptation. Each subsequent appropriation of the text simultaneously draws on and creates additional intertexts, producing what Andrea Kirchknopf refers to as an ‘adaptive chain’,86 echoing J. Hillis Miller’s concept of ‘a long chain of parasitical presences—echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts’.87 This increasing body of intertexts includes not only creative responses to the novel in the form of literary, screen, and stage adaptations, but critical readings as well88; thus Victorian scholarship contributes to the creation of neo-Victorian narratives. If these ‘chains’ threaten to obscure the original source text (Kohlke suggests they risk its ‘eventual disappearance […] altogether’),89 they also serve to demonstrate the expansive legacy of particular texts and genres and (to return to Hutcheon’s analogy) their mutation into other forms and narratives—a mutation which enables (rather than inhibits) their survival.

 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 13.  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 212. 86  Andrea Kirchknopf, Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the 19th Century (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013), p. 2. 87  J.  Hillis Miller, ‘The Ethics of Reading’ (1987) in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 22. 88  The most recent television adaptation of The Woman in White (BBC, 2018), suggests the influence of feminist readings of sensation fiction: both Marian and Laura are more explicit in their feminism than in Collins’s original novel. 89  Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein’, p. 26. 84 85

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These ‘chains’ are further evident in the history of screen adaptations of The Woman in White. The first of these was an American-produced silent short, in 1912. This was followed by a longer production in 1917, entitled The Unfortunate Marriage. The latter is of note for Count Fosco’s transformation into Doctor Cuneo, who is wanted for embezzlement and experiments on animals, echoing Collins’s vivisectionist Dr Benjulia in his 1883 novel Heart and Science. This alteration contrasts sharply with the novel, in which Fosco’s love of animals marks one of the contradictory features of his character. The Unfortunate Marriage is not the only adaptation to transform the character of the villain. In Egad, The Woman in White, Fosco is excised completely, while Countess Fosco is the evil proprietor of the asylum where Anne Catherick is imprisoned. Further screen adaptations appeared over the next decades, including Crimes at the Dark House (1940), an adaptation which draws heavily on the conventions of Victorian melodrama, and three BBC productions: a six-part television series in 1982, which remains relatively faithful to the source text, a television movie in 1997, which, like several later adaptations of the novel, introduces the issue of sexual abuse, and a five-part television serial in 2018, which again is reasonably true to the source text. Several screen versions of literary re-workings of The Woman in White, including Fingersmith (BBC, 2005) and The Thirteenth Tale (Heyday Films, 2013), represent further links in the ‘adaptive chain’. Although it is possible to trace Collins’s influence on fiction throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the development of the detective novel,90 specific literary re-workings of The Woman in White become increasingly popular in the late twentieth century. They range from Booker Prize-nominated works to self-published short stories and online fan fiction. Titles which directly adapt aspects of Collins’s plot or recreate the original narrative’s characters include Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister, Wilson’s The Dark Clue, Water’s Fingersmith, Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, Linda Newbery’s Set in Stone (2006), Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn (2009), Harwood’s The Asylum, and the pseudonymous erotic short story, 90  Collins’s influence on a variety of authors and texts has been the subject of various critical discussions. A. B. Emrys examines the fiction of Collins and American writer Vera Caspary in Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), while Rory Bardly suggests Collins’s text as an influence on Nabokov in ‘The Woman in White as a Subtext in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ (Nabokovian, 61 [Fall 2008], pp. 14–23).

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‘The  Lady in White’ (2012).91 Several versions of The Woman in White rewritten for younger readers have also appeared,92 as well as comic93 and computer game adaptations. A brief examination of these illustrates the extent to which Victorian popular fiction has influenced and infiltrated almost every conceivable subgenre of neo-Victorian writing, including literary fiction (Fingersmith; Sleep, Pale Sister), bio-fiction (The Dark Clue), teen fiction (Wildthorn; Set in Stone), lesbian fiction (Fingersmith; Wildthorn), erotica (‘The Lady in White’) and (neo-)Gothic (all). If we broaden this to include contemporary works which engage more generally with the conventions, themes, and motifs of Collins’s novel, we find ourselves faced with an even wider range of sub-types of neo-Victorian and historical fiction—from A.  S. Byatt to Mills and Boon, Booker Prize to bonkbuster. In contrast, then, to the sometimes narrow critical definitions of neo-Victorianism, as the literary returns to The Woman in White indicate, neo-sensation fiction represents a diverse, expansive, and inclusive genre. Hutcheon’s evolutionary analogy is again relevant here: the multitude of contemporary reiterations of the novel suggests its flourishing afterlife is in part due to its ability to mutate into multiple generic variants. Despite vast generic differences in contemporary literary appropriations of The Woman in White, several common themes and motifs are identifiable. Although the erotic short story ‘The Lady in White’ is somewhat atypical, marking a generic shift towards the ‘lowbrow’ rather than ‘highbrow’, the introduction of a sexual narrative is indicative of a distinct trend within neo-sensation (and neo-Victorian) writing. This is one of several tropes evident in contemporary re-workings, which also include representations of violence and sexual abuse, as well as explorations of sexuality and sexual identity. Kelly’s and Lloyd Webber’s stage adaptations, drawing on the traditions of melodrama and musical theatre, respectively, are notable for their introduction of violence into the narrative. In Egad, The Woman 91  Fingersmith, Wildthorn, and The Asylum all employ Collins’s asylum plot, in which the heroine is falsely imprisoned in an asylum under a different name. Sleep, Pale Sister and The Thirteenth Tale also draw on Collins’s explorations of doubling and identity. The Dark Clue is written as a sequel to Collins’s novel, and includes many of the original characters. Set in Stone reworks Walter’s employment as art tutor at Limmeridge House. ‘The Lady in White’ adapts Walter Hartright’s initial encounter with Anne Catherick on a moonlit road in the middle of the night. 92  These include Richard G. Lewis’s retelling for younger readers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 93  Classics Illustrated produced a graphic novel version of The Woman in White in 1949.

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in White, Glyde beats Countess Fosco to death, in a scene described in the production notes as ‘the comic highlight of the mellerdrammer’ (77), while in Lloyd Webber’s musical, Glyde is physically violent to both Anne and Laura and—in a revelation which serves to update the sensational elements of the text for a twenty-first-century audience—is guilty of raping Anne and murdering their child. This trend is further evident in literary and screen adaptations, including Crimes at the Dark House, in which the villain (impersonating Sir Percival Glyde) murders at least four people, and, the subtext strongly suggests, rapes Laura and attempts to rape Marian. In Tim Fywell’s 1997 film, Glyde is revealed to have sexually abused Anne when she was a child. In Wilson’s The Dark Clue, a ‘sequel’ to The Woman in White, Walter rapes Marian, while Newbery’s young adult novel Set in Stone, and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, all feature sexual abuse and incest. As Salah notes, ‘Like Collins’ stage version before them, […] later adaptations reinterpret the social controversies that fuelled the original text and utilise the source material to explore deeply-held concerns of their own times’.94 The introduction of sexual trauma into adaptations and appropriations of The Woman in White suggests both an anxiety reflecting contemporary concerns, and an attempt to redress the absence of Victorian narratives of sexual abuse, to reveal what remained largely concealed in nineteenth-century literature and culture.95 The inclusion of narratives of lesbian desire represents another trend in contemporary adaptations and appropriations, including Fingersmith, Wildthorn, and The Asylum—also notable for their portrayals of murder and violence. These narratives contribute to a significant subgenre of neo-­ Victorian writing, which has sought to address the absence of homosexuality in nineteenth-century fiction. Within this body of work, Terry Castle’s ‘apparitional lesbian’—‘never with us, […] always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind’96—materialises and takes her place in the Victorian literary landscape. Lesbian fictions which adapt The Woman in White may also be drawing on particular (critical) interpretations of the novel, in which Marian is constructed as ‘queer’.97 The tendency to associate Marian with  Salah, ‘This picture always haunted me’, p. 33.  This issue is explored at length in Chap. 5. 96  Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 2. 97  See, for example, Laurel Erickson, ‘“In Short, She is an Angel; and I am –“: Odd Women and Same-Sex Desire in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’ in Marilyn Demarest Button 94 95

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sexual desire or sexual trauma in adaptations of The Woman in White points to a discomfort with her avowed single status in Collins’s original narrative. She occupies an ambivalent position as the ‘happy’ spinster, dependant, ‘queer’ woman, and object of desire (of both Walter and Fosco). The re-presentation of Marian suggests repeated attempts to address, and even resolve, the ostensibly liminal position she occupies in Collins’s novel. The focus on sexuality and sexual trauma in re-imaginings of The Woman in White evidences a popular trope in neo-Victorian productions, and is closely associated with the genre’s employment of sensation, or, as Kohlke terms it, ‘sexsation’, which she reads as a ‘contradictory celebration of libidinous fantasy and defilement’.98 Sexual narratives in the neo-sensation novel elicit a sense of disorientation, functioning as stark reminders of the contemporaneity of texts which otherwise seek to imitate mainstream Victorian fictions. In this respect, such representations are analogous to the figure of the criminal woman who appears as the angel of the hearth in the Victorian sensation novel (epitomised by Lady Audley): both initially serve to disrupt reader expectations before establishing themselves as a recognisable trope. If the introduction of narratives of violence, sexual trauma, and sexual desire mark a point of departure between Victorian sensation and neo-­ sensation narratives, contemporary appropriations and adaptations of The Woman in White nonetheless highlight the process of insistent return which characterises the neo-Victorian project. In employing Collins’s novel as source text, contemporary works both introduce and revisit narrative tropes and motifs, and in doing so enact a process of simultaneous returning and reimagining. This process is central to constructions and conceptions of the relationship between contemporary literature and culture and the Victorian past. The Woman in White and its cultural afterlives enable an exploration of this relationship precisely because several of the central tropes and motifs of the original narrative operate as symbols for the relationship between past and present. In particular, the generic conventions of both sensation and Gothic fiction which permeate the narrative, and which are consequently employed in subsequent adaptations, serve as metaphors for the connections between the contemporary and and Toni Reed (eds.), The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, Outsiders (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 95–116. 98   Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’ in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds.), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 67.

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Victorian. The novel is characterised by buried secrets, doubling, haunting, and detection, while deceptive appearances, inheritance, and textual ‘evidence’ are also key. In these narrative tropes and characteristics we find the metaphorical tools for unpicking the broader neo-Victorian project and the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the Victorians and ourselves. We are ‘haunted’ by the Victorians, enthralled by the ‘buried secrets’ of the Victorian past; the Victorian age represents something at once knowable and unknowable, ourselves (our ‘double’) and our ‘other’, within our grasp yet just out of reach, inviting a process of detection through which we might understand our own cultural inheritance, but which threatens to deceive us even as we attempt to unravel its multiple clues. While these issues resonate with (neo-)sensation texts more generally, The Woman in White is particularly well placed in this respect. The ghostly Anne Catherick ‘haunts’ the narrative, as the spectre of the Victorian age haunts contemporary culture; she functions as Laura Fairlie’s double, just as the neo-Victorian novel serves as an uncanny double for Victorian narratives. The secrets of the past (Percival’s illegitimacy; Anne Catherick’s parentage) haunt and influence the present as the Victorian age exerts its continued influence. The uncovering of those secrets via a process of detection (enacted by Walter and Marian) serves to reveal the ‘truth’, yet that truth remains subjective, indicated by the construction of the narrative at the discretion of Walter. Appearances are deceptive (Glyde’s title; Laura’s identity), warning the reader not to trust them, just as the neo-Victorian reader must resist oversimplifications of the period. Meanwhile, the focus on (rightful and wrongful) inheritance in the novel parallels contemporary concerns with our own nineteenth-century inheritance, and the uses that are made of that legacy. Here, then, we find the explanation for the status of The Woman in White as a neo-Victorian urtext to which contemporary literature and culture repeatedly return: the spectre of the woman in white haunts contemporary engagements with Victorian literature and culture because her ghostly presence serves as a mirror for the Victorian age itself—something tangible, yet indistinct, seemingly both within and without our reach, persistently haunting the cultural imaginary even as it rescinds further into the past. The narrative of the Victorian age is continually rewritten, overwritten—like The Woman in White—serving as a palimpsest for both expressing contemporary concerns and anxieties and revisiting the Victorian past. In the chapters that follow, I begin to unpick these multiple metaphors, and examine their resonances in the literary and cultural descendants of Victorian sensation fiction.

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References Anon. 1860. Review of The Woman in White. Saturday Review, August 25, 249–250. ———. 1861. Recent Popular Novels. Dublin University Magazine, February, 192–208. ———. 1865a. The Theatres. Saturday Review, April 15, vol. 18, 441–442. ———. 1865b. The Theatrical Examiner. The Examiner, April 8, 216. ———. 1865c. The Stage from the Front. Punch, April 1, 134. ———. 1865d. Review of The Woman in Mauve. The Athenaeum, March 25, 428. Arias, Rosario. 2016. Neo-Sensation Fiction, or “Appealing to the Nerves”: Sensation and Perception in Neo-Victorian Fiction. In Neo-Victorian Deviance. Special Issue, RSV, ed. Mariaconcetta Costantini, and Saverio Tomaiuolo, vol. 40, 13–30. Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham. 2009. Introduction. In Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, xi–xxvi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bardly, Rory. 2008. The Woman in White as a Subtext in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Nabokovian 61: 14–23. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. 2014a. Introduction: Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, 1–17. Abingdon: Routledge. ———, eds. 2014b. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. Abingdon: Routledge. Bollen, Katrien. 2009. An Intertext That Counts? Dracula, The Woman in White, and Victorian Imaginations of the Foreign Other. English Studies 90 (4): 403–420. Booth, Michael R. 1991. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bormann, Daniel. 2002. The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel. Bern: Lang. Bowser, Rachel A., and Brian Croxall, eds. 2010. Steampunk, Science, and (Neo) Victorian Technologies. Special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 3 (1). Brantlinger, Patrick. 1982. What Is “Sensational” About the “Sensation Novel”? Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1): 1–28. Caracciolo, Peter. 1971. Wilkie Collins’s ‘Divine Comedy’: The Use of Dante in The Woman in White. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (4): 383–404. Castle, Terry. 1995. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Collins, Wilkie. 2006. The Woman in White. 1860; Peterborough, ON: Broadview. ———. 2011. The Woman in White: A Drama. 1871; London: British Library. Costantini, Mariaconcetta. 2016. When Deviance Becomes the Norm: Neo-­ Sensational Excess, Pastiche, and Textual Manipulation in Charles Palliser’s

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Rustication. In Neo-Victorian Deviance. Special Issue, RSV, ed. Mariaconcetta Costantini and Saverio Tomaiuolo, vol. 40, 51–68. Cox, Jessica. 2017. Canonisation, Colonization, and the Rise of Neo-Victorianism. English 66 (253): 101–123. Dalziel, Margaret. 1957. Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago: An Unexplored Tract of Literary History. London: Cohen and West. Dennis, Abigail. 2008. “Ladies in Peril”: Sarah Waters on Neo-Victorian Narrative Celebrations and Why She Stopped Writing About the Victorian Era. Neo-­ Victorian Studies 1 (1): 41–52. Emrys, A.B. 2011. Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary, and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel. Jefferson: McFarland. Erickson, Laurel. 1999. “In Short, She is an Angel; and I am—”: Odd Women and Same-Sex Desire in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. In The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, Outsiders, ed. Marilyn Demarest Button and Toni Reed, 95–116. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Fantina, Richard, and Kimberly Harrison, eds. 2006. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Gilmour, Robin. 2004. The Novel in the Age of Equipoise. In The Victorian Novel, ed. Harold Bloom, 103–146. New York: Chelsea House. Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochberg, Shifra. 2012. Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacobo Ortis and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White: A Case for Possible Influence. Wilkie Collins Society Journal 11. Hughes, Winifred. 1980. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. Abingdon: Routledge. James, Henry. (Unsigned). 1865. Miss Braddon. The Nation, November 9, 593–594. Kaiser, Matthew. 2011. From London’s East End to West Baltimore: How the Victorian Slum Narrative Shapes The Wire. In Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual, and Cultural Politics, ed. Marie Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 45–70. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kelly, Tim. 1975. Egad, The Woman in White. London: Samuel French. Kirchknopf, Andrea. 2013. Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the 19th Century. Jefferson: McFarland. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2008. Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction. In Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza, 53–77. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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———. 2012. Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection. In Neo-­ Victorian Gothic, ed. Marie-luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 221–250. New York: Rodopi. ———. 2014. Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 21–37. New York: Routledge. Laird, Karen E. 2014. “No Paste-and-scissors Version”: The Woman in White’s Stage Debut. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36 (2): 179–199. Leavis, Q.D. 2011. Fiction and the Reading Public. New York: Random House. Maunder, Andrew. 2004. Bibliography of Sensation Fiction. In Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890. Vol. 1, 279–392. London: Pickering and Chatto. ———. 2013. Sensation Fiction on Stage. In The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham, 52–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J.  Hillis. 2005. The Ethics of Reading (1987). In The J.  Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys, 17–77. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mills, Catriona. 2013. “Such a Dazzling Display of Lustrous Legerdemain”: Representing Victorian Theatricality in Doctor Who. Neo-Victorian Studies 6 (1): 148–179. Mitchell, Kate. 2010. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, Grace. n.d. Neo-Victorian and Pastiche. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 627–638. Oxford: Blackwell. Oliphant, Margaret. 1867. Novels. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September, 257–280. Palliser, Charles. 1989. Author’s Afterword. In The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam, 1203–1221. London: Penguin. Palmer, Beth. 2009. Are the Victorians Still With Us? Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacy in the Twenty-First Century. Victorian Studies 52 (1): 86–94. Phillips, Watts. 1865. The Woman in Mauve: A Sensation Drama in Three Acts. London: Thomas Hailes Lacy. Pykett, Lyn. 2005. Wilkie Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel. Tavistock: Northcote. ———. 2013a. Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel. In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David, 211–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013b. The Sensation Legacy. In The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham, 210–223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubery, Matthew. 2009. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salah, Christiana. 2010. “This Picture Always Haunted Me”: Dramatic Adaptations of The Woman in White. Neo-Victorian Studies 3 (2): 32–55.

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Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon: Routledge. Setterfield, Diane. 2006. The Thirteenth Tale. London: Orion. Shiller, Dana. 1997. The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel. Studies in the Novel 29 (4): 539–561. Shuttleworth, Sally. 2014. From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 179–192. New York: Routledge. Stoneman, Patsy. 1996. Brontё Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1889. Wilkie Collins. Fortnightly Review cclxxi: 589–599.

PART I

Reinventing Victorian Popular Fiction: Genre and Neo-Sensationalism

CHAPTER 2

Neo-Gothic Sensations

The spectre of Gothic literature haunts the Victorian sensation novel, even as it largely eschews the supernatural. Of all the various genres with which sensation fiction is associated, it is with the Gothic that it shares the closest affinities. In the sensation novel we encounter a reimagined Gothic landscape, and the literary descendants of the fiction of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe. The movement in the sensation novel is away from the foreign lands and distant times of the earlier Gothic tradition, and into the familiar setting of the respectable Victorian home. The phantoms whose echoes reverberate throughout the genre are not of the supernatural variety, but are the revenants of past secrets and crimes. The scene which best epitomises the role of the Gothic in sensation fiction occurs at the start of The Woman in White, when Walter Hartright is accosted by the ghostly Anne Catherick on a road in the dead of night. There is nothing supernatural about the appearance of the ‘woman in white’, but, as Bachman and Cox note, it ‘impart[s] a sudden and

An earlier version of part of Chap. 2 was published as ‘“[T]he Ghost of Myself”: Women, Art and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994)’ in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Vol. 7: 3 [2013], pp. 346–360). © The Author(s) 2019 J. Cox, Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4_2

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unexpected frisson to Victorian readers’1—provokes, in other words, the sensation for which the genre is named. There are fewer damsels in distress and rather more damsels causing distress in the sensation novel compared to its Gothic predecessors, but the theme of female imprisonment remains prevalent, though metaphorical confinement as a consequence of patriarchal structures is as common as literal imprisonment. The line from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century Gothic writing to sensation fiction can be clearly mapped, and with it the history of popular fiction: from the supernatural fiction of Walpole and Lewis, via Radcliffe’s novels, in which rational explanations are provided for supernatural events, to the numerous Gothic short stories which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, to the Brontës’ proto-sensation novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (neither of which entirely eschew the supernatural). Via this process, the mysteries and horrors of the Gothic gradually move closer to the familiar space of the Victorian home (though this home is also often recognisably Gothic), before taking up residence in the sensation novel, whilst the heroine moves from passive victim to active agent. The Gothic ‘monsters’ of earlier writing are replaced by the criminal, transgressive women of sensation fiction: in place of Frankenstein’s creature, we find Braddon’s ‘golden-­ haired, blue-eyed, girlish creature’, Lady Audley.2 Despite its contemporaneousness, the sensation novel’s reworking of the Gothic evidences its interest in the past: it is the crimes and secrets of the past which return to haunt the characters’ present (Percival Glyde’s illegitimate birth; Aurora Floyd’s marriage to her father’s groom). The trope of characters ostensibly returning from the dead is a recurrent one: Walter Hartright encounters Laura Fairlie at the site of her own grave; George Talboys’s ‘dead’ wife has faked her own death and is married to Sir Michael Audley; reports of Isabel Vane’s death enable her to return in disguise to her former home of East Lynne; in Braddon’s Henry Dunbar (1864), Margaret Wilmot, investigating her father’s murder, discovers her father himself, alive and well having murdered Henry Dunbar and stolen his identity. These spectral returns not only signify the sensation novel’s 1  Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox, Introduction to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), p. 9. 2  Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003), p. 358. The quotation is used by Lady Audley to describe her mother, but also serves as an apt description of the heroine herself.

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affiliation with Gothic fiction, but also the haunting of the present by the past. This interest in the past is echoed in the neo-Victorian novel, with its more insistent focus on history via its reimagining of the Victorian age. Both genres, then, evince a concern with the manner in which the past impacts on the present, though neo-Victorianism inevitably takes a longer view. In this context, neo-Victorianism’s persistent engagement with both Gothic and sensation fiction is unsurprising. The line of descent between Gothic and sensation fiction evidences the sensation novel’s participation in an ongoing tradition of popular fiction—one which extends far beyond the nineteenth century and is reflected in neo-sensation writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There is a strong tradition of Gothic writing in neo-Victorian literature, both popular and ‘literary’, reflecting a trajectory begun in the nineteenth century: whilst the Gothic influenced the popular genres of sensation fiction and the ghost story, its themes and conventions also attracted the attention of ‘literary’ writers including George Eliot (The Lifted Veil [1859]) and Henry James (The Turn of the Screw). This chapter explores the complex relationship between Gothic, sensation, and neo-Victorian fiction. It considers the manner in which Victorian sensation writers rewrote the Gothic novel and the subsequent reimagining of Gothic sensation fiction in twentieth-century writing, via an examination of two pairs of texts: Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951); and Collins’s The Woman in White and Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister. Neo-Victorian Gothic has received significant critical attention—a fact which speaks to its aptitude for reflecting the nature of contemporary culture’s relationship with the Victorian past, which frequently takes the form of re-visitations and hauntings. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben argue that ‘neo-Victorianism is by nature quintessentially Gothic: resurrecting the ghost(s) of the past, searching out its dark secrets and shameful mysteries, insisting obsessively on the lurid details of Victorian life, reliving the period’s nightmares and traumas’.3 The elements which are here identified as ‘quintessentially Gothic’ are also closely associated with the sensation novel: the (metaphorical) ‘ghosts of the past’ which haunt its characters, ‘dark secrets and shameful mysteries’ which threaten 3  Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations’, Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), p.  4, emphasis in original.

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the Victorian family, and ‘the lurid details of Victorian life’ which critics of the genre felt should remain concealed. Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham’s collection, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2009), also highlights the centrality of Gothic tropes in neo-Victorianism, construing the Victorian past as ‘spectral presence’,4 and emphasising the ‘uncanny nature’ of the neo-Victorian novel: [I]t often represents a “double” of the Victorian text mimicking its language, style and plot; it plays with the conscious repetition of tropes, characters, and historical events; it reanimates Victorian genres, for example, the realist text, sensation fiction, the Victorian ghost story and, in doing so, seemingly calls the contemporary novel’s “life” into question; it defamiliarizes our preconceptions of Victorian society; and it functions as a form of revenant, a ghostly visitor from the past that infiltrates our present.5

Whilst the Gothic adopts a variety of manifestations in neo-Victorianism, it exerts a significant influence on neo-Victorian ‘literary’ fiction: the postmodern, ‘historiographic metafiction’ which dominates early neo-­ Victorian critical discourses.6 The transformation of the Gothic in this respect suggests, perhaps, a maturation of the genre. It performs a journey of self-development: dismissed as popular fiction for the masses in its early incarnations (including the sensation novel’s domestic Gothic) before gaining respectability in contemporary literary fiction. However, this does not tell the full story, for the popular Gothic continues to flourish—in multiple re-imaginings of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Stoker’s Dracula, as well as in numerous YA novels. Whilst critical discourses are predominantly concerned with the ‘literary’ Gothic, few consider in any detail the Gothic’s origins as popular fiction, or the way in which neo-­ Victorian Gothic narratives are frequently mediated via the sensation novel’s domestication of the Gothic. Kohlke and Gutleben do acknowledge this relationship in their introduction to Neo-Victorian Gothic, noting the links between ‘neo-Victorian Urban Gothic’ and ‘the legacies of nineteenth-century sensation fiction’:

 Arias and Pulham, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, p. xi.  Ibid., p. xv. 6  Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. ix. 4 5

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The latter, or course, in part constituted a reinvigoration of Female Gothic, drawing on a range of typical tropes from the earlier subgenre: women’s victimisation and domestic entrapment, false imprisonment, madness, transgressive (female) sexual desire, seduction and abuse. All of these recur regularly in neo-Victorian Urban Gothic and crime fiction[.]7

In the same volume, Kym Brindle further explores these links via a consideration of the ‘lost and found document convention’ in neo-­ Victorian fiction, which draws on both nineteenth-century Gothic and sensation fiction.8 Waters’s neo-Victorian Gothic fiction, for which the sensation novel serves as a key influence, has also received attention, but for the most part, the genre’s influence remains largely absent from discussions of neo-Victorian Gothic. Despite the move away from the supernatural, notions of ‘haunting’ nonetheless function as an important metaphor in both sensation and neo-­sensation fiction, and in turn for the manner in which Victorian texts ‘haunt’ contemporary fiction, just as the past ‘haunts’ the present. The Victorian age and its literature function as enduring spectres in contemporary literature and culture, a persistent reminder of a past which must remain spectral, can never be fully materialised. Neosensation Gothic fiction bears witness to the impossibility of an authentic recreation of the past in the present. To this end, the two genres function as doubles, paralleling their persistent concern with doubles and Doppelgängers, and thus again align themselves with a key trope of the Gothic. This doubling is evident at the level of character, text, and genre. The doubling of Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick is central to The Woman in White, specifically to the narrative’s engagement with Gothic traditions, and is replicated in reimaginings of the text—via Sue and Maud in Waters’s Fingersmith, for instance. At the same time, Fingersmith itself serves as a double for Collins’s novel, and thus simultaneously evidences the manner in which the neo-Victorian Gothic novel assumes a Doppelgänger function for its Victorian predecessor. This is replicated in a host of other neo-sensation Gothic novels, which take The Woman in White as their key intertext, including Harwood’s The Asylum, Eagland’s YA novel Wildthorn, and Setterfield’s The  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, p. 28.  Kym Brindle, ‘Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic’ in Kohlke and Gutleben, eds., Neo-Victorian Gothic, p. 279. 7 8

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Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield’s novel represents a key example of the neosensation Gothic novel, and illustrates the movement from the domestic Gothic of the sensation novel to the neo-Victorian novel, as well as the concern with doubling, via its most significant intertexts: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). But of course these textual doubles are not exact clones: the neo-Victorian mirror offers a distorted reflection of its Victorian forebears. Peter K. Garrett notes, in his study of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, that Gothic doubling typically enacts [a] transformation of shifting perspectives, turning inside out and outside in. The uncanny duplication that initially represents a division within the self turns out to disclose its inextricable involvement with others; the varied figures of a story turn into dreamlike projections of the protagonist or author. Doubling carries the drama of multiple versions from the level of narrative discourse into the heart of the story itself.9

Read in the context of the doubling of Victorian and neo-Victorian (and more specifically sensation and neo-sensation) Gothic fiction, this assessment has significant implications. The ‘transformation of shifting perspectives’ is crucial to the neo-Victorian project, and its ‘uncanny duplication’ of Victorian literature and culture, whilst the notion of ‘a division within the self’ is suggestive of contemporary culture’s relationship with the Victorian age, and the idea that the ongoing fascination with the period is inextricably linked to the uncanny feeling that the modern self originates, or is somehow connected to this era. As Kohlke and Gutleben note, ‘On psychological and ideological levels, the Victorians function as our threatening doubles and distorted freak-show/funhouse mirror images’.10 This process of Gothic doubling (encompassing character, text, and genre) is evident in Du Maurier’s reworking of Lady Audley’s Secret in My Cousin Rachel, and in Harris’s reimagining of The Woman in White in Sleep, Pale Sister.

9  Peter K.  Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 75. 10  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, p. 4.

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Sensational Cousins: Repurposing the Female Gothic in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951) A beautiful but materialistic woman marries into wealth and position, and is subsequently implicated in the death of her husband. Her husband’s heir (presumptive), distinguished by his misogynistic view of women, determines to discover the truth, and attempts to collect evidence to prove his suspicions. The (anti-)heroine employs her feminine wiles against him, but is ultimately outwitted, and her antagonist succeeds in bringing her to her death. The above description serves as an outline of both Lady Audley’s Secret and My Cousin Rachel, evidencing the latter’s indebtedness to the sensation novel generally, and Braddon’s novel specifically. Du Maurier is a natural heir to the sensation novelists, particularly in terms of her employment of Gothic tropes, which echo those of the sensation novel, tending to focus on family secrets rather than the supernatural. The Gothic fiction of the Brontës represents a common ancestor for the sensation novelists and Du Maurier (both Lady Audley’s Secret and Rebecca rework elements of Jane Eyre). Nathalie Abi-Ezzi places Du Maurier’s work in both the sensation and Gothic traditions in her study of the double in the work of Stevenson, Collins, and Du Maurier.11 Sally Beauman, in her introduction to My Cousin Rachel, highlights ‘Du Maurier’s ability to conceal unpalatable social truths within a page-turning format’12—a statement which could equally be applied to the sensation novel. Margaret E. Mitchell, in her article examining female beauty in Du Maurier’s fiction, notes that in My Cousin Rachel, ‘conflict returns to the domestic sphere’—implicitly marking the narrative’s similarity to the sensation novel.13 Though My Cousin Rachel does not explicitly reference Lady Audley’s Secret, it functions as the narrative’s key intertext. The parallels extend far beyond this basic outline: characters, plot, and the central tropes appear as a ghostly echo of Lady Audley’s Secret. In Du Maurier’s historical novel, set in the

11  Nathalie Abi- Ezzi, The Double in the Fiction of R.  L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, and Daphne Du Maurier (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). 12  Sally Beauman, ‘Introduction’, My Cousin Rachel (London: Vintage, 2003), p. vi. 13  Margaret E. Mitchell, ‘“Beautiful Creatures”: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:1 (2009), p. 36.

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mid-nineteenth century,14 Philip Ashley is heir presumptive to his cousin Ambrose’s estate, echoing the relationship between Sir Michael and Robert Audley. Ambrose’s marriage, later in life, poses a threat to Philip’s position, and recalls Sir Michael’s marriage to Lady Audley. Whilst Braddon’s heroine is accused of killing her first husband, George Talboys, Ambrose’s unexpected death causes suspicion to fall on his new wife, Rachel. As in Braddon’s novel, there is a tension between the hero’s attraction to the heroine’s beauty and his suspicion of her criminal acts. Despite his initial distrust of her, Philip becomes entirely infatuated with Rachel and convinced of her innocence, and consequently signs over Ambrose’s money and estate to her for her lifetime, fulfilling the instructions of Ambrose’s unsigned will. He subsequently proposes to her and is rejected; thus Rachel avoids losing her newly gained wealth through marriage. Spurned into renewing his investigation into his cousin’s widow, Philip finds what appears to be evidence against her, echoing Robert Audley’s investigation of his aunt. He encourages her to take a walk in the garden, which is undergoing restoration, knowing a bridgeway is unsafe. She subsequently falls to her death, and the estate reverts to Philip. Whilst the circumstances of her death recall George Talboys’s fall into the well in the grounds of Audley Court, it also echoes the death of Braddon’s protagonist at the close of Lady Audley’s Secret, and in this respect both texts appear to close with the restoration of the patriarchal order. There are further parallels between the two narratives. Both heroines are beautiful and exert an enchanting effect on those they encounter, but are also associated with materialistic desires for wealth and extravagance. This materialism can be seen to originate in the characters’ experiences of poverty: whilst Lady Audley feels ‘the bitterness of poverty’ (358) in her childhood and following her marriage to George Talboys, Rachel spends ‘five fearful years’ following the death of her father, ‘not always certain where our next meal would come from’ (166). The jewels which both subsequently covet, and, at various points take possession of, though only ever temporarily, represent symbols of femininity which, like the Victorian wife, are only truly possessed by the men who effectively control them. Both characters are twice married—the first time unhappily. In both 14  No explicit date is provided, but clues in the narrative suggest a date of around 1840 (Philip is twenty-four, and refers to his father’s death ‘fight[ing] the French’ (113), when he was very young, which would seem to suggest he was born around the time of the Napoleonic wars, which concluded in 1815.

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novels, houses, and within them the heroines’ boudoirs, play a central and symbolic role. The transformation of Audley Court following Sir Michael’s imprudent marriage is echoed in the transformation of Philip Ashley’s home prior to his cousin’s widow’s arrival. Art figures heavily in each text: Lady Audley’s portrait reveals her identity to her first husband, whilst a portrait of Ambrose, who bears a close resemblance to Philip, looks down from the walls of the Ashley home: a visual representation of the male gaze. Letters and documents play a crucial role—as both evidence and red herrings—and Alicia Audley’s unrequited love for Robert is echoed in Louise Kendall‘s feelings for Philip. The intensity of feeling between Robert and George, which borders on the homoerotic, is paralleled in the relationship between Ambrose and Philip in Du Maurier’s novel. Gothic descriptions and tropes are employed liberally throughout both novels— in the descriptions of the houses and grounds, as well as the weather, the foreshadowing of events, and the symbolic references to dark crimes: Braddon’s idyllic descriptions of the countryside around Audley Court are disrupted by reference to the murder of a young girl by a man she ‘loved and trusted’ (91), foreshadowing the fate of the heroine, whilst My Cousin Rachel opens with the image of the body of a convicted criminal, a man guilty of killing his wife, ‘hang[ing] in chains’ (1) near the Ashely estate, anticipating Philip’s position as murderer at the end of the narrative. In both novels, secrets are literally buried: in Braddon’s text, the body of a poor woman, Matilda Plowson, is interred in a grave marked with Helen Talboys’s name, whilst in My Cousin Rachel, Philip buries a letter written by Ambrose detailing his suspicions about his new wife. Both Rachel and Lady Audley bear multiple names, reflecting the narratives’ interest in questions of identity: Braddon’s protagonist is known at various points as Helen Maldon, Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham, Lady Audley, and Madame Taylor, whilst Du Maurier’s eponymous heroine is born Rachel Coryn, becomes the Contessa Sangalletti on her first marriage, and subsequently Mrs Rachel Ashley on her marriage to Ambrose, but is repeatedly referred to as ‘my cousin Rachel’ by the novel’s narrator, Philip. Prior to meeting her, he imagines her in multiple forms, this ‘shadowy hated figure of that woman I had never seen. She had so many faces, so many guises’ (52). Though these ostensibly resolve themselves when he finally meets her, her identities, like those of Lady Audley, remain confused: is she a tragic widow, wrongly accused and disinherited by her husband, or the evil poisoner of Ambrose and Philip’s imagination? On Ambrose’s gravestone, her name is inscribed as ‘Rachel Coryn Ashley’

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(49). These identities—like most of Lady Audley’s—are indicative of marriage and patrimony. Her maiden name is the result of ‘A Coryn marr[ying] an Ashley two generations ago’ (14), thus her ancestry also links her to both her second husband and her would-be suitor and murderer Philip. Meanwhile, her Italian title, like her Italian mother, associates her with the figure of the exotic but dangerous ‘Other’, so closely associated with both Gothic and sensation fiction (the sinister foreign villain is also represented in the novel in the figure of Rachel’s ally, Signor Rainaldi). Her first husband’s death in a duel also suggests the narrative’s neo-sensational credentials, as does Du Maurier’s repeated use of cliff-hangers, and the novel’s inheritance plot. In contradistinction to Braddon’s novel, the heroine’s sanity is not called into question, but this plotline is echoed in the character of Ambrose, whose letters from Italy following his marriage cause increasing alarm, appearing to be ‘not the letter[s] of a man in his right senses’ (26), sparking fears of a brain tumour. His final letter implicates his wife in his forthcoming death: ‘She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment’ (27). This is reiterated in the earlier letter which Philip only receives some months after Ambrose’s death, and which he subsequently buries. The question of the truth of these letters, like the issue of Lady Audley’s sanity, is not fully resolved in the narrative, as the opening, set after the events of the novel have taken place, makes clear: ‘every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?’ (4). This image of the narrator haunted by the past reinforces the narrative’s position as a neo-­Gothic sensation novel, whilst the question of guilt or innocence as it pertains to the transgressive heroine recalls one of the key critical questions to emerge from a reading of Braddon’s novel. The haunting nature of the past is also evident in the various letters written by Ambrose in the months leading up to his death. One of these, in which he voices a suspicion that his wife is poisoning him, is not received until several months after his death,15 by which time Philip has become infatuated with Rachel. In an attempt to repress this ‘message from the dead’ (203), he conceals it in a pocket book which he buries under a stone which serves as a memorial to Ambrose, whose body has been interred in 15  The letter is given to Philip by one of the tenants on his land, in a scene which strongly echoes that in Braddon’s novel in which Luke Marks, on his deathbed, presents the note from George Talboys to Robert: ‘Sam Bate, […] who was in bed, poorly, wished very much that I would go and see him as he had something of importance to give me’ (201).

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Italy. The stone was placed by Ambrose himself, on his favourite spot on the estate, prior to leaving Italy, and he tells Philip ‘This […] can serve me for tombstone when I die. Think of me here, rather than in the family vault with the other Ashleys’ (204). This site, then, bears a similar function to the gravesites in both The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret: while these latter conceal bodies of women under a different name, Ambrose’s ‘grave’ becomes the burial place for secrets as well, though the nature of that secret is unclear—whether it reveals Rachel’s potential as a murderess or Ambrose’s mental deterioration as a consequence of his illness. Philip’s burial of the letter signifies a desire to inter the past (‘Ambrose was dead, and the past went with him when he died’ [205]), to prevent its haunting of the present. As the neo-Victorian novel suggests, though, this repression is not possible, and can only ever be temporary. The letter details Ambrose’s suspicions of his wife, including the possibility that she is trying to poison him, and, significantly, poses the possibility that she is affected by a hereditary malady (echoing Braddon’s novel), which takes the form of excessive extravagance: ‘Whether hereditary or not I cannot say’, writes Ambrose, ‘but I believe so’ (206). However, even this flaw is called into question at the end of the narrative, when it is revealed that Rachel has returned the family jewels, given to her by Philip, to the solicitor ‘until such time as [her] heir, Mr Philip Ashley, may take possession of them’ (332). Ambrose also informs Philip of the loss of their child, a few months into the pregnancy, which he believes ‘did [Rachel] irreparable harm’ (206). Carla T. Kungl raises the possibility that both Lady Audley and her mother suffer from a form of postnatal depression, and here too pregnancy is associated with mental deterioration.16 Rachel later informs Philip that at this time she was ‘almost out of my mind’ (216). Read in this light, the narratives appear to imply a biological explanation for women’s transgressive behaviour, but this is a conservative interpretation of events, and ignores what at times can be read as a rational response to the unreasonable constraints placed upon women. In the case of Du Maurier’s text, this explanation is also associated with what can be read as Ambrose’s increasing paranoia, raising the question of which of them is suffering from a mental ailment.

16  Carla T. Kungl, ‘“The Secret of My Mother’s Madness”: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Gothic Instability’ in Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ed., Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), p. 172.

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Sometime later, when his suspicions have once again been roused, Philip disinters the letter: ‘I could not shake off the desire within me to read the letter once again’ (314). The buried letter, interred by Philip in Ambrose’s faux-grave, is symbolic of the hidden documents which serve as a key trope in the sensation novel and threaten to expose the secrets of the past (the luggage labels in Lady Audley’s Secret which evidence the protagonist’s multiple identities; the doctored marriage register in The Woman in White which reveals Percival Glyde’s illegitimacy). It is also one of several crucial documents in My Cousin Rachel, which include the disturbing letters from Ambrose, the unsigned will, and the deed of transfer via which Philip signs over the estate to Rachel. Philip’s desire to recover the letter from its burial place speaks to the neo-Victorian desire to return to the ‘buried’ narratives of the past, including the sensation novel. Following this disinterment, the letter appears ‘damp and limp, the lettering more faded than before, but still decipherable’ (314)—an image which pertains to the afterlife of the sensation novel, whose influence remains decipherable. The letter’s contents are once again set out for the reader, and this narrative repetition suggests the persistent returns to sensation fiction, the plots of which are subject to ongoing cultural repetition. The letter is subsequently torn to shreds, ‘ground […] into the earth’ (316), but this repetition ensures its echo remains, haunting Philip and the narrative, and paralleling the fate of the sensation novel. Both novels are replete with the Gothic trope of doubling. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Clara’s uncanny likeness to her brother George allows Robert to transfer his intense affections for his friend onto her—a more conventional object of desire. Lady Audley has several doubles in the narrative, reflecting her own shifting identities. Matilda Plowson, whose mother is bribed into allowing her daughter to be buried under Lady Audley’s previous name of Helen Talboys, bears a vague resemblance to the heroine. A more striking resemblance is found in Lady Audley’s maid, Phoebe: ‘There were sympathies between [Lady Audley] and this girl, who was like herself inwardly as well as outwardly’ (313). Perhaps the most uncanny double of Lady Audley is found in her portrait, commissioned by Sir Michael, which not only reveals her true identity to her first husband, but also threatens to reveal her true nature: It was so like and yet so unlike; it was as if you had burned strange-coloured fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of feature, the

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brilliancy of colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint medieval monasteries until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (107)17

Du Maurier’s novel also exhibits a preoccupation with the double. The most significant example of this is the resemblance between Philip and Ambrose, emphasising their interchangeable positions as patriarchal representatives, estate owners, and (potential) husbands for Rachel. The doubling between Ambrose and Philip is firmly established in the opening of the novel: ‘I have become so like him that I might be his ghost. […] I have wondered lately if, when he died, […] whether his spirit left his body and came home here to mine, taking possession, so that he lived again in me’ (4–5). The language here reinforces the significance of the (uncanny) double in Gothic fiction, but is also suggestive of the manner in which Du Maurier’s novel reworks Braddon’s narrative—of the ghostly echoes of Lady Audley’s Secret that permeate My Cousin Rachel, and the manner in which the later text ‘takes possession’ of the earlier genre to give it new life. Later, he states, ‘I think I am too much like Ambrose’ (56), signifying that his encounter with Rachel will prove similarly damaging to her. As in the earlier novel, this doubling is also signified by the image of a portrait: There was a portrait of Ambrose hanging on the wall […] It was strangely like myself […] We could be brothers, […] almost twin brothers, that young man in the portrait and myself. This sudden realisation of our likeness gave an uplift to my spirits. It was as if the young Ambrose was smiling at me saying “I am with you.” And the older Ambrose, too, felt very close. (71–72)18

As with Lady Audley, the uncanny likeness displayed by the portrait reveals Philip’s ‘true’ nature: like his Doppelgänger’s, his mistrust of Rachel will 17  There is an echo of this portrait in Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969), in which Miss Stacy, a character heavily influenced by Miss Havisham, paints a portrait of ‘a heavily pregnant Edith, her face twisted in an expression of something between fear and cunning’ (Shivering Sands [Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2013], p. 157), which bears little resemblance to the original. See Chap. 6 for further discussion of Holt’s novel. 18  Several portraits feature in My Cousin Rachel, mainly of Philip’s ancestors, reinforcing the narrative link to the past. On Philip’s twenty-fifth birthday, his butler presents him with a portrait of himself, which Philip hangs on the wall. Though unimportant to the story, the notion of the image of the servant on the wall overlooking the inhabitants of the houses is suggestive of a central trope of the sensation novel.

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grow, until it threatens both of them. Rachel also bears witness to this doubling, her eyes ‘widen[ing] in sudden recognition’ (77) when she first encounters Philip. She subsequently wonders if ‘there is any difference’ (119) between the two of them. Rachel, too, has an uncanny double—in the form of an Italian beggar woman whom Philip encounters: ‘She was young, not more than nineteen or so, but the expression on her face was ageless, haunting, as though she possessed in her lithe body an old soul that could not die; centuries in time looked out from those two eyes’ (31). Meeting Rachel for the first time, he is struck by the resemblance: Once, not so long ago, I had seen other eyes with that same age-old look of suffering. […] [I]t must be because the eyes are the same colour and they belong to the same race. Otherwise they could have nothing in common, the beggar woman beside the Arno and my cousin Rachel. (87)

That Rachel’s double should be located in this figure is significant in terms of the narrative’s revision of Braddon’s novel, echoing the association between Lady Audley and Phoebe, who are also divided by their social position, as well as suggesting the haunting timelessness of the sensation novel and its heroines, who repeatedly fall victim to those agents of patriarchy represented by Ambrose and Philip. This uncanny doubling returns to haunt Philip at the end of the novel, when, falling into a fever he imagines he is back in Italy: ‘Rachel, the beggar girl, came up to me with empty hands. She was naked, save for the pearl collar around her throat. Suddenly she pointed at the water and Ambrose went past us, under the bridge, his hands folded on his breast’ (287). The image is one of dangerous, transgressive femininity, employing its charms to steal and potentially kill. But it is less a reflection of Rachel’s transgression than of Philip’s misogynistic, suspicious—even paranoid—view of women. These doubles also operate across the two narratives: Robert/Philip, Sir Michael/Ambrose, Lucy/Rachel, and Louise/Alicia. Robert and Philip bear striking similarities: both are representatives of a masculine authority rooted in patriarchal and class structures. Robert is educated at Eton, Philip attends Harrow and Oxford19; both exhibit a disturbing 19  Jennifer S.  Kushnier concludes that Robert Audley too attended Oxford (‘Educating Boys to be Queer: Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 [March 2002], p. 63). She associates Robert’s education with his homoerotic tendencies,

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misogynistic streak which influences their subsequent pursuit of the heroines; both experience extreme grief at the loss of the (presumed) dead husband. As a consequence, both swear vengeance upon the woman they believe responsible for his death. Just as Robert, who previously avoided the hunting field, effectively hunts his antagonist to the death, so too does Philip threaten to ‘hunt her out’ (60), declaring ‘I smell blood’ (65). Even when his feelings towards her change, he still sees her as ‘a wounded animal’ (158). In each narrative, then, the transgressive woman becomes a creature to be hunted and destroyed. Whilst doubles permeate both novels, and whilst My Cousin Rachel functions as an uncanny double of Lady Audley’s Secret, via its reimagining of the story, both works also contain what might be termed a double narrative. Read from one perspective, Braddon’s novel is a sensational story of a madwoman who commits bigamy, attempted murder, arson, and manslaughter, before her crimes are finally discovered and she is incarcerated in a madhouse. But from another perspective, it offers quite a different story: a woman is abandoned by her husband, and in desperation reinvents herself, marrying again and working to protect her newfound wealth and position. Upon discovery, she uses the excuse of madness to protect herself from the gallows, but the real cause of her behaviour lies in the suffering she has experienced as a woman living in a patriarchal society in which she is denied fundamental rights. Similarly, Du Maurier offers two possible stories within a single narrative: the tale of a sinister widow, who poisons her second husband before manipulating his heir into handing over his estate and finally receiving her comeuppance, and, alternatively, the story of a woman twice widowed, whose second husband experiences delusions caused by a brain tumour, and consequently disinherits her, rendering her dependent on the generosity of his heir, whose attitude towards her shifts when she rejects his proposals, leading him to kill her. Both novels tell the story of a potentially dangerous woman, who will stop at nothing to achieve her own materialistic desires. But both also tell the story of a woman, oppressed by a patriarchal system which renders her both poor and powerless, and her attempts to overcome this system. These double narratives are significant, for they represent on a microlevel the sensation novel and its legacy more generally: sensation fiction,

but it might also be speculated that both Robert’s and Philip’s education contribute towards their misogynistic attitudes.

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dismissed as a ‘heap of trash’ by Victorian critics,20 in fact has much to say about the role and treatment of women in society, and this commentary is continued in the genre’s afterlife. The two novels’ most significant doubles, then, are the hidden subtexts, concealed beneath these narratives of popular fiction, which reveal the inequalities faced by women. In Du Maurier’s Gothic repurposing of Braddon’s novel, power initially appears to shift from male to female: the Victorian man is recast as man-­child (Philip is repeatedly referred to as a ‘child’ [222, 239, 291]), and his property passes from him to the powerful figure of the widow. Until the very end of the novel, it appears that Rachel has achieved what Lady Audley cannot: wealth and position independent of the rule of a husband. Philip’s decision to sign over his entire property to Rachel is an attempt to ensure she does not leave, to control her. But it essentially has the opposite effect, freeing her from her dependence on him following Ambrose’s death. His subsequent proposal points to another attempt to bring her under his rule, but this too fails, and it is only through her death that Philip can regain control. This is foreshadowed a number of times in the novel: in the initial image of the corpse of the wife-killer, and subsequently in Philip’s violent attack on the heroine following her refusal to marry him: ‘I put my hands about her throat, encircling it; and now she could not move, but watched me, her eyes wide. And it was as though I held a frightened bird in my two hands, which, with added pressure, would flutter awhile, and die’ (270–271). Later we learn that Ambrose too had placed his hands around her neck, reinforcing the narrative doubling and the notion of patriarchy as inherently violent towards women. At this point, when Rachel has ‘the property, the money, and the jewels’ (270), Philip’s only remaining power lies in violence. His propensity towards violence against women is already evident as he anticipates her arrival: ‘If she should be loud-mouthed, vulgar, I thought I knew how to shut her up […] I always found extreme bluntness of speech, amounting to brutality, sent them back to their holes’ (67–68). He subsequently jokingly suggests he may ‘throw[] my cousin Rachel over the headland […] if she goads me hard enough’ (74). These threats of brutality and violence, and the subsequent violence he employs against her recalls the violent ‘correction’ of Dickens’s transgressive women—Mrs Joe and Estella—in Great Expectations. The story of the 20  George Eliot to John Blackwood (11 September 1866) in Gordon Sherman Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 1862–1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 309.

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wife-killer highlights Ambrose’s misogynistic perspective, and in doing so draws attention to the dangers faced by women who refuse to conform to patriarchal expectations: ‘Here is Tom Jenkyn, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It’s true his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers’ (2). Rachel’s subsequent death reinforces the notion, perpetuated by both Ambrose and Philip, that violence is the only way to deal with transgressive women—explicitly acknowledged by Philip shortly beforehand: ‘Physical strength alone disarmed a woman’ (308).21 For Philip and for Ambrose, as Mitchell observes, femininity is construed as ‘a force, and explicitly a destructive one’.22 Rachel goes further than Lady Audley in obtaining wealth and independence apart from patriarchal authority, signified by her position as a (double) widow. Consequently, it seems, more extreme measures are required to ultimately contain her. Rachel’s realisation that remarriage will result in the relinquishment of the estate may be what prompts her refusal of Philip’s proposal: ‘You must remain a widow if you wish to keep your fortune’, Philip’s Godfather tells her, to which she responds, ‘That suits me very well’ (277). The terms of the will mean Philip is doubly entitled to the return of his inheritance in the event of his marrying Rachel: under the marriage law of the time, which saw all property and money pass into the possession of the husband upon marriage, and via the remarriage clause in the transfer deed drawn up to compensate for the unsigned will. Philip declares he would ‘share every penny of it with her’ (278), but her earlier experience of men has taught her that such promises are not always kept. In contrast to Jane Eyre, Rachel has no intention of relinquishing her fortune. Death, then, remains the only means via which Philip can reclaim his estate. Both Braddon and Du Maurier repurpose the Gothic in their narratives of transgressive heroines, participating in a specifically female Gothic tradition, which, as Garrett notes, ‘with its symbolization of women’s oppression, exposes and undermines patriarchy’23. Lady Audley and Rachel Ashley exert a power over men that challenges those patriarchal structures which seek to control them (marriage, property laws), trading 21  Roger Michell’s 2017 film adaptation of My Cousin Rachel also emphasises Philip’s tendency towards violence: upon hearing of Ambrose’s death, he violently threatens Signor Rainaldi (0:08:56), and when he is informed of Rachel’s arrival in England, the camera cuts to the hammer he is holding, which he raises slightly as if to hit something (0:14:47). 22  Mitchell, ‘Beautiful Creatures’, p. 38. 23  Garrett, Gothic Reflections, p. 1.

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on their looks, sexuality, and ability to fascinate. Their parallel fates—death at the hands of the male protagonists—suggest an ongoing anxiety provoked by the figure of the rebellious woman some ninety years after Lady Audley first made her appearance. But if Du Maurier’s heroine, like Lady Audley, is ultimately defeated, so too, in contrast to Robert Audley, is Philip Ashley and everything he represents, for the subject of Du Maurier’s novel is not so much the criminal within the home, as the flawed and dangerous masculinity which threatens the selfhood and lives of the women it encounters. Gothic monstrosity in these narratives is located not in the figure of the (neo-)sensation heroine, but within patriarchy itself.

Women, Art, and (Neo-)Gothicism in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994) This dangerous patriarchy is also in evidence in Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister— one of a multitude of neo-Victorian narratives which function as a (distorted) Gothic mirror for The Woman in White. As with Du Maurier’s revisioning of Lady Audley’s Secret, Harris’s novel reimagines Collins’s narrative via the creation of characters who function as uncanny doubles to the originals. Harris foregrounds a concern with female disempowerment, and with the relationship between the female body and the male artist— something articulated in Collins’s novel via the relationship between artist Walter Hartright and the passive heroine, Laura Fairlie (who is more reminiscent of earlier Gothic heroines than the transgressive women of sensation fiction such as Lady Audley). In both texts, the female body acts as objet d’art, and the artistic process represented provides a metaphor for the rewriting of the past in neo-sensation Gothic fiction. Like Du Maurier, Harris goes some way towards revising the power relations inherent in her novel’s key intertext, and (temporarily) empowering the heroine. The female body—particularly as an objet d’art, or subject for the male artist—functions as a significant trope in both Victorian and neo-sensation Gothic fiction. In some instances, there is an explicit focus on these issues through the incorporation of the characters of artist and model; elsewhere, the construction of the feminine as objet d’art takes a more subtle form through the inclusion of stereotypes of femininity and allusions to various artistic depictions of women. In their seminal study, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar emphasise the significance of such stereotypes:

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Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy … she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her ‘inconstancy’ and—by identifying her with the ‘eternal types’ they have themselves invented—to possess her more thoroughly…. [W]omen must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been ‘killed’ into art.24

The prevalence of stereotypes of femininity in nineteenth-century fiction has marked a key point of departure for neo-Victorian writers, many of whom seek to challenge the problematic angel/whore binary that dominates Victorian gender ideologies.25 Here too there is a clear parallel with the work of earlier sensation writers, who provoked controversy through their portrayals of seemingly angelic women concealing transgressive, even criminal, pasts.26 Yet these portrayals are often contradictory, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing prevailing gender stereotypes, in particular via representations of the female body as objet d’art. Allusions to women as works of art permeate Victorian sensation novels (reflecting nineteenthcentury fiction more generally). Via these references, women are framed, enclosed, rendered mute and powerless: presented as silent objects of the male gaze, rather than speaking subjects.27 This process of containment shares obvious affinities with the Gothic trope of imprisonment. The relationship between the (male) artist and (female) subject is particularly prevalent in Collins’s fiction: Hide and Seek (1854), The Woman in White, and Poor Miss Finch (1872) all engage in a process through which the 24  Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 16–17. There is a deliberate echo here of Virginia Woolf’s comments on killing the Angel in the House in her 1931 speech ‘Professions for Women’. Though Gilbert and Gubar’s work was first published over thirty years ago, their analysis remains relevant, as neoVictorian writers attempt to dismantle or remove these ‘masks’, thus continuing the process of ‘kill[ing] the aesthetic ideal’. 25  Contrary to this, neo-Victorian author Maggie Power suggests that ‘the angel/whore dichotomy persists, although the weight of cultural validation has shifted somewhat to the latter’ (Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Neo-Victorian Goblin Fruit: Maggie Power on the Gothic Fascinations of Demon Lovers and Re-Imagining the Victorians’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:1 [2011], p. 85). 26  Braddon’s Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd, and Collins’s Lydia Gwilt, for example. 27  The multitude of texts presenting the heroine as an objet d’art include Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Wood’s East Lynne, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872).

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heroine is presented as an objet d’art through the eyes of the male artist.28 In all three novels the heroine is rendered powerless to resist the male gaze: literally silenced (as in the case of Hide and Seek’s Madonna, who is mute, and The Woman in White’s Laura Fairlie, who is denied a narrative voice) or unable to return the gaze (as in Poor Miss Finch, in which the eponymous heroine is blind), recalling the passive and submissive heroines of earlier Gothic literature. The Woman in White evinces a particular concern with women and art. Laura is introduced to the reader via her representation as a work of art. Not only is her story framed within her artist-husband’s narrative, she is initially presented through his description not of her actual person, but of a portrait which he has painted of her: ‘How can I describe her? […] The water-colour drawing that I made of Laura Fairlie, at an after period, in the place and attitude in which I first saw her, lies on my desk while I write. I look at it’ (89). The detailed description which follows is based on Walter’s artistic interpretation of the heroine and represents one of a multitude of Victorian artistic images of women which tend to reinforce particular stereotypes (in particular the angel/whore dichotomy). Walter’s description of Laura equates woman and artistic object, and combines this with the voyeurism of the male gaze,29 as is evidenced by his own conclusions: ‘Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and happy days, show me these things [Laura’s physical characteristics]? Ah, how few of them are in the dim mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it!’ (90). In offering a description of Laura based on a painting of her, the text effectively conceals Laura’s actual body from the reader, and obscures her identity: she is disembodied by the framing of her body both as a work of art and within the larger structure of Hartright’s narrative. Her body, then, is offered up to possession by the (male) gaze. The artist’s view of the body is an impression only, yet as a work of art, its purpose is to be observed, scrutinised, by those who consume it: Collins, Hartright, and the reader. This process of Laura’s artistic containment pre-empts her subsequent imprisonment in 28  See John Berger, Ways of Seeing, in which he proposes ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ ([London: Penguin, 2008], p. 47). 29  In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey argues that ‘The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure’ (in Patricia Erens, ed., Issues in Feminist Film Criticism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press], p. 33). On the male gaze in neoVictorian writing, see Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism.

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the asylum, and anticipates Braddon’s later text, in which the Pre-­ Raphaelite portrait of Lady Audley is subject to similar treatment. Via the male gaze (those of the artist and of her antagonists, Robert Audley and George Talboys), Lady Audley is disempowered (in Gilbert and Gubar’s words, ‘“killed” into art’), unable to withstand or respond to the patriarchal gaze which reveals her ‘true’ (constructed) self. In its representation of the heroine as a Pre-Raphaelite painting, Lady Audley’s Secret engages with a movement with close parallels to the Victorian sensation novel.  Like sensation fiction, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood emerged in the mid-nineteenth century: both challenged prevailing attitudes towards the arts, both caused controversy—not least through their representations of women—and both were frequently discussed in terms of the ‘sensation’ they provoked. Sophia Andres’s assessment of the art of the Pre-Raphaelites is equally applicable to the fiction of Victorian sensation writers: ‘Transgressing aesthetic, social, and gender boundaries, the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde gaze revealed hitherto unexplored perspectives as, for instance, unconventional beauty in conventional ugliness, feminine fragility in masculinity, and masculine strength in conventional femininity’.30 In life, as well as in their art, the central figures of the Pre-Raphaelite movement courted sensation—indeed the tales of marriage breakdown, drug addiction, and disturbed graves might have come from the pages of a Victorian sensation novel. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their models have provided significant source material for an increasing number of neo-Victorian writers.31

30  Sophia Andres, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Realism of the Sensation Novel’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 3. 31  In addition to Sleep, Pale Sister, examples include Elizabeth Savage’s Willowwood (1978), Maggie Power’s trio of Neo-Victorian novels (Goblin Fruit [1984], Lily [1994] and Porphyria’s Lover [1995]), John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004), Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love (2004), Newbery’s Set in Stone, Fiona Mountain’s Pale as the Dead (2002), Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and Elizabeth Hickey’s The Wayward Muse (2008)—many of which also incorporate elements of the Victorian sensation novel. The story of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood has also been adapted for television, in Desperate Romantics (BBC, 2009). While the series was undoubtedly ‘sexed up’ for the contemporary viewer, aspects of the history of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Millais et al., including Millais’s marriage to Ruskin’s first wife following the annulment of her marriage to Ruskin, and Rossetti’s retrieval of his poetry from his wife’s grave several years after her death, are not dissimilar to the typical plots of Victorian sensation novels.

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In Harris’s novel, a narrative replete with Gothic tropes, plot elements from The Woman in White are fused with details of the relationships between John Ruskin, Effie Gray, and John Everett Millais.32 Harris’s work, in reimagining the relationship between art and artist, seeks to dismantle the power relations between the sexes evident in Collins’s original narrative, temporarily empowering the heroine whilst simultaneously highlighting the manner in which Victorian literature rendered her powerless. Like Lady Audley’s Secret and My Cousin Rachel, then, it participates in the subgenre of the Female Gothic, revisiting and rewriting Collins’s Gothic sensation novel, and emancipating—if only briefly—the Victorian heroine. Harris opens with an image of the male artist’s creative interpretation of the female form, but subsequently calls into question the assumptions Collins makes about the compliance of the female model and her role as passive object rather than active subject, forcing a re-evaluation of Victorian aesthetic constructions of women. The plot centres on artist Henry Chester (based loosely on Ruskin), his wife, Effie (who shares her name with Ruskin’s wife, Effie Gray),33 and her lover. Chester evinces an unhealthy artistic and sexual fascination with the figure of the girl-child: he becomes obsessed with his model, Effie, whom he begins painting when she is nine years old, and marries at the age of seventeen. Unable to reconcile his artistic image of Effie with the role of wife—particularly in terms of sexual relations—he distances himself from her, seeking sexual fulfilment from young prostitutes instead. Effie too finds satisfaction outside of her marriage, embarking on an affair with another artist, Moses Harper (partially based on Millais). Through Moses, Effie meets the euphemistically named brothel keeper, Fanny Miller, whose clients include Henry Chester. Several years earlier, whilst visiting Fanny’s house, Henry attempted to rape and subsequently killed Fanny’s young daughter, Marta. Fanny, a spiritualist and mesmerist,34 uses Effie to 32  Ruskin married Effie Gray in 1848, but the marriage was subsequently annulled on the grounds of non-consummation—critical speculation suggests Ruskin was horrified by the sight of his wife’s pubic hair (see Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, [London: John Murray, 1967], p. 156). Effie subsequently married the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais. 33  For the character of her heroine, Harris draws on both Ruskin’s wife and the figure of Rose La Touche, with whom Ruskin later became infatuated following the breakdown of his marriage. He met Rose when she was nine years old (like Effie in Harris’s novel), and proposed to her some years later (she declined). 34  Her abilities as mesmerist are reminiscent of the character of Count Fosco in The Woman in White. This supernatural element marks a departure from the sensation novel, but reinforces the narrative’s position as Gothic text.

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channel her dead daughter’s spirit in order to enact revenge on her child’s murderer. Henry is introduced to ‘Marta’ (whom he fails to recognise as Effie), and becomes increasingly obsessed by her. The alienation he feels from his wife, and his developing feelings for Marta, eventually lead him to murder Effie, paradoxically finally freeing her from the artistic vision through which he has sought to imprison her. The plot to ‘kill’ Effie is intended as a ploy, devised by Fanny in order to enable Effie to escape her husband and become a permanent vessel for Marta’s spirit: Henry gives her a dose of laudanum and she is taken to a disused sepulchre in Highgate cemetery and left there—an example of the narrative’s Gothic excess. Moses is supposed to return later to rescue her, but fails to do so, and she dies. Haunted by her death, Henry suffers a stroke, and subsequently confesses to the crime, implicating Moses as well. The novel closes with the two artists’ impending deaths. The novel is a loose adaptation of The Woman in White: like Percival Glyde, Henry Chester attempts to impose an alternative identity upon his wife; subsequently, her identity becomes confused with that of another woman, Marta, whose ghost haunts the text (paralleling Anne Catherick’s ‘ghostly’ presence); the murder plot leaves Effie’s body buried in a grave marked not by her own name, but by another, echoing Anne’s burial under Laura’s name. The use of multiple narrators also echoes Collins’s novel. Henry’s role as artist is established in the novel’s opening paragraph, in which he refers to himself as ‘Henry Chester, painter, twice exhibited at the Royal Academy’.35 His art is devoted specifically to the female form: he notes, ‘I had no interest in painting men: I found more poetry in the female form, and a certain type of female form at that’ (25), hinting at a desire to ‘possess’ the female form through his art. He subscribes to the stereotypical Victorian angel/whore binary, and becomes obsessed with finding the perfect model to exemplify the former. By his own admission, his paintings of idealised women conceal a very different reality: “when I look back at some of my earlier works, I find it hard to trust my memory, recollecting that sweet-faced Juliet had an illegitimate child, or innocent Cinderella an addiction to the gin bottle” (ibid). This acknowledgement highlights the problematic nature of male artists’ subjective images of women, emphasising the extent to which art operates as masquerade, concealing and obscuring women’s ‘true’ identity, through the perpetuation

 Joanne Harris, Sleep, Pale Sister (London: Random House, 1994), p. 13.

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of the various myths of femininity.36 His distaste for the models—‘their lewdness, their unclean thoughts’ (25)—leads him to shift his artistic focus on to the girl-child, whose innocent appearance seems less likely to belie a corrupt reality. Through his search for a child model he encounters Effie, of whom he notes, ‘There was no wilfulness in her: she seemed created to embody all the feminine virtues without any of the perversity of the sex’ (28). His reaction to her highlights the problematic relationship between male artist and female subject: ‘I knew instantly that I had to have her as my model: there was an infinite promise of expression in her face; each movement was a masterpiece of definition. Looking at her I knew that child would be my salvation; her innocence moved me as much as her spectral beauty’ (26). Like Laura, then, Effie is introduced to the reader via the perspective of the male artist (although unlike her predecessor, Effie is subsequently granted a narrative voice). In his first painting of her, which prefigures Effie’s own early death, Henry imagines a scene from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem, ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ (1850), in an attempt to capture ‘the purity of the innocent who dies young’ (28). Effie subsequently becomes the model for almost all his work, which is characterised by its representations of the ‘eternal types’ of femininity to which Gilbert and Gubar refer, and which also provided inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelites: ‘I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in The Passion-Flower, she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia, in rags for The Little Beggar Girl’ (29). The multiple roles in which Effie is cast by Chester, and the projection of identities rooted in the male artist’s fantasies echo Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (1857): ‘One face looks out from all his canvases/[…] Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’.37 The image of Effie as a beggar girl recalls Charles Dodgson’s famous photograph of Alice Liddell as a beggar girl (1858), as well as Tennyson’s poem ‘The Beggar Maid’ (1842).38 The final words of Tennyson’s poem—‘The beggar maid 36  This confusion between the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’ woman recalls the ambiguous works of the Pre-Raphaelites, such as Ford Madox Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! in which aspects of the Madonna image are combined with those of the fallen woman. 37  The uncomfortable relationship between woman as art and her male ‘creator’ also recalls Robert Browning’s poems ‘Andrea Del Sarto’ (1855) and ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842). 38  Dodgson’s photograph and his relationship with Alice Liddell have inspired other neoVictorian works, including Katie Rophie’s Still She Haunts Me (2001) and Melanie Benjamin’s Alice I Have Been (2009).

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shall be my queen’—suggest a parallel with the various roles adopted by Effie in Chester’s paintings. Both Dodgson’s photograph and Tennyson’s poem draw on the story of Cophetua, and so engage in a similar process of revision and adaptation as Harris. Effie (like the model in Christina Rossetti’s poem) is thus presented with a series of ‘masks’ and hence encapsulates a multitude of female identities (echoing the representations of Lady Audley and Rachel Ashley); yet all represent a patriarchal vision of womanhood which ultimately seeks to obscure her own individual identity. She is repeatedly framed and constrained by Henry’s artistic construction of her, and this aesthetic imprisonment anticipates her later incarceration in the sepulchre. Shortly before their marriage, he completes yet another portrait of her, this time as Sleeping Beauty, epitomising the passive yet beautiful heroine of the Victorian artistic and literary imagination to whom Collins, amongst others, paid homage39: ‘My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty, so like My Sister’s Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl’s bed’ (29). The parallels between the two pictures (the former of a nineyear-old child, the latter of a seventeen-year-old woman) are suggestive of the stunted development of the child-woman: trapped within the male gaze, her growth is inhibited by the constraints of the patriarchal artistic vision. This lack of development is reminiscent of Laura Fairlie, who is repeatedly described as, and treated like, a child in The Woman in White: Marian refers to her as ‘the poor child—for a child she is still in many things’ (212), while Walter later observes ‘She spoke as a child might have spoken; she showed me her thoughts as a child might have shown them’ (444).40 While Collins’s heroine never truly escapes the confines of this stereotype, failing to move beyond Walter’s construction of her as passive, childlike, docile, Effie is more successful in this respect. Henry’s marriage to Effie shatters the image of her which dominates his paintings: the angelic, pure, innocent feminine. He is horrified by her expressions of sexual desire. Whilst the marriage (unlike that of Ruskin and Effie Gray) is con39  Examples of the passive, beautiful heroine in Collins’s fiction include Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White and Hide and Seek’s Madonna. 40  Laura is not the only character in the novel to be constructed in these terms: at various points in the novel, Anne Catherick, Marian Halcombe, and Madame Fosco are all compared to the figure of the child.

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summated, it soon becomes largely celibate, Henry being unable to reconcile his desire for the object of his artistic gaze with her position as desiring subject, so contrary to his notion of idealised femininity. Recalling their wedding night, he writes: ‘I was pinned to the mattress in horror: where was my beggar girl, my sleeping beauty, my pale sister? Where was the child I had nurtured? She was all adult now in the dark heat of her desire’ (54). Like Philip Ashley, Henry is unmanned by the revelation of woman’s true identity, so much at odds with the idealised image he has created. The scene marks the clash of the ‘eternal types’ of feminine—angel and whore—which Henry has persistently sought to impose. He becomes here a victim of his own artistic vision, which renders him blind to the existence of women outside the patriarchal stereotypes which he has perpetuated; thus the narrative, in contradistinction to Collins’s novel, highlights the problematic nature of Victorian aesthetic images of womanhood. Effie’s transformation from objet d’art to active, temporarily empowered subject is suggested not only by her sexual agency (emphasised through her brief expression of desire for her husband, and subsequently by her adulterous affair with Moses), but also by her response to her husband’s work: I, who had once been enchanted by his work, cared nothing for it now. Once, I had loved the way he drew me, always emphasizing my eyes and the purity of my features, but now his art left me indifferent and I wondered that I had ever thought him talented. The pictures sickened me, spread out like trophies over every available surface of wall in every room; and worst of all, in the bedroom, The Little Beggar Girl, painted when I was only thirteen, haunted me like the ghost of myself. (46)

If the effect of presenting women as works of art is to frame them, contain and silence them, then in responding to the artistic representations of herself, Effie breaks the frame which imprisons her, explicitly rejecting the notion of the female body as a ‘trophy’ belonging exclusively to the male gaze. This rejection, then, might be read as an act of neo-Victorian reclamation, through which the female body is rescued from a patriarchal vision which distorts and shapes it according to its own subjective view, and recalls the attempts made by both Lady Audley and Rachel Ashley to escape the patriarchal frames and narratives which constrain them. In all

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three narratives, then, the Gothic theme of imprisonment is reworked to emphasise the multiple ways in which patriarchy seeks to contain women. Effie’s rejection of the roles imposed upon her by the male artist is further exemplified in the scene in which she destroys her embroidery— another representation of Henry’s art (and more specifically of his artistic interpretation of his wife’s body): ‘The embroidery was half finished, the design an invention of Henry’s in rich, glowing colours: the Sleeping Beauty on her couch, all twined round with climbing roses. Even in its unfinished state, the face of the sleeping girl looked like mine’ (47). Sitting working at her embroidery, Effie, reflecting on her marriage to Henry, enters into a ‘furious trance’ (ibid). Jolted out of it by the appearance of her servant, she finds she has inadvertently destroyed the embroidery, which is now stained with her own blood: ‘I looked down in surprise and saw my hands bleeding from a dozen stab wounds. A bloody handprint branded the needlework, obliterating half of the sleeping girl’s face’ (ibid). While the image of her bleeding hands is suggestive of stigmata, indicating the sacrificial role of the Victorian woman (as both objet d’art and wife), the face of the sleeping girl, now obscured by Effie’s blood, further signifies the heroine’s rebellion against these restrictive roles. This Gothic image of the sleeping girl destroyed, Effie subsequently reveals, represents her ‘true portrait’ (86): bleeding, damaged, tainted, ‘the face branded with scarlet’ (ibid), it is nevertheless a truer representation of the individual woman than the images of purity and innocence which the male artist repeatedly produces. The destruction of the embroidery as a symbolic rejection of the masks male artists fasten on women is further suggested by the presence in Victorian art, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings in particular, of women embroidering—a task which also typifies the image of the domesticated Victorian woman. The figure is found in D. G. Rossetti’s early work, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–1849), in which Mary reproduces in embroidery the lily in front of her—symbolising her own purity.41 In Millais’s Mariana (1851), the title figure gazes out of the window, her attention diverted away from the embroidery in front of her. The Lady of Shalott, often featured with her embroidery, was another favourite subject with Pre-Raphaelite artists.42 Meanwhile, the woman sewing in Millais’s A  The embroidered lily also features in Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–1850).  See William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott (1886–1905), and John William Waterhouse’s later painting ‘I am half-sick of shadows’ said the Lady of Shalott (1916), for example. 41 42

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Waterfall in Glenfinlas (1853) is Effie’s namesake, wife of Ruskin and later of Millais himself. Effie’s action thus takes on multiple meanings: it is an act of self-assertion, a declaration of independence, a rejection of the male artist’s view of the female body and role, and a refusal to countenance the false representations of women in art. Yet ironically, in Harris’s novel, Effie’s destruction of the image of herself represented by the embroidery prefigures her actual destruction at the close of the narrative. The identities created for her by male artists ultimately become so entwined with her own self-identity that they become inseparable, and the destruction of one necessitates the destruction of the other: breaking free from the role of objet d’art and the control of the male artist, Harris suggests, is fraught with danger, just as Rachel’s declaration of independence, signified by her refusal of Philip’s marriage proposal, proves fatal. Sleep, Pale Sister calls into question Collins’s representation of the passive, two-dimensional heroine by demonstrating the inauthentic nature of the male artist’s representations of the female subject: while Laura fails to move beyond the passive feminine represented in Walter’s portrait of her, Effie rebels against her husband’s construction of her as the ideal feminine, rejecting those images of her which he has so painstakingly constructed. This rebellion, however, is short-lived: having failed in his attempts to ‘kill’ Effie into art, Henry resorts to literally taking her life. Ultimately, then, Effie does not escape her status as victim. While Henry’s control over her (as husband and artist) is initially lessened, she is subject to the control of others, including, significantly, that of another artist (her lover, Moses, to whom she is no more than a sexual conquest), as well as the brothel keeper, Fanny Miller, whose interest in her is only as a vessel through which she can channel her own dead daughter. Effie eventually falls victim to those who seek to control her for their own purposes—paying the ultimate price in death. Ironically, Effie’s death restores her to the image of idealised femininity she initially appears to represent in Henry’s paintings and which she has persistently sought to challenge: ‘the innocent who dies young’ (28)—a recurrent image in Victorian art and literature. In death, she finally takes on the role in which her husband has repeatedly cast her: ‘every canvas showed her in some macabre, gloomy role … dying, dead, sick, blind, abandoned … thin and piteous as a dead child, swathed in her winding-­ sheet as Juliet’ (65). Thus, in the act of taking her life, Henry finally succeeds in killing her into art. This is most clearly indicated in the parallels between the failed plot to pretend to kill Effie and the conclusion of

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Romeo and Juliet—one of the many scenes in which Henry has previously painted Effie. Stirring from her laudanum-induced sleep as she is placed in the sepulchre by Henry and Moses, Effie herself recognises this: ‘Just like … Juliet in the tomb … like Henry’s painting’ (304). She fails, however, to realise that Moses is no Romeo, that he will not return to claim her, and the price of her ignorance is ultimately death. Moses’s remorse at his failure is minimal, and he too recognises that through her death Effie finally becomes the artistic construct of the male artist’s imagination: ‘Don’t think I didn’t feel a pang for my poor little Effie; I was very fond of her, you know. But you have to admit that her death would have been very convenient for all of us. Almost as if it has been meant, somehow. And so poetic, don’t you think? Like Juliet in the tomb’ (310). Invoking the tragic demise of Shakespeare’s heroine, Moses’s words also echo those of Edgar Allan Poe, who proclaimed: ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’.43 Moses too, then, participates in the process through which the heroine is ‘killed’ into art, and Effie fails to escape her position as the victim (object) of male artists, unable, finally, to remove ‘those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face’. Effie’s status as victim and her eventual death link her to Collins’s Anne Catherick. In contrast to Effie, Laura does, it seems, eventually find fulfilment through her marriage and motherhood. Collins’s heroine, however, remains bound to the figure of the male artist whose vision of her obscures her true identity in favour of an artistic interpretation. Effie’s death thus represents a paradox: it is the act through which she is unremittingly killed into art, but it is also a form of escape (though not of her own making), through which she is finally freed from the artistic gaze.44 The ending of Harris’s novel can be read in multiple ways: as a reworking, questioning, or rejection of the typical marital conclusion to the Victorian novel; as a commentary on the impossible 43  Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) in Edgar Allan Poe’s Complete Poetical Works (Whitefish: Kessinger Publisher, 2004), p. 225. Elisabeth Bronfen examines artistic representations of women and death in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). The notion of the poetic death of the beautiful woman is encapsulated by Pre-Raphaelite model and Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddall, who was buried with a volume of her husband’s poetry. When he retrieved it some years later, it was rumoured that her beauty remained intact, and that her red hair had continued to grow, and filled the coffin. 44  There is a contrast here with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), in which the heroine chooses to escape the constraints of patriarchal society via her suicide.

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confinement of Victorian women’s lives and the difficulties in attaining personal fulfilment, rendering death or madness potentially appealing alternatives to the death-in-life Laura experiences; or, as indicative of both the dangers and demise of the female stereotypes perpetuated by Chester and his contemporaries. The latter possibility perhaps suggests a Virginia Woolf-esque desire, on the part of the author, to ‘kill’ the ‘Angel in the House’,45 reinforcing the notion that it is only through death that Effie can escape the identities that have been forced upon her. These four narratives demonstrate the centrality of Gothic tropes in the sensation and neo-sensation novel, and the manner in which later fiction is haunted by the spectre of the Victorian sensation novel. All four texts are concerned with questions of female (dis)empowerment, with the ways in which patriarchal society seeks to contain and control women, and thus they operate in a specifically female Gothic tradition.46 The typically Gothic themes and tropes with which they engage—the double, imprisonment, buried secrets, death—offer productive ways of characterising the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and its (ghostly) afterlives, as well as illustrating the continuities between Victorian sensation and subsequent popular and literary fiction. The positioning of My Cousin Rachel as a neo-Victorian, neo-sensation narrative forces a reconsideration of the chronological and cultural boundaries of neo-Victorianism, and demonstrates the pervasive spectral presence of the sensation novel throughout twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, which remains haunted by the ghosts of Lady Audley, Anne Catherick, and their ilk.

References Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie. 2003. The Double in the Fiction of R.  L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, and Daphne Du Maurier. Bern: Peter Lang. Andres, Sophia. 2011. The Pre-Raphaelite Realism of the Sensation Novel. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed., Pamela Gilbert, 559–575. Oxford: Blackwell. Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham. 2009. Introduction. In Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, xi–xxvi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 45  See Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ in Selected Essays (1931; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 140–145. 46  The Woman in White’s relationship to the female Gothic is complex, given Walter’s relationship to Laura, but its highlighting of the injustices faced by women in a patriarchal society evidences its participation in this tradition.

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Bachman, Maria K., and Don Richard Cox. 2006. Introduction to Wilkie Collins. In The Woman in White, 9–37. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Beauman, Sally. 2003. Introduction. In My Cousin Rachel, v–x. London: Vintage. Beer, Gillian. 2009. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2003. Lady Audley’s Secret. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Brindle, Kym. 2012. Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic. In Neo-Victorian Gothic, ed. Kohlke and Gutleben, 279–300. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Collins, Wilkie. 1860. The Woman in White, 2006. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Du Maurier, Daphne. 2003. My Cousin Rachel. London: Vintage. Eliot, George to John Blackwood (11 September 1866) in Gordon Sherman Haight, ed. 1954. The George Eliot Letters, 1862–1868. New Haven: Yale University Press, 309. Garrett, Peter K. 2003. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Harris, Joanne. 1994. Sleep, Pale Sister. London: Random House. Holt, Victoria. 2013. Shivering Sands. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2011. Neo-Victorian Goblin Fruit: Maggie Power on the Gothic Fascinations of Demon Lovers and Re-Imagining the Victorians. Neo-­ Victorian Studies 4 (1): 77–92. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutelben, eds. 2012. Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben. 2012. The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-­ Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations. In Neo-­ Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 1–48. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press. Kungl, Carla T. 2010. “The Secret of My Mother’s Madness”: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Gothic Instability. In Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, 170–180. Jefferson: McFarland.

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Kushnier, Jennifer S. 2002. Educating Boys to Be Queer: Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Victorian Literature and Culture. 30 (1): 61–75. Lutyens, Mary. 1967. Millais and the Ruskins. London: John Murray. Michell, Roger. (writer/director). 2017. My Cousin Rachel. 20th Century Fox. Mitchell, Margaret E. 2009. ‘“Beautiful Creatures”: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction. Women: A Cultural Review 20 (1): 25–41. Mulvey, Laura. n.d. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, 28–40. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Poe, Edgar Allan. 2004. ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846). In Edgar Allan Poe’s Complete Poetical Works, 220–231. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publisher. Woolf, Virginia. 1931. Selected Essays, 2008. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Criminal Sensations: Neo-Victorian Detectives

In Agatha Christie’s short story, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ (1960), a will is hidden inside a copy of Lady Audley’s Secret. Indeed, the story’s central frame of reference is sensation fiction. An extravagant Victorian mansion (the ‘folly’ of the title), built ‘in eighteen-sixty or seventy or thereabouts’,1 is the scene of a crime. In a convoluted plot with strong echoes of the sensation novel, Katherine Greenshaw is murdered by her housekeeper and an accomplice in order that they may inherit her estate. In an attempt to exonerate themselves, the housekeeper impersonates her mistress in order to disguise the true time of the murder. As well as explicitly referencing Lady Audley’s Secret, Miss Greenshaw’s allusion to her sister who ‘ran away with the riding master’ (232) recalls Aurora Floyd, and the regular updates on the house and its inhabitants provided by a woman working for Miss Greenshaw are sardonically referred to as ‘instalment[s]’ of a ‘thrilling serial’ (240). The Victorian house, the inheritance plot, the switching of identities between mistress and servant, as well as the implicit and explicit allusions to Braddon’s novels all serve to link the story to the earlier genre. The mystery is solved by Miss Marple, Christie’s famous amateur detective, whose precursors include the amateur female detectives of sensation fiction, such as The Woman in White’s Marian Halcombe and Braddon’s Margaret Wilmot in Henry Dunbar. Other characters include a writer, Raymond West, who is ‘horrified at the mere idea’ that he might produce 1  Agatha Christie, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ in The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding (London: Collins, 1960), p. 229.

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detective fiction (249), echoing critical disdain of the sensation novel in a manner which recalls Braddon’s self-referential critique of popular fiction in The Doctor’s Wife (1864) via her portrayal of sensation writer Sigismund Smith.2 The house of the title and its history are also emblematic of the sensation novel: the project of Miss Greenshaw’s grandfather—a ‘Barefoot boy who had risen to immense prosperity’ (229), only to lose everything and teeter on the brink of bankruptcy—the house evidences a diverse range of influences, and in this respect appears symbolic of the generic indeterminacy of sensation fiction, with its tendency to borrow from multiple genres and sources. The fate of its original owner echoes that of the sensation novel, with its disreputable roots in melodrama and penny dreadfuls, its huge success, and subsequent apparent fall into obscurity. This obscurity is reinforced by Christie’s reference to the house’s library, which contains ‘Some novels of a bygone period’ (including Lady Audley’s Secret) which ‘showed little signs of having been read’ (234)—suggestive of the lack of interest in the sensation novel by the time ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ was published. Christie’s story functions as a tribute to the sensation novel, an early example of neo-Victorian (sensation) fiction, and an acknowledgement of the genre’s influence on detective fiction. As the clues Christie provides here indicate, the detective genre is heavily indebted to the Victorian sensation novel. Indeed, in many respects, the detective novel represents sensation fiction’s most successful and enduring legacy, as well as its most persistent ongoing engagement with popular culture.3 Neo-Victorian literary fiction frequently contains elements of detection, but in its truest form, detective fiction belongs to the realms of popular culture. It is, in the words of Franco Moretti, ‘anti-literary’4—a claim which echoes Victorian criticisms of sensation fiction. This is important in terms of the emergence of a neo-Victorian canon: sensation fiction’s legacy is evident in the literary fiction of Byatt, Waters, and others, but the genre also 2  The character of the writer appears repeatedly in the neo-sensation novel: examples include Alice Lincroft in Holt’s Shivering Sands, Brian Thompson’s Bella Wallis and Kate Ardleigh Sheridan in Robin Paige’s Victorian Mystery series. 3  Melissa Schaub identifies detective fiction as specifically ‘middlebrow’, arguing that as it was both ‘popular and […] intellectually respectable […] it was the form where high and low were most likely to mingle and become middlebrow’ (Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], p. viii). 4  Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983; London: Verso 2005), p. 148.

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remains a pervasive influence on those works which neo-Victorian scholarship initially excluded from the critical debate. And yet the success of detective fiction serves in many respects to obscure the influence of the sensation novel: by the time of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, the sensation novel in its original form was already languishing in obscurity, its influence on the immensely successful detective novel largely forgotten. This chapter traces the detective descendants of the sensation novel from Sherlock Holmes through to contemporary neo-sensational detective fiction, examining the way in which the specific tenets of the sensation novel (including the domestic setting, the emphasis on family secrets, and the figure of the amateur detective) are redeployed in the detective genre. As with the tropes of the Gothic novel, the characteristics of detective fiction provide a useful metaphor for the relationship between past and present, as authors, historians, and readers seek to uncover, to detect and solve the mysteries of the past. Heilmann and Llewellyn note the close association between neo-Victorian and detective fiction, suggesting that ‘much neo-Victorianism locates itself’ within and ‘is particularly suited’ to ‘detection’: ‘The association between detection and historical fiction per se inevitably rests in the similarities in the gathering of evidence and the search for the new (and hopefully correct) interpretation of that material.’5 Louisa Hadley makes similar claims, suggesting that ‘Detective fiction provides a way for […] neo-Victorian novelists to explore questions not only of the possibility of knowing the past but also of the responsibility that the present owes the past’, and arguing that ‘detective fiction connects to neo-­Victorian fiction’s concern with how we can know, and narrate, the Victorian past’ by ‘[r]aising questions of what we know about the world and the systems by which we acquire that knowledge’.6 Scott McCracken’s summary of detective fiction in his study of popular fiction also suggests neat parallels with neo-Victorian literature: ‘the detective narrative can be seen as a new form of an old story: the narrative that attempts to explain what has gone before, to find a beginning or origin.’7 Both neo-Victorian and detective fiction are fundamentally concerned with the past, but the neo-Victorian reader, like the detective, needs to be  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 16.  Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 59. 7  Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 51. 5 6

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aware of ‘red ­herrings’, of misrepresentations which obscure rather than reveal the Victorian past. The paradoxical process of (re)discovering and obscuring the past is central to the neo-Victorian novel, and casts the reader as ‘detective’. The ongoing tensions between literary and popular detective fiction, evident in the limited discussion of the latter in neoVictorian criticism, are addressed here via an exploration of several popular works, including Emily Brightwell’s The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (1993) and Tasha Alexander’s And Only to Deceive (2005), which, whilst distinct from Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metaficton’, nonetheless represent significant cultural engagements with the Victorian past, and specifically with the sensation novel.

The Victorian Sensation Novel as/and Detective Fiction The success of the Victorian sensation novel coincided with a broader social and cultural interest in crime and detection, resulting from a combination of factors, including the formation of the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan police in 1842,8 and the rise of the popular press, which led to increased reporting on crime. Popular fiction had long evinced an interest in crime and mystery, including the antecedents of the sensation novel, such as Gothic and Newgate novels. Gothic literature, whilst rife with crime (the victim of which was often the passive heroine), frequently positioned itself as both geographically and historically distant from the reader’s own experiences, whilst the Newgate novel is very much concerned with criminality amongst the poorer classes, thus also effectively distant from the typical middle-class Victorian reader. The sensation novel provoked anxiety in part because it seemed to imply that heinous crimes could be committed within the sanctified space of the respectable upper-/middle-­class home. These anxieties were reinforced by several real-life criminal cases which demonstrated exactly that, and were widely reported in the media, including the Road Hill House murder, in which a teenage girl, Constance Kent, apparently killed her young half-brother by slitting his throat whilst the family slept.9 The sensation novel’s 8  See Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov, eds., Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 9  Although Kent eventually confessed and was convicted, there has been speculation that she was covering for her brother, and may not have committed the crime. See Kate

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engagement with these developments and cases was noted by several of the genre’s critics, including Margaret Oliphant, who criticised the ‘police-court aspect of modern fiction’,10 and the author of an article in The Christian Remembrancer in 1864, who noted that ‘Crime is inseparable from the sensation novel, and so is sympathy with crime’.11 Later critical readings also support the association between crime, detection, and sensation fiction. Suzanne Moore’s analysis of the (American) female detective novel echoes critical descriptions of the sensation novel: ‘the presence of the female detective recasts both the Gothic’s potential for gender critique in its depiction of women trapped in domestic spaces and the domestic novel’s assertion of the home as the center of value against the public market economy.’12 The detective novel, then, like sensation fiction, is concerned with interrogating the cultural assumptions and meanings associated with the ideas of home and family. Further, as Hadley notes in her exploration of neo-Victorian detective fiction, ‘Sensation and detective fiction adopt a similar plot structure: both genres hinge on the discovery of a secret from the past that threatens the social order in the present’.13 Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is generally cited as the sensation genre’s most significant engagement with detective fiction. T.  S. Eliot described it as ‘the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels’, thus positing it as one of the founding texts of the genre.14 However, Eliot’s claim only stands up to critical scrutiny if we accept as a defining feature of the form the inclusion of the figure of the professional detective. This, though, is undermined by some of the most famous works of the genre, whose protagonists operate as amateurs rather than professionals, including Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; or The Murder at Road Hill House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). 10  Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Aug. 1863, p. 169. 11  Anon., ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, The Christian Remembrancer, Vol. 46, Jul– Oct 1864, p. 210. 12  Suzanne Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection: The Female Detective in Victorian and Contemporary Mystery Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47:2 (Summer 2001), pp.  449– 450. Moore’s review article examines Catherine Ross Nickerson’s The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Duke University Press, 1998)—a study which evidences significant parallels between the Victorian sensation novel and nineteenth-century American detective fiction, particularly in terms of the emphasis on domesticity. 13  Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 63. 14  T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 464.

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(1887–1927) and Christie’s Miss Marple series (1927–1976). Indeed, amateur detectives are frequently considerably more successful than The Moonstone’s Sergeant Cuff, who fails to solve the mystery of who stole the infamous diamond. If we disregard the necessity for the professional detective, it is evident that several earlier sensation novels also pre-empt the detective genre. The defining features of the sensation novel as detective fiction are, then, located elsewhere: in the figure of the amateur detective, but also in the details of the crime itself, which is closely associated, in sensation fiction, with both the respectable domestic space and the inhabitants of that space. A consequence of this is that the home, and with it the family, become the subject of surveillance. Domesticity, then, is crucial to both the sensation novel’s transformation of the Gothic and its engagement with detective fiction. The domestic space and its inhabitants consequently represent an important feature of nineteenth-century popular fiction in its various manifestations, as well as of later detective fiction, much of which is similarly concerned with the family and crimes committed there. The central mystery of the Victorian sensation-detective novel must be a crime, punishable, in theory at least, by the law—and these works frequently reference the machinery of the law, even if they ultimately don’t invoke it. Those sensation novels which deal with immorality rather than criminality, do not, then, fall into this sub-category. The prevalence of detective elements in the sensation novel is evidenced by a brief examination of some of the most famous works of the genre. All three of the novels which are most frequently cited as the originators of the form—The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret, and East Lynne— contain elements of the detective novel. In The Woman in White, Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe attempt to piece together evidence to prove Laura Fairlie’s true identity, and to discover Sir Percival’s Glyde secret, whilst the narrative itself, with its multiple narrators functioning as witnesses, is constructed as representative of a legal case, ‘As the judge might once have heard it’ (49).15 In Braddon’s novel, Robert Audley takes on the role of amateur detective, determined to form the ‘chain of evidence […] constructed link by link’ (282) which will prove Lady Audley’s guilt. An article which appeared in The London Review in 1863 described

15  The latest BBC television adaptation of Collins’s novel (2018) replicates this structure via the multiple interviews Mr Nash (a scrivener hired by Walter to help solve the case) conducts with the various ‘witnesses’, which are interspersed throughout the series.

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him as a ‘social detective’.16 For both Robert and Walter, the detective process is crucial in establishing their masculine identity: Lillian Craton notes that these ‘male detectives […] as culmination of their efforts, gain more secure footholds in middle-class masculinity’.17 Isabel Vane’s adultery and abandonment of her husband and children in East Lynne mark the narrative’s interest in immorality rather than criminality, but its detective credentials are evident in the subplot in which Archibald Carlyle and Barbara Hare attempt to  discover the true identity of the murderer of George Hallijohn and clear Barbara’s brother, Richard, who has been falsely accused. In The Woman in White and East Lynne, the amateur female detective plays a key role, evidencing another trend in the sensation novel, with other notable examples of this including Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), in which Valeria Macallan attempts to clear her husband’s name after he is accused of murdering his first wife, Margaret Wilmot in Braddon’s Henry Dunbar, who attempts to prove that Henry Dunbar has murdered her father, and Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name (1876), in which the heroine, Leona Lecoste, seeks to establish her father’s innocence following his death after discovering he is suspected of murder. Braddon’s later novel, Thou Art the Man (1894), also features an amateur female detective, whilst His Darling Sin (1899) and Henry Dunbar include the figure of the professional detective. Several short stories by sensation novelists contain female amateur detective figures, including Collins’s ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’ (1856), and one of the earliest professional female detectives appears in Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective (1864). The introduction of these fictional female detectives is significant in terms of both the sensation genre and its cultural afterlife. In their roles as (amateur) detectives, the transgressive heroines of sensation fiction become the instigators, rather than the subjects of surveillance. This is most clearly evident in Marian Halcombe’s attempts to spy on Count Fosco and Percival Glyde: climbing out of a window, she leaves the safety of the domestic space, and scrutinises her sister’s husband and his co-­ conspirator—powerful men who have used their positions to target Laura’s inheritance and silence Anne Catherick. Collins’s Anne Rodway 16  Anon., ‘Lady Audley on the Stage’, The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science, Vol. 6 (March 7 1863), p. 245. 17  Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009), p. 143.

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pits her wits against a particular type of criminal masculinity in an attempt to discover the murderer of her friend, Mary, and Braddon’s Margaret Wilmot, a poor piano teacher, dogs the footsteps of the man she believes to be millionaire banker Henry Dunbar, who is protected by his wealth and position, in order to discover the truth about her father’s apparent murder. Their appearance coinciding with the Victorian feminist movement, sensation heroines go some way towards subverting society’s power structures and in their roles as detectives place under scrutiny those patriarchal forces which have formerly sought to contain them, paralleling women’s rights protestors calling into question the laws which disempowered them. Both the sensation-detective heroine and the women’s rights campaigners, then, sought to introduce some form of justice and to challenge prevailing ideologies, and thus the process of detection itself came to represent a form of rebellion. The notion of detection as a transgressive process is reinforced by its association with spying. The sensation novel spoke to Victorian anxieties about surveillance—particularly within the home. The policeman, and by extension the detective, as Anthea Trodd has pointed out, has affiliations with the figure of the servant: both represent outsiders in the domestic space, and threaten the reputation and the stability of the family, even as they ostensibly serve it.18 Hence, Marian’s efforts are aimed at protecting and securing justice for her sister, but to succeed she must expose the injustices of Victorian marriage law, and reveal the institution of marriage as potentially dangerous for the respectable Victorian woman. However, the proto-feminist implications of female detection are to some extent undermined by the motivations of these various characters, as well as by the outcomes of the detective processes. Whilst Marian endeavours to protect her sister, Valeria, Margaret, Leona, and Eleanor work to protect or defend the reputations of their husbands or fathers. In this, we find an earlier Gothic precedent in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), in which the heroine, Adeline, is also involved in detecting her father’s murderer—reinforcing the notion of an evolution of popular literature from the Gothic to the detective novel, via sensation fiction. The affinities between these three key genres of nineteenth-century popular fiction are further suggested by Stephen Knight’s claim that  See Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 18

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‘The essence of sensationalist fiction […] was to surround a crime with a combination of Gothic-style mystery and meticulous realism’.19 Further, these detective-­heroines not infrequently fail to solve the mystery, are indebted to their male counterparts for the solution, or relinquish (voluntarily or involuntarily) their task, and return to the ‘proper’ feminine sphere. This is most clearly illustrated in The Woman in White, via Marian’s illness, which results directly from her attempts to spy on Fosco and Glyde, and serves to literally (re-)confine her to the home. However, the fate of sensation fiction’s other female detectives is also relevant here. Anne Rodway ultimately relinquishes the detective role to her fiancé, and, like Marian, is left confined to the domestic space, her ‘strength and resolution’ having been ‘too hardly taxed’.20 The story closes with the reassurance of her subsequent happy marriage. Valeria returns to the role of dutiful wife and mother. Leona represents one of the more successful examples of the female detective, and, having cleared her father’s name, is duly rewarded with a happy marriage. Margaret Wilmot’s case is slightly different. Like Anne Rodway, she is assisted by her fiancé, Clement, but when she eventually discovers her father is the murderer and is impersonating Henry Dunbar, she breaks off her engagement without explanation, leading Clement to employ the services of a professional detective, who solves the mystery but is prevented from arresting the perpetrator when Margaret assists in his escape; thus she moves from the role of detective to criminal. Nonetheless, her father’s death results in her reunion with Clement and their subsequent marriage. In Eleanor’s Victory, the heroine is criticised for her obsessive pursuit of the man she holds responsible for her father’s suicide, and she is encouraged to—and eventually does— relinquish her pursuit of ‘justice’ in favour of her wifely duties. In sensation fiction, then, the female detective frequently fulfils a paradoxical position: temporarily escaping from the confines of the feminine role, only to subsequently return to it in the narrative conclusion. To this end, these narratives appear to finish with the restoration of order—a key feature, as Patrick Brantlinger and others have observed, of both sensation

19  Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010 [2nd edition]), p. 233. 20  Wilkie Collins, ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’ in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: The Victorian Era (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview, 2006), p. 486.

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and detective fiction.21 Discussing the detective genre, Moore notes its ‘convention-bound nature’,22 and its emphasis on ‘a shattered innocence that is restored by the solution of the crime’.23 She suggests that ‘The figure of the female detective is […] in the business of reasserting middleclass order, performing the conservative re-establishment of the accepted hierarchy for which detective fiction in general has been critiqued’,24 but in the sensation novel, the process of detection itself appears to threaten the ‘innocence’ of the heroine, as she engages in a (public) world of criminality and danger, whilst her ultimate return to the domestic space subsequently appears to restore that innocence. As evidenced above, in the case of several sensation heroines, the transgressive behaviour signalled by the move into a public space and the adoption of the detective role is motivated primarily by a sense of obligation or duty to the father, and thus, paradoxically, becomes an extension of the ‘proper’ feminine role and duties—notably that of moral guardian. This is evident in Leona’s attempts to clear her father’s name in Marryat’s novel, but also in the case of several daughters of ‘bad’ fathers, such as Braddon’s Margaret Wilmot in Henry Dunbar. Indeed, ‘bad’ fathers are as pervasive as absent mothers in the sensation novel, and are frequently the root cause of the heroine’s transgressions. Aurora Floyd’s overly indulgent father spoils his daughter, who later elopes with his groom; Lady Audley’s alcoholic and neglectful father (along with her husband) fails to provide for her, resulting in her taking matters into her own hands; Isabel Vane’s irresponsible father squanders his fortune, effectively forcing her to marry for position after his death; Eleanor Vane’s father, meanwhile, loses three fortunes to his expensive tastes and poor judgement, but still manages to spoil his daughter whilst living in relative poverty; and Laura Fairlie’s father’s extra-marital liaison with Mrs Catherick produces Anne Catherick, and enables the later identity switch which results in Laura’s imprisonment in an asylum. In Henry Dunbar, Eleanor’s Victory, and Her Father’s Name, daughters undertake to carry out detective work on behalf of their (flawed) fathers. Heidi H. Johnson suggests that representations of the detective daughter are common enough in Victorian fiction to be identified as a significant trope:  Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’, p. 16.  Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47:2 (Summer 2001), p. 448. 23  Ibid., p. 449. 24  Ibid., p. 450. 21 22

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A frequently recapitulated scenario of the daughter who detects to discover the secret of her father’s death or, conversely, whose detection reveals his culpability serves as an archetype for a daughterly and womanly desire seen as vital by a number of mid- and late- Victorian authors even as they overtly condemn their protagonists’ quests.25

Johnson reads these works in psychoanalytic terms, suggesting that ‘What the female sleuth seeks is the secret of the father’s power, as her act of detection demystifies his primacy and allows her to reinaugurate through her own agency a process of psychosexual growth arrested by her protracted attachment to the father’.26 It may, though, be helpful to consider these texts in relation to the sensation genre’s broader challenge to Victorian gender ideologies, and to consider the ways in which they present ostensibly conservative narratives which demonstrate the dangers of women subscribing blindly to patriarchal authority, regardless of its faults. In restoring order at the end of these texts, the heroines are all brought under the control of more positive representatives of Victorian patriarchy in the form of the husband (with the notable exception of Marian, who does not marry, but nevertheless ends the novel as ‘the good angel’ [617], safely ensconced in the domestic sphere). At the same time, the amateur female detective frequently participates in a process through which threats to the respectable family, to moral values, and to the sanctity of the home are negated, as Moore notes thereby ‘protecting the middle- and upper-­ class way of life from the evils of some of its own members’.27 The message presented in these various narratives, then, is simultaneously both radical (exposing patriarchal figures as deeply flawed) and conservative (restoring the heroines to patriarchal rule via marriage and domestication and ensuring the continued sanctity of the Victorian home). Whilst the popular neo-sensation detective novel offers more radical possibilities for its transgressive daughters, it too often resorts to a nostalgic conservatism in terms of gender roles. The suggestion that the female detective figure’s return to the domestic space and a ‘proper’ feminine role in the sensation novel represents a restoration of order serves to emphasise the extent to which she represents, 25  Heidi H. Johnson, ‘Electra-fying the Female Sleuth: Detecting the Father in Eleanor’s Victory and Thou Art the Man’ in Marlene Tromp, Pamela Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, eds., Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth in Context, p. 255. 26  Ibid. 27  Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection’, p. 450.

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along with her criminal counterpart, an example of transgressive femininity. Trodd identifies the parallels not only between the policeman and the servant, but also with the lady of the house, and notes the association between criminality and femininity suggested by the sensation novel. The female detective embodies the various anxieties generated by these figures: her investigative role echoes that of the police, and thus threatens the family’s respectability, even as she seeks to restore it. She becomes, like the figure of the servant, a potential spy within the home, placing its inhabitants under surveillance in order to obtain the evidence required to solve the mystery. Further, the line between detective and criminal is at times blurred, reinforcing the notion of an association between criminality and femininity. This is evident in No Name, Eleanor’s Victory, and Henry Dunbar, all of which depict some slippage between detection and criminality, as the heroines’ desire for revenge sees them employing the skills of both the detective and the criminal: Magdalen Vanstone in No Name marries her cousin under an assumed name in order to access the inheritance she believes is rightfully hers; Margaret Wilmot assists her father’s escape from the law; Eleanor enters the home of her father’s friend and steals (so that she may protect) a copy of his will. The conservative conclusions of sensation fiction, however, ensure the negation of the threat posed by both the ‘criminal angel’28 and the female detective, either via death or a return to her ‘proper’ sphere. The neo-sensation novel, though, offers greater possibilities in this respect.

Neo-Sensation Detectives The defining features of sensation-detective fiction, outlined above and evident in a range of Victorian sensation novels, provide a blueprint for the neo-sensation detective novel, and enable a distinction between this notable subgenre and the multitude of other historical detective novels set in or engaging with the nineteenth century—many of which, of course, reference Conan Doyle’s later creation of Sherlock Holmes. In addition to specific intertextual references to the sensation novel, these include predominantly amateur, rather than professional detectives (often women), and are concerned with crimes linked to domesticity and the family. Even within these narrowed parameters, there is an extensive range of contemporary fiction which falls into this category, amongst which some key  Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, p. 5.

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­ atterns and trends are discernible. The earliest examples of detective ficp tion reworking the sensation novel appeared in the nineteenth century, at times blurring the boundaries between the two genres. These include Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, which draws on elements of The Moonstone. Collins’s novel continues to exert a powerful influence on crime and detective fiction, with later reworkings including Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), and Kylie Fitzpatrick’s The Ninth Stone (2007), as well as Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008)—an historical account of the Road murder case which inspired Collins’s novel. The Moonstone has been adapted several times for screen, most recently by the BBC in 2016, and Summerscale’s work is also the subject of a 2014 BBC adaptation. It is possible, then, to trace a direct lineage from Collins’s ‘origin’ detective novel to contemporary neo-Victorian cultural productions. As Christie’s short story evidences, the sensation novel also influenced ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction, not only via explicit references to the genre such as that found in ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, but also in terms of some of the classic tropes employed by Christie and her contemporaries: the country-­ house murder, in particular, with its emphasis on the respectable home as a crime scene, owes much to works such as Lady Audley’s Secret, Aurora Floyd, and The Moonstone, whilst Collins’s short story ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ (1852) anticipates later locked-room mysteries, such as John Dickson Carr’s The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), suggesting sensation writers’ influence on American as well as British detective fiction. Dorothy L. Sayers was heavily influenced by Collins, particularly in her novel The Nine Tailors (1934).29 The amateur detectives of this period, including Miss Marple and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (1910–1936), as well as the domestic crimes which frequently form the basis for their investigations, also find their antecedents in the sensation novel. As A. B. Emrys has explored at length, Collins’s novels were a significant influence on American writer Vera Caspary’s work, notably Laura (1943) and The Secret of Elizabeth (1978)—the latter of which draws explicitly on The Woman in White.30 More recently, Sherlock Holmes has proved the most popular intertext for the neo-Victorian detective novel, with a slew of 29  See Christine Colón, Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), and Susan R.  Hanes, ‘The Persistent Phantom: Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers’, Wilkie Collins Journal, 3 (2000), n.p. 30  See Emrys, Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary, and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel.

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l­iterary adaptations, including Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty  (2014), and Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series (1994–2015), as well as popular screen adaptations Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009) and Sherlock (BBC, 2010–2017). Other recent neo-Victorian television series with a detective focus draw on the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 (a case which has also generated numerous literary adaptations)—notably Whitechapel (ITV, 2009–2013) and Ripper Street (BBC, 2012–2016).31 Despite Collins’s influence on Conan Doyle, however, these recent literary and screen adaptations on the whole depart from the sensation novel via their emphasis on the (usually male) professional detective and the public world of (Victorian) London streets, rather than the private domestic space of the respectable family.32 Amateur detectives feature heavily in neo-sensation detective fiction, and amongst these a number of trends are evident. Following in the footsteps of The Moonstone, in which Franklin Blake plays the role of both amateur detective and perpetrator of the crime, several contemporary works include the criminal as detective, such as Andrew Pepper’s Pyke mysteries (2006–2011), in which the eponymous Pyke is ‘sometimes Bow Street Runner, sometimes crook’, and Cox’s The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time, in which criminality and detection are also intertwined via the respective protagonists Edward Glyver and Esperanza Gorst. Esperanza additionally combines the roles of servant and spy, whilst Emily Brightwell’s Mrs Jefferies series (1993–present) also presents a servant as detective in its housekeeper protagonist. Several works feature the figure of the author as detective, including Brian Thompson’s Bella Wallis mysteries (2008–2011), in which the protagonist is both amateur detective and sensation writer, William J. Palmer’s The Detective and Mr Dickens (1990), in which Collins and Dickens collaborate with a professional detective to solve a murder, and Gyles Brandreth’s series of six novels which casts Oscar Wilde in the detective role. Dan Simmons’s Drood also depicts Collins, who narrates the novel, alongside Dickens, embroiled in the search for the mysterious Drood. The (investigative) journalist as detective makes several appearances, sometimes working alongside the 31  Like Ripper Street, Oscar de Muriel’s Frey and McGray books (2015–2018) are also set in the wake of the Ripper murders. 32  M. R. C. Kasasian’s The Gower Street Detective series (2013–2017) is an example of the form which is heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes, but which features a female detective.

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professional detective, as in Lee Jackson’s A Metropolitan Murder (2003). In John MacLachlan Gray’s The Fiend in Human (2002), the protagonist enlists the help of an investigative journalist to solve the case of a serial killer, whilst Fitzpatrick’s The Ninth Stone represents female journalists attempting to solve a murder. Fitzpatrick’s novel, as well as Brightwell’s Mrs Jefferies series and Thompson’s Bella Wallis series, feature widows in the detective role, and this trend is also evident in Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey novels (2006–2011) and Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily mysteries (2005–present). These varying professions and positions support, in part, McCracken’s suggestion that contemporary ‘detectives operate within a larger constellation of possible identities’,33 but also reflect a concern with identity which harks back to the Victorian sensation novel. The criminal-detective echoes the Victorian sensation novel in hinting at the confused lines between criminality and respectability, as well as the dual role played by the detective, whose attempts to solve a crime and deliver justice may also reveal domestic secrets which the family would rather conceal. This line is further blurred via the roles of servants, such as Cox’s Esperanza Gorst, who pose a similar threat, and, like The Moonstone’s Rosanna Spearman, undertake to make observations which threaten the family with exposure. The inclusion of the author-detective renders explicit the relationship between neo-Victorian authorship and detection via the narratives’ metatextual commentary: the author-protagonists’ investigations are mirrored by their creators’ investigations into the Victorian past, which itself becomes the subject of surveillance and detection. The journalist-­detective points to the need for thorough investigations in order to establish the true ‘facts’, not only of the criminal case in question, but also those pertaining to the Victorian landscapes the novel depicts, whilst simultaneously gesturing to the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and the nineteenth-century popular press. These various works engage in diverse ways with the conventions of sensation and detective novels and span the spectrum from literary to popular fiction, in some cases evidencing the blurred boundary between these two categories. Thompson’s series is a case in point. His protagonist is both amateur detective and writer of popular novels. The first book in the series, The Widow’s Secret (2008), is described in a Guardian review by D.  J. Taylor, author of neo-sensation detective novel Kept (2006), as a  McCracken, Pulp, p. 70.

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‘vivacious mock-Victorian romp’.34 Taylor’s reference to ‘the current mania for mock-Victorian detective stories’ contains strong echoes of Victorian reviews of sensation fiction, such as that which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1866: ‘Everything must now be sensational […] Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, […] so now we have a Sensational Mania’.35 Taylor also highlights the novel’s brevity: at some 260 pages, it is fairly typical of the neo-sensation detective novel, but, Taylor notes, paraphrasing Henry James, distinct from ‘the baggy monsters of modern neo-Victoriana’.36 Taylor’s review seems to reinforce the idea of a distinction between neo-­ Victorian and popular historical detective fiction, and associates Thompson’s novel primarily with the former; despite the superficial parallels with Alexander and Brightwell, this series does indeed have more in common with the literary neo-Victorian fiction of authors such as Fowles, Byatt, and Waters. The narrative announces its position as a faux-Victorian text in a deliberate departure from Victorian literary norms, including the use of profanities and explicit depictions of violence and sex. In this, the narrative is also distinct from those popular historical fictions which seek to replicate the Victorian (sensation) novel in style and effect as well as content. This difference is evident early on in the first book of the series, The Widow’s Secret (2008), via the image of a child defecating: ‘a small girl crouched and extruded a pale, glistening turd almost at [Bella’s] feet, one that curled as it fell’.37 This vivid description marks the narrative distance between itself and the Victorian novel: a metaphorical shitting on the sanctified and sanitised world of Victorian fiction. Yet paradoxically, it also suggests resonances with the earlier genre, evoking an almost physical sensation of disgust in the reader comparable to the nervous sensations provoked by Anne Catherick’s sudden appearance on a moonlit road in the Victorian reader. Meanwhile, Bella departs from the typical Victorian sensation detective-heroine via her dual role as sensation writer, as well as her various sexual liaisons, including her relationship with a young woman, and her smoking habit. These various departures raise questions about the authenticity of the neo-Victorian novel. Those which elide sex, for  D. J. Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’, The Guardian (23 August 2008), n.p.  Anon. [J. R. De Capel Wise], ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 30:1 (1866), p. 126. 36  Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’. 37  Brian Thompson, The Widow’s Secret (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), p. 24. 34 35

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instance, replicate their Victorian forbears, but those which concern themselves with sexuality might be said to have more in common with the realities of life in the nineteenth century, and certainly work to evoke the sensations of the age. In portraying an author of sensation fiction, Thompson echoes Braddon’s depiction of Sigismund Smith in The Doctor’s Wife. Whilst Smith’s productions have more in common with penny dreadfuls, Bella’s work, published under the name of Henry Ellis Margam, also departs from the typical sensation novel in several key ways. Indeed, the narrative distinguishes between her work and that of Collins: Bella had once heard Collins described with reverence as a troubled aspen: Henry Ellis Margam was, by comparison, hardly more troubled than a trench of asparagus. He wrote fluently and expressively about sex and betrayal, money and lust as it affected the kind of men—and the readers were nearly always men—who came from Bella’s own class. In that one narrow sense, the stories were high-flying adventures; and they had their own eerie style. But they made no pretensions to literature and this was the greatest part of their appeal. They were guilty pleasures for gentlemen who associated pleasure with guilt. (26)

There are parallels with the sensation novel (her works are popular fiction, rather than ‘great’ literature), but also crucial differences: in the male readership and their emphasis on sex. In employing her writing as a means of revealing the secrets and crimes of her acquaintances, Bella extends the processes of surveillance and revelation inherent in that of detection, and in detective fiction itself. Her work becomes a means of exposing the immoral behaviour of those around her, just as the sensation novel threatened to expose the secrets hidden within the respectable Victorian home.38 But despite these parallels, Thompson’s novels are not indebted to the sensation novel in the same way as other popular historical detective series, such as those by Alexander and Brightwell. Indeed, Thompson’s work is an example of Heilmann and Llewellyn’s ‘self-consciously engaged’ neo-­ Victorian fiction—full of in-jokes for the ‘knowing’ reader (Taylor suggests it is ‘a bit too knowing’),39 and mocking of both Victorian and 38  There is also an echo here of Collins’s The Woman in White, which allegedly drew on the case of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, who imprisoned his wife on an asylum. In this respect, Collins, too, exposed the questionable morals of his seemingly respectable acquaintances. 39  Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’, n.p.

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contemporary popular fiction. Its commentary on sensation fiction speaks to the genre’s ongoing influence, but it is a commentary, rather than a descendant of the work of Collins and his contemporaries, and its blurring of popular and literary tropes is accomplished in a deliberate, self-aware manner which ultimately serves to distinguish it from the popular reworkings of the form.

The Widow in the Library: Sensational Tropes in the Neo-Sensation Detective Novel Though Thompson’s Bella Wallis series has little in common with popular historical detective fiction, it signifies the centrality of the widow as detective in neo-Victorian fiction. Just as Victorian female detectives escape from the private sphere and participate—albeit often only briefly—in the public world via the processes of detection, so too does the widow stand apart from the nineteenth-century patriarchal structures which contain her married sisters. Indeed, the neo-sensational widow-detective often defies those remaining patriarchal authorities which would seek to constrain and contain her, including the father, signifying a declaration of independence resulting from the death of the husband into whose authority she had initially passed from that of the father. Nadine Muller reads the neo-Victorian detective-widow as symbolic of transgressive femininity: [T]his character strives to break, or at least occasionally transgress, the boundaries of respectable femininity, not only through her investigative association with the crimes of others but also through her own deviant (if not criminal) intellectual pursuits (usually in the form of certain reading and/or writing activities) as well as her partial disregard for mourning customs and other matters of social etiquette.40

Muller’s description of the neo-Victorian detective-widow is strongly reminiscent of the sensation heroine, who also frequently transgresses ‘the boundaries of respectable femininity’. It would seem appropriate, then, that this figure is used as a means of exploring, amongst other things, Victorian constructions of femininity and crimes which, in various ways, appear to threaten popular nostalgic perceptions of the Victorian past. 40  Nadine Muller, ‘Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction’, Clues, 30:1 (Spring 2012), p. 99.

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Further, the reading and writing activities of these characters, noted by Muller, also serve to offer a commentary on the Victorian sensation novel and its influence on contemporary popular crime fiction. McCracken suggests that the detective’s ‘identity is defined in relation to his or her world’.41 Significantly, the widow-detective in neo-sensation fiction is defined by her marital status, and in this parallels her Victorian forebears, albeit that status effectively frees her from the constraints of marriage. Alexander’s Lady Emily, Raybourn’s Lady Julia Gray, and Brightwell’s Mrs Jeffries all give their marital titles to the series in which they appear. Lady Emily, as the daughter of an Earl and wife of a Viscount, has a dual right to this title, but nonetheless it is indicative of her relation to patriarchal representatives—father and husband—recalling the position of the female detective in the Victorian sensation novel, whose fate is so often bound up with these relationships. Even while, as widows, these characters break from the confines of marriage and establish a degree of independence, they nonetheless remain indebted to their husbands for their identity, signifying that total female independence remains elusive within the boundaries of the (neo-)Victorian world they inhabit, and thus perhaps offering an implicit commentary on women’s position in the modern world. The position of the widow also offers a useful metaphor for the relationship between Victorian and neo-sensation fiction: the contemporary genre stands apart, independent from its nineteenth-century predecessor, but is nonetheless defined in terms of its relationship with it, much as the widow continues to be defined by her marriage, even as she escapes its constraints via her husband’s death. The neo-sensation detective-widow, then, becomes an appropriate vehicle through which to investigate the Victorian past. This is reinforced by her association with death: the mourning clothes and rituals are suggestive of a kind of cultural mourning for the Victorian period signified by the nostalgic returns made by the neo-sensation novel. Popular historical detective series in many respects represent the antithesis to the postmodern, literary, neo-Victorian novel, but, in part as a consequence of this, have much in common with the Victorian sensation novel. Brightwell’s Mrs. Jeffries series is a case in point. Published pseudonymously by American writer Cheryl Lanham, the series extends to more than 35 titles, and features the eponymous Mrs Hepzibah Jeffries, widow of a policeman, housekeeper to Inspector Gerald Witherspoon of Scotland Yard, and a far more capable detective than her employer. The first novel  McCracken, Pulp, p. 61.

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in the series, The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries, bears several of the hallmarks of the sensation-detective novel: blackmail, a murder victim (Dr Bartholomew) poisoned in his own home, a somewhat incompetent police detective (with echoes of Collins’s Sergeant Cuff), and an amateur female sleuth. Brightwell’s prolific output and her use of a pseudonym, as well as the subject matter of her Mrs Jeffries stories, recall Victorian sensation writers and their work, and in particular Braddon, suggesting significant parallels between the sensation and historical detective novel in terms of their position within their respective literary marketplaces. These parallels are further suggested by some of the Amazon reviews of her work, which criticise her for her apparent use of Americanisms, which appear at odds with the Victorian setting, and, it is suggested, undermine the (faux) authenticity of her work. These criticisms are not entirely unwarranted, but nonetheless recall Victorian critics’ dismissals of the sensation novel for its lack of artistic, literary qualities. One particularly scathing reviewer suggests, ‘Emily Brightwell writes in whatever genre pays this week and churns them out by the bucket load’,42 directly paralleling Victorian criticisms of the commercial nature of the sensation novel. Brightwell’s series thus fits Heilmann and Llewellyn’s definition of ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’,43 rather than neo-Victorian fiction, but the boundaries between the two are not as clear as Heilmann and Llewellyn imply. The novel gestures towards its own status as popular fiction via the inclusion of the character of Luty Belle Crookshank, a brash American woman, with a voice which is ‘flat, twangy and loud enough to wake the dead’.44 Luty’s character and voice can be read as a metatextual commentary on the narrative’s own neo-Victorian intervention, in which an American author (mis)creates the Victorian world. The portrayal may not be entirely accurate, and the narrative’s self-conscious engagement with the period may be limited, but nonetheless, it succeeds in the process of ‘wak[ing] the [Victorian] dead’ for the reader of popular fiction, and thus contributes to the neo-Victorian aim of detecting the past, even if some of the clues it offers are ultimately red herrings, which give rise to the 42  John Stevenson, Amazon Review of The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (28 March 2015), https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspector-Mrs-Jeffries-Emily-Brightwell/product-reviews/14 72108868?pageNumber=4. 43  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 6. 44  Emily Brightwell, The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (1993; London: Constable and Robinson, 2013), p. 46.

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c­ reation of a largely fictionalised, imagined representation of the Victorian landscape. If Luty Belle represents the narrative’s self-declaration of its status as popular fiction, this is reinforced by Mrs Jeffries’s reference to Mudie’s circulating library (38), which also acts as a declaration of both the narrative’s own status as popular fiction, and its engagement with an earlier popular genre in the form of sensation fiction, further hinted at in the reference to a minor character’s ‘lunatic’ wife whom ‘He keeps at home’— recalling one of the major themes of the sensation novel (madness) and one of the genre’s most important precursors, Jane Eyre (99). The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries goes some way to address, and to some extent rewrite the key concerns of Victorian sensation fiction in terms of both gender roles and class status. As in the work of nineteenth-century sensation novelists, servants play a crucial role in Brightwell’s detective novel. As housekeeper, Mrs Jeffries is both servant and detective, and she employs both her own skills and those of the other servants to assist their kind but hapless employer in his detective work. Here, then, servants are involved in solving, rather than committing crimes, though the narrative also hints at the latter possibility when both the murder victim’s cook and butler fall under suspicion, recalling Victorian anxieties about the people they employed in their homes. Ultimately, though, crime is associated with the apparently ‘respectable’ classes: Dr Bartholomew, the murder victim, is guilty of serial blackmail, his heir is guilty of theft, and the murderer is revealed as the outwardly respectable Colonel Seaward, an experienced military man awaiting an appointment from the Queen. The inept Inspector Witherspoon fails to interpret clues because he accepts things as they appear, believing Colonel Seaward to be innocent because ‘the man is a gentleman’ (65). Here, then, servants are responsible for exposing the crimes of the respectable classes, subverting conventional Victorian expectations whilst simultaneously reinforcing the view of servants as potential spies, and thus echoing the conventions of the Victorian sensation novel. Unlike the typical detective-heroine of sensation fiction, or indeed Alexander’s and Raybourn’s widow-detectives, Hepzibah Jeffries is not young, beautiful, and vulnerable,45 but, by contrast, a fifty-seven year old woman, and a capable housekeeper and detective. In this respect, Brightwell’s series privileges the older woman in a manner still relatively unusual in contemporary popular culture, and certainly in contrast to  Marian Halcombe represents an obvious exception to this.

45

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Victorian sensation fiction, in which older women are frequently side-­ lined and often caricatured or disparaged.46 Mrs Jeffries is not only older than the typical (neo-)sensation heroine, but is also considerably more adept at police work than the professional detective, whilst simultaneously displaying maternal and nurturing characteristics, which often help in drawing out people’s secrets. She thus effectively combines stereotypically masculine and feminine characteristics. Her moral outlook paradoxically contributes to a reassuringly nostalgic vision of Victorian England, in which crime and corruption are rooted out and defeated, whilst simultaneously eschewing commonplace Victorian attitudes at odds with the outlook of most modern readers. In this latter respect, ‘her unorthodox views regarding the British Empire [are] less than popular’ (102) with those around her, but of course are no doubt intended to chime with those of the contemporary reader. Consequently, Mrs Jeffries represents both a nostalgic view of the (fictionalised) Victorian past and a reassuring version of the ‘modern self’, which McCracken identifies as central to the detective novel.47 In her role as detective, Mrs Jeffries infiltrates the stereotypically masculine space of the crime scene, but nonetheless the narrative subscribes, to some extent at least, to a vision of gendered spaces associated with the nineteenth-century separate spheres ideology. In her occupation as housekeeper, her domain is officially the Victorian home, and it is here she subtly interrogates her employer for clues to the crimes he has undertaken to solve. She operates behind the scenes, and, via a process of manipulation, credits her employer with the powers of deduction through which the crimes are solved. Her entry to the crime scene is generally gained through the performance of a task associated with her role as housekeeper: via a relationship with the servants of the house, or a need to perform a duty for her employer (returning his cigar case, for example). In addition, she delegates to her fellow servants, and frequently employs the coachman, Smythe, to carry out those aspects of detection which take place outside the home, such as following suspects. To this end, the text echoes the gendered spheres depicted in the Victorian sensation novel, in which the detective-heroine is generally returned to the private sphere of the home in the narrative’s conclusion. Here, too, the protagonist is first encountered in the domestic space of the home, referred to as her ‘cozy kingdom’  See, for example, Collins’s The Evil Genius.  McCracken, Pulp, p. 60.

46 47

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(11), performing domestic duties, and the novel concludes with her in the same space, the mystery now solved. Other characters also maintain an association with specifically gendered spaces, including the cook Mrs Goodge, who ‘never left the kitchen. Except for retiring to her quarters at the back of the house every night, the woman was never outside her domain’ (55). The narrative thus challenges those stereotypes with which contemporary readers are likely less comfortable—specifically the idea of women as less capable than men (Mrs Jeffries is described as ‘a very clever woman’ [27])—whilst maintaining a gendered division of roles which contributes to the narrative’s nostalgic vision of Victorian England. This is not an example of Christian Gutleben’s ‘nostalgic postmodernism’,48 which has informed much neo-Victorian scholarship, but rather a nostalgia inherent to the appeal of popular fiction and culture, and particularly historical fiction and period drama.49 This nostalgia is also evident in Alexander’s Lady Emily series, in which another detective-widow takes centre stage. The first book in the series, And Only to Deceive, like Brightwell’s work, both engages with its Victorian sensation-detective predecessors and acknowledges its own position as a work of popular fiction. It opens with a sudden death, and foul play is subsequently suspected. The victim’s widow plays a key role in discovering the truth about her husband’s death—and in establishing that he is indeed dead. The question of whether or not her husband is dead and the possibility of his reappearing recall the plot of Lady Audley’s Secret. This literary debt is explicitly acknowledged via several references to Braddon’s work. With this acknowledgement is an implicit recognition of the type of fiction Alexander is herself producing. Her protagonist observes: Lady Audley’s Secret was not the book a young bride ought to have taken on her wedding trip, and my mother had forbidden me to pack it. I, of course, had not listened to her and began reading the story of the gorgeous Lucy almost as soon as our train pulled out of Victoria Station.50

Her husband’s later comment, in his diary, that Emily ‘spends much of her time reading the worst sort of popular fiction’ (262) is suggestive of the 48  Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 49  See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal, Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television (San Diego: University of California Press, 1983). 50  Tasha Alexander, And Only to Deceive (New York: Harper, 2006), p. 82.

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perceived divide between highbrow and lowbrow literature, and again functions as a metatextual commentary on the type of book Alexander is producing.51 Later, her husband replaces her cheap copy of Pride and Prejudice with a first edition, informing her that ‘It is always preferable to have the genuine article’ (141)—suggesting an ironic commentary on the genre of historical fiction, which imitates its literary predecessors, but can never authentically replicate them. If the text crosses the boundary between historical detective-romance and neo-Victorian fiction, it also suggests the value of returning to the past: after her husband’s death, the protagonist becomes involved in the study of antiquities, following in her husband’s footsteps. She is advised by a friend to stop embroiling herself in the past, but defends her activities, in a statement which might be read as a commentary on contemporary culture’s relationship with the Victorian past: ‘The people in those civilizations were not so different than we are, […] and the art and literature they produced are still meaningful today’ (116). Her assertion points to the fact that it is in part through reading Victorian fiction that we elicit meaning from neo-Victorian writing. As in Brightwell’s Mrs. Jeffries series, the significance of the historical detective novel as a nostalgic evocation of the Victorian period is suggested in Alexander’s portrayal of gender roles. Attempts to subvert traditional Victorian gender ideologies are ultimately obscured by a reversion to conventional roles, in which the heroine is reliant upon (and occasionally rescued by) the hero. Alexander emphasises the ‘romance’ of the Victorian age, even while her plots revolve around mystery, crime, and murder and attempt to offer an illustration of the problematic social position of women in the nineteenth century, suggesting a desire for a return to an ‘uncomplicated’ past, in which gender roles are clearly defined. However, the trope of the widow grants the protagonist a degree of power to which, under Victorian marriage law, she would not otherwise be entitled. This, though, is undermined by the entail on her husband’s estate, which means she can be evicted from her home at a moment’s notice. There is a parallel here with Mrs Jeffries, whose ‘cozy kingdom’ is not hers, as she is a paid member of Inspector Witherspoon’s household, and thus able to be dismissed at any time. Though Lady Emily is not associated with the feminine space of the home to the same extent as Brightwell’s 51  A similar gesture is evident in Raybourn’s Silent in the Grave (2006), in which the narrator-protagonist, reviewing her collection of books, notes ‘Some of them were good novels, by proper authors. Much of it was complete rubbish’ (Richmond: MIRA, p. 220).

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protagonist, both nonetheless, in their relationship with that space, illustrate the tenuous nature of Victorian women’s power, even as they participate in narratives which seek to rework traditional Victorian power structures. Nonetheless, in contrast to her Victorian predecessor, Lady Audley, Lady Emily retains significant control over her life. For Braddon’s anti-heroine, widowhood is effectively an aspiration: she hopes, in marrying Sir Michael, that her first husband has died, and subsequently attempts to ensure this when she pushes him down the well. Similarly, in East Lynne, the heroine adopts faux-widowhood as a form of masquerade, but never obtains the advantages which it potentially brings. The widow-heroines of the neo-sensation detective novel assert an independence as a consequence of their marital status which remains largely unavailable to their Victorian forebears, even as they remain subject to the constraints imposed upon them by a patriarchal society. In this respect, they potentially mirror the position of contemporary women and their relationship to their Victorian predecessors: the former granted far greater freedoms, but still forced to contend with social inequality. For Muller, ‘Alexander engages in an act of feminist historiography through Emily’s literal detection of the various facades of the social, legal, and cultural role of the widow in the nineteenth century’,52 whilst the novel’s detective features also align with the heroine’s search for her own self-identity, in line with McCracken’s identification of the key tropes of the detective novel. More broadly, though, detection in both the Lady Emily and Mrs. Jeffries series is bound up with (popular) cultural returns to the past, in order to both understand and reclaim it. The act of detection, as Heilmann and Llewellyn note, parallels the investigation the author of historical fiction must enact in order to produce a narrative which is at once contemporary and (neo-)Victorian. This is reinforced in And Only to Deceive by the heroine’s uncovering of both her husband’s past, and the wider historical investigation she undertakes centred around forged ancient Greek artefacts, whilst in both series the relationship to the past is signified by the figure of the widow whose status is effectively defined by a past relationship. Emily’s investigations into forged artefacts, as Muller points out, serve as a commentary on the issue of artistic authenticity, and thus by implication the neo-Victorian novel itself, whilst the heroine’s own endorsement of the value of the forged artefacts suggests

 ‘Dead Husbands and Deviant Women’, p. 104.

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that the neo-Victorian novel ‘need not be judged against its literary, cultural, or other source texts, or by its relationship to them’.53 This, though, raises the question of how these texts are judged in critical discourse, and, within neo-Victorian scholarship, popular fiction such as Alexander’s and Brightwell’s historical detective novels have generally been ignored, or dismissed as unworthy of critical investigation,54 as ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’ which does not ‘self-­ consciously engage’ with that period.55 The issue here, then, is not the way in which these narratives are judged in relation to their Victorian source texts, but the implicit comparisons drawn with other neo-Victorian ‘literary’ narratives. However, the clues offered by neo-sensation popular detective fiction point to its value as neo-Victorian fiction and its significance in terms of the legacy of the sensation novel. These texts frequently recognise and acknowledge their own status as popular fiction and their relationship with the works of Braddon and her contemporaries, via explicit references as well as various plot devices. This in itself stands in direct contradiction to critical claims that popular historical fiction does not engage self-consciously with the Victorian period, and exposes the flawed ideology of some neo-Victorian critics, for whom literary ‘worthiness’ is bound up with both intertextuality and self-conscious intellectualness. In acknowledging the debt to Victorian popular fiction, neo-sensation detective novels might be seen to offer an implicit critique of the manner in which the neo-Victorian canon has sought to construct itself, mirroring the literary hierarchies which informed the creation of the wider canon in the early twentieth century. The critical rediscovery of the sensation novel in the late twentieth century firmly established the value of Victorian popular fiction, but in overlooking the value of historical popular fiction, neo-­ Victorianism as a critical discourse threatens to replicate the literary snobbery of those who initially dismissed sensation fiction as unworthy of critical investigation. Critical theorising on neo-Victorianism identifies the manner in which contemporary culture engages with the Victorian past as a key concern. For the wider populace, historical detective fiction and period dramas represent primary points of engagement with the Victorian past and, therefore, these cultural artefacts (the popular novel and the

 Ibid., p. 106.  Muller’s article is an obvious exception to this. 55  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 4. 53 54

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television period drama) must form part of the critical debate within neo-Victorianism. While the contemporary detective genre can be disturbing in terms of its evocation of our own fears and anxieties, the displacement of murder and mystery into a Victorian setting renders it ‘safe’: accounts of contemporary murders may provoke unease and disquiet in the reader; historical cases generate a different kind of fascination (the wealth of material based around the Jack the Ripper murders testifies to this). The neo-sensation detective novel thus in some respects has less in common with its Victorian predecessors than does the detective novel with a contemporary setting— for it is the contemporary setting which provokes the fear and anxieties which were traditionally associated with sensation fiction: the contemporary genre creates a distance between the reader and the events described, thus the effects of the ‘exploding mine’ are rendered obsolete. The neo-­ sensation popular detective novel, then, often operates as an exercise in nostalgia, even as it seeks to rework the tropes of the Victorian sensation novel. The narratives of Alexander and Brightwell rewrite Victorian sensation fiction’s female detectives, granting them greater agency and freedom. But what are the implications of this in terms of the legacy of sensation fiction, and its transformation into contemporary neo-sensation detective fiction? Via its focus on female detectives, crime, the family, and domesticity, the neo-sensation detective novel replicates sensation fiction’s concern with processes of surveillance within the domestic space. If the Victorian sensation novel exploited anxieties about the shifting roles of women and the family, and ultimately emphasised the restoration of order, what are the parallel features of the neo-sensation detective novel? What is the object of the contemporary genre’s surveillance? To take the metaphor of detection to its obvious conclusion, the answer to the latter question is the Victorian age itself, which becomes both the focus of the narrative’s surveillance, and the subject of the contemporary desire to restore order: to order the past to understand it. This then raises a further question: who polices the Victorian past? For traditional neo-Victorian critics, the answer appears to be those creators of literary neo-Victorian fiction, ‘self-consciously engaged’ with Victorian literature, history, and culture; popular historical detective fiction, though, suggests otherwise. The figure of the fictional detective embroils the authors and readers of popular historical fiction in the process of surveillance, and invites readers of popular fiction to ‘police’ the past, whilst simultaneously combining

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red herrings with the true clues about the meanings of that past. Detection as a neo-Victorian metaphor suggests a logical, rational approach to the Victorian age, to the gathering and interpretation of evidence to establish a clear vision of history. Yet both the gathering and interpretation of this evidence are subjective, liable to misinterpretation—in historical and more particularly in fictional accounts of the Victorian era. We should, therefore, be suspicious of those ‘detecting’ history—but perhaps no more so of ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’ than of literary neo-Victorian literature. Both the protagonists and the readers of detective fiction are invited to unpick clues, solve mysteries, and thus restore, or impose, order, but this imposition of order is an illusion, albeit a reassuring one. McCracken discusses at some length the significance of signs and metonymy in detective fiction.56 Though not specifically concerned with historical detective fiction, his analysis suggests some potential approaches to neo-sensation detective fiction. He argues that the ‘metonymic structure of detective fiction can be understood […] as the way each narrative part fits into the structure of the whole’.57 This is particularly evident in Collins’s sensation-detective novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But McCracken’s statement might also be useful in terms of approaching genre, as well as individual texts: in this instance, the texts then function as the ‘narrative parts’ and the genre, or subgenre (here neo-sensation detective fiction) as the ‘whole’. With this in mind, McCracken’s analysis of the significance of this structure takes on new meaning: ‘Where the solution to the mystery assumes a metonymic structure, the crime as metaphor defers a final truth, suggesting a complexity that needs to be constantly reinterpreted’.58 In neo-Victorian narratives, it is the Victorian age itself which is ‘constantly reinterpreted’, as writers (and readers) return again and again to its ‘crimes’ and ‘mysteries’, whilst its ‘final truth’ is perpetually deferred, as these multiple and diverse returns further complicate contemporary culture’s engagement with and understanding of the past. Neo-sensation detective fiction and neo-Victorianism more widely, cannot ultimately succeed in imposing order and meaning on the Victorian past, but nonetheless they evidence the pervasive cultural desire to order that past, to render it understandable and contained.  McCracken, Pulp, pp. 56–61.  Ibid., p. 57. 58  Ibid., p. 58. 56 57

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References Alexander, Tasha. 2006. And Only to Deceive. New York: Harper. Anon. 1864. Our Female Sensation Novelists. The Christian Remembrancer 46: 209–236. Anon. [J.  R. De Capel Wise]. 1866. Belles Lettres. Westminster Review 30 (1): 125–132. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2003. Lady Audley’s Secret. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1982. What Is “Sensational” About the “Sensation Novel”? Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1): 1–28. Brightwell, Emily. 2013. The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries. 1993; London: Constable and Robinson. Christie, Agatha. 1960. The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding. London: Collins. Collins, Wilkie. 2006a. The Woman in White. 1860; Peterborough, ON: Broadview. ———. 2006b. The Diary of Anne Rodway (1856). In The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 5: The Victorian Era, 473–490. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Colón, Christine. 2018. Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition. Abingdon: Routledge. Craton, Lillian. 2009. The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Amherst, MA: Cambria Press. Eliot, T.S. 1951. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Emrys, A.B. 2011. Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary, and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel. Jefferson: McFarland. Gutleben, Christian. 2001. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Heidi H. 2000. Electra-fying the Female Sleuth: Detecting the Father in Eleanor’s Victory and Thou Art the Man. In Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth in Context, ed. Marlene Tromp, Pamela Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, 255–276. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Knight, Stephen. 2010. Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave. McCracken, Scott. 1998. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore, Suzanne. 2001. The Simple Art of Detection: The Female Detective in Victorian and Contemporary Mystery Novels. Modern Fiction Studies 47 (2): 448–457.

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Moretti, Franco. 2005. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. 1983; London: Verso. Muller, Nadine. 2012. Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction. Clues 30 (1): 99–109. Mulvey, Laura. n.d. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, 28–40. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Oliphant, Margaret. 1863. Novels. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August, 168–183. Raybourn, Deanna. 2006. Silent in the Grave. Richmond, VA: MIRA. Rosenthal, Sherry Lynne. 1983. Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television. San Diego, CA: University of California Press. Ross Nickerson, Catherine. 1998. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Schaub, Melissa. 2013. Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Seres, Fiona. [screenwriter]. 2018. The Woman in White. BBC. Stevenson, John. 2015. Amazon Review of The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries, March 28. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspector-Mrs-Jeffries-Emily-Brightwell/ product-reviews/1472108868?pageNumber=4. Taylor, D.J. 2008. Murder She/He Wrote. The Guardian, August 23. Thompson, Brian. 2013. The Widow’s Secret. London: Chatto & Windus. Trodd, Anthea. 1989. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Repackaging the Sensation Novel: Neo-­ Victorian Young Adult Fiction

In 2015, Frances Hardinge’s neo-Victorian Young Adult (YA) novel The Lie Tree was awarded both the Costa Children’s Book of the Year and the overall Costa prize, reflecting the contemporary literary marketplace’s burgeoning interest in both neo-Victorian and Young Adult fiction.1 Set in the late 1860s, the novel tells the story of Faith, a teenage girl whose father dies in mysterious circumstances. When Faith discovers a strange tree, hidden by her father before his death, which flourishes on whispered lies, whilst the fruit it bears elicits truths, she determines to use it to discover the truth about her father’s death. Although the fantasy elements of the novel differentiate it from Victorian sensation fiction, it nevertheless shares a number of important similarities. Hardinge described the novel as ‘a Victorian Gothic mystery with added palaeontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism’.2 Its affinities with the Gothic, the transgressive detective-daughter heroine, and its interest in not only the nineteenth-century past but also palaeontology point to crucial points of concurrence with the neo-sensation novel, suggesting it forms part of 1  The Lie Tree is not the first YA or neo-Victorian novel to win Costa’s Book of the Year award. These genres are reasonably well represented in the award’s history—a reflection of the emphasis on popular fiction as well as critical acclaim. The last children’s book to win the main award was Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass in 2001. Penelope Lively’s neo-Victorian novel A Stitch in Time won the Children’s award in 1976. 2  Mark Brown, ‘Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree wins Costa book of the year 2015’, The Guardian (26 January 2016), n.p.

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the sensation novel’s complex legacy. It is also indicative of the rising ­popular and critical acclaim of both YA and neo-Victorian fiction. As with other YA novels whose appeal extends beyond their target audiences, such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000) and J.  K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007), Hardinge includes fantastical elements alongside a narrative of self-development and, as in the works of Pullman and Rowling (though these are not explicitly neo-Victorian), there are echoes of both the Victorian Bildungsroman and the sensation novel here. In its recreation of the Victorian age in the years following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) as well as Faith’s father’s tampering with historical evidence, the novel suggests that history itself is a fiction, subject to reinvention and revision. The Victorian period has long proved fertile ground for authors of children’s and Young Adult fiction. YA fiction exhibits a particular appetite for the sensational tropes which can be traced back to the Victorian genre. A great many YA neo-Victorian narratives employ the themes, plots, or characters familiar to readers of Victorian sensation fiction. Whilst some of these works are explicit rewritings of sensation novels, such as Newbery’s Set in Stone (2006) and Eagland’s Wildthorn (2009), both of which draw heavily on The Woman in White, in other cases the relationship is more ambiguous: the inclusion of feisty, often subversive heroines; the employment of cliff-hangers to increase suspense; an emphasis on family secrets, crime, and identity, and so forth. Characteristics of the sensation novel are evident in some of the most successful YA literature of recent decades, including Harry Potter and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005– 2008), although neither employ a Victorian setting and both include strong fantasy elements. Other works adhere more closely to the sensation novel via both setting and plot, largely eschewing fantasy and the supernatural, including Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series and Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace (2010). The Goodreads list ‘Victorian YA Novels’ (despite the title, comprising contemporary historical rather than nineteenth-­ century fiction) includes a total of 110 titles.3 Sensational tropes associated with the fiction of Collins, Braddon, and their contemporaries are frequently deployed for a modern YA readership, and some of the key subgenres of the YA novel are also those most closely associated with neo-Victorianism: the Gothic, detective fiction, the Bildungsroman, and fantasy fiction. 3

 See https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4736.Victorian_YA_Novels.

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Several titles straddle the genres of children’s and YA neo-Victorian literature, including Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time (1976), which received the Whitbread (now Costa) award for children’s literature in 1976, and Helen Cresswell’s The Moondial (1987). Both these works employ a contemporary setting and feature young girls in the role of protagonist. Although children’s literature, each of these texts engages in sophisticated ways with the slippage between (Victorian) past and present. Lively uses a time-slip narrative to demonstrate the continuities between the child’s experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whilst Cresswell sets her work in Lyme Regis, echoing and anticipating other neo-Victorian fictions such as Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009). Cresswell’s novel is an important exploration of trauma and its echoes through time, and in this respect resonates with other neo-Victorian works.4 Though significant examples of neo-Victorian children’s literature, neither of these texts engage closely with the conventions of Victorian sensation fiction: indeed, both depart from the genre in a number of significant ways, perhaps most notably through the employment of fantasy/supernatural elements. Nonetheless, they are evidence of the need to embrace expansive definitions of neo-Victorianism to encompass a wider range of writing, including children’s and YA fiction. Despite the increased presence of children’s and YA fiction in both literary scholarship and university syllabuses, and an increasing number of YA titles employing a Victorian setting, neo-Victorian scholarship to date has paid relatively little attention to YA fiction. This is in part attributable to neo-Victorian scholarship’s early tendency to focus on ‘literary’, rather than popular fiction: like the neo-sensation novel, YA fiction does not fit clearly into critics’ traditional definition of neo-Victorian writing as literature ‘self-consciously engaged’ with the Victorian period. While the field has recently broadened its remit to include popular fiction and culture, YA literature remains somewhat marginalised. There is evidence that this is beginning to change: Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day’s edited collection, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture (2018), is specifically concerned with challenging this omission and with ‘interrogat[ing] what the neo-Victorian children’s 4  See Chap. 5, and Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).

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canon might look like and what forces might be shaping it’.5 This chapter offers a critical assessment of this emerging genre of neo-Victorian writing in relation to its engagement with the nineteenth-century sensation novel. It considers the manner in which contemporary YA writers employ the themes, characteristics, and tropes of Victorian sensation fiction. While neo-Victorian criticism has evinced some concern to date with the figure of the child/adolescent,6 little has yet emerged on the quite different subgenre of neo-Victorian YA fiction—literature specifically constructed for an adolescent audience. What is the significance of the influence of sensation fiction on this genre, and its representation of the Victorian era for a younger readership? Why do writers engage with the Victorian period and its cultural forms in a genre traditionally concerned with the future, rather than the past? And what can the relationship between the sensation novel and contemporary YA literature reveal about shifting attitudes towards popular and literary fiction? Here I explore some of the parallels between YA and Victorian sensation fiction, contending that the earlier form can be read as an example of nineteenth-century YA fiction. A comprehensive overview of neo-Victorian YA fiction, its relationship to sensation fiction, and its role in the contemporary literary marketplace is followed by a detailed analysis of two-key neo-sensation YA novels: Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and Hooper’s Fallen Grace.

YA Fiction and the Sensation Legacy A brief analysis of the history and key characteristics of YA fiction serves to identify significant parallels with the Victorian sensation novel. As with sensation and neo-Victorian fiction, YA writing is not a coherent and easily contained literary genre, but rather an expansive and inclusive category, 5  Claudia Nelson, Foreword to Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day, eds., The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. xi. Other critical examinations of neo-Victorian YA fiction to date include discussions of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series (see below); Susan Reynold’s ‘Dumbledore in the Watch Tower: Harry Potter as Neo-Victorian Narrative’ in Diana Patterson, ed., Harry Potter’s Worldwide Influence (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009, pp.  271–292); and Margaret Stetz’s article ‘The ‘My Story’ Series: A Neo-Victorian Education in Feminism’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6:2 (2013), pp. 137–151. 6  See, for example, Anne Morey and Claudia Nelson, eds., The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse: Renegotiating Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Childhood, Special Issue, NeoVictorian Studies, 5:1 (2012).

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taking in a wide range of characteristics, themes, and forms. The parameters of fiction ostensibly targeted at an adolescent audience are difficult to define: the typical age range for YA readers has traditionally been 12–18 but in the last twenty years, this has expanded to include children as young as ten, as well as adults in their early twenties.7 Particularly since the publication of Rowling’s Harry Potter series, publishers have sought to exploit the market for ‘crossover’ fiction, with an increasing number of titles released with alternative covers for younger and older readers.8 The boundaries of YA fiction, like those of neo-Victorian and sensation fiction, are permeable, mutable: blurred lines exist between both children’s and YA literature,9 and YA and adult fiction. YA fiction as a distinct genre—like neo-sensation writing—is a problematic concept, encompassing multiple genres, including but not limited to sci-fi, fantasy, detective, Gothic, historical, Bildungsroman, and dystopian fiction. Indeed, engagement with multiple genres is also apparent within the more limited category of neo-­ Victorian YA fiction. For the purposes of this chapter, I take the broader approach to the designated age range, whilst defining YA neo-Victorian fiction as that which engages at any level with Victorian history, literature and culture, and YA neo-sensation writing as works invoking the Victorian sensation novel as intertext, or via narrative conventions including themes, plot, character, structure, and style. What, then, are the identifying features of the YA novel, given this engagement with multiple genres? Typically, two-key characteristics ensure a narrative’s designation as YA fiction: the marketing of a work as such (a decision made by authors and publishers) and the age of the protagonist(s). YA fiction almost always features a young protagonist, often a similar age to the expected reader. It is not distinguishable by either themes or genres, although certain genres are particularly popular, including adventure novels, science-fiction, fantasy, and coming-of-age literature. In their detailed 7  See Michael Cart, ‘From Insider to Outsider: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature’ in Voices from the Middle. 9:2 (2001), pp.  95–97, and Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson, Literature for Today’s Young Adults, sixth edition. New York: Longman, 2001, pp. 3–4. 8  On ‘crossover’ fiction, see Michael Cart, Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism (Chicago: American Library Association, 2010), Chap. 8, ‘So, How Adult is Young Adult? The Crossover Conundrum’, pp. 111–122. 9  Some critics include YA fiction in the category of children’s literature (see, for example, Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, eds., Reading History in Children’s Books [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012], p. 186.

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overview of YA literature, Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson identify seven general characteristics of YA fiction, several of which also feature heavily in Victorian sensation fiction, and thus serve to emphasise the significant parallels between the two genres. Amongst these are the inclusion of a young, independent protagonist, a fast-paced plot, engagement with a wide range of literary subgenres, an emphasis on ethnic and cultural diversity, a tendency towards optimistic conclusions, and a focus on emotions and experiences which are ‘psychologically important to young people’.10 There are several points of convergence with sensation fiction here. The sensation novel too features young (usually female) protagonists, of an age towards the upper end of the spectrum of YA readers (c.18–25). As in YA fiction, the independent heroine, and in particular the orphan-protagonist is a common feature not only in sensation fiction, but in nineteenth-century novels more generally. The ‘fast pace’ of much YA fiction mirrors the sensation novel, in contrast to Victorian realist fiction, with the latter’s emphasis on detailed descriptions rather than pacey plots. Indeed, the sensation novel was often accused of being nothing but plot, as The Spectator review of Collins’s The Moonstone made clear: ‘if readers like a book containing little besides a plot, and that plot constructed solely to set them guessing, there is no particular reason why they should not be gratified’.11 The wide variety of genres and subjects which constitute YA fiction is evident in the Victorian sensation novel, with its blurred generic boundaries, encompassing the domestic Gothic and detective fiction, while also engaging with the Bildungsroman and realist novel. Ethnic and cultural diversity is less evident in the sensation novel, but we might point to the inclusion of characters from different class and, to a lesser extent, ethnic backgrounds as evidence of this, as well as to the homoerotic subtexts of some sensation novels.12 Both genres emphasise the growth and development of a character through the successful negotiation of trials and tribulations, even if the sometimes contrived ‘happy-ever-after’ endings  Nilsen and Donelson, Literature for Today’s Young Adults, pp. 32–33.  Anon., Review of The Moonstone, The Spectator (July 25 1868), p. 881. 12  Examples of ethnic diversity in sensation fiction include representations of the Italian Fosco in The Woman in White, Indians in The Moonstone (1868), and the interracial marriage referenced in Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), although many of these representations are far from positive. See Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Class and Race in Sensation Fiction’, in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, pp. 430–441. On homoeroticism and sensation fiction, see Ross G.  Forman, ‘Queer Sensation’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, pp. 414–429. 10 11

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and moral resolutions of the sensation novel are often a nod to the moralising forces of Mudie’s circulating library and Victorian critics. Finally, although sensation fiction is less ostensibly focused on issues of psychological importance to young people, it is nonetheless concerned with emotion, maturation, and identity—particularly in relation to the figure of the heroine. While adolescents have long been a significant demographic in the literary marketplace, fiction targeted specifically at this group did not emerge as a distinct genre until the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with heightened psychological and cultural interest in the figure of the teenager. S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders (1967) is frequently cited as initiating the genre.13 Both the timing and the geographical origins of this novel are significant. It is no coincidence that it appeared in the 1960s—a decade which heralded the arrival of new forms of youth culture. That The Outsiders is a work of American fiction is typical of the early years of YA literature, when the genre was predominantly associated with American writers. Michael Cart notes that ‘young adult literature is—like the Broadway musical, jazz, and the foot-long hot dog—an American gift to the world’.14 Though partly tongue in cheek, Cart’s assertion emphasises the association between YA literature and forms of popular culture, in turn suggesting an important parallel with the Victorian sensation novel, though both have subsequently gained increasing cultural gravity. Hinton’s novel is unusual in that it is not only aimed at a young adult readership but is also the product of an adolescent writer: Hinton was only seventeen when she wrote The Outsiders. By contrast, most YA fiction, then and now, is the product of adult writers, and thus might be perceived as a form of cultural appropriation, suggesting a parallel with neo-Victorian fiction in terms of the appropriation of nineteenth-century literature and culture by contemporary writers. Over the course of the last fifty years, the genre of YA fiction has expanded rapidly, and is no longer dominated by American writers. The significance of YA fiction within the literary marketplace was cemented in the late 1990s with the unprecedented success of the Harry Potter series, and in the last twenty years the genre has spawned an increasing number of hugely popular works, including Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, 13  See, for example, Alice Trupe, Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. vi. 14  Cart, Young Adult Literature, p. 3.

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Meyer’s Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008–2010), and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). Many of these works have received critical as well as popular acclaim, and fall into the category of crossover as well as YA fiction; all have been adapted into successful film adaptations. Although none of these titles employ a Victorian setting, the influence of the nineteenth-century (sensation) novel is evident in several of these works. Harry Potter, with its orphan-protagonist, sent away to boarding school, bears strong similarities to Jane Eyre, one of the sensation genre’s key intertexts. Both narratives are important examples of the Bildungsroman, both were publishing sensations on their first appearance, and both have significant links to the sensation novel. Whilst Jane Eyre is a crucial precursor to the form, Harry Potter’s neo-Victorian credentials are ambivalent: there is no Victorian setting and no explicit engagement with nineteenth-century history and culture. However, the emphasis on suspense (family) secrets, and hidden identities suggest significant parallels with sensation fiction.15 Both Harry Potter and the sensation novel are key examples of popular fiction, frequently scorned by purveyors of ‘highbrow’, literary fiction. Rowling’s work departs most obviously from the sensation novel in its portrayal of a magical world. The Harry Potter series marks a significant moment in the history of children’s/YA publishing, and has been widely credited with reviving the children’s and YA literature market. Neither Jane Eyre nor later Victorian sensation fiction was marketed as either children’s or YA literature, but both appealed to an adolescent, as well as an adult readership, further paralleling Rowling’s later work. With its links to both Jane Eyre and later sensation fiction, in terms of content and its effect on the literary marketplace, Harry Potter is indicative of both the pervasive influence of the sensation novel across a multitude of literary genres, and an increasing engagement with the Victorian period and its literature in contemporary children’s and YA fiction. The increasing success and popularity of children’s, YA and crossover fiction is also reflected in literary scholarship and academia. Several academic publishers now publish series on children’s literature, which include a number of titles specifically on YA fiction.16 Universities, including 15  The storyline involving Snape and Harry’s parents, Lily and James, also suggests Wuthering Heights may be an intertext for Rowling’s novels. 16  These include Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, Ashgate’s Studies in Childhood, and Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture.

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Roehampton, Goldsmiths, and Reading, now offer MAs in children’s literature, while both English Literature and Creative Writing degrees increasingly offer modules on YA and children’s fiction.17 There is a clear parallel here with the gradual acceptance into the canon of Victorian sensation fiction, now widely recognised for its cultural significance. The developing recognition of YA fiction is further indicated by the increasing number of awards dedicated to the genre,18 and its presence on shortlists for general literary prizes. There are further parallels between the two genres in addition to their position in the literary marketplace as forms of popular fiction, and the delayed recognition of their importance in terms of both literary and cultural merit. The cultural concerns, at times moral panics, which surround these two genres also suggest a point of comparison. The perceived dangerous influence of the sensation novel, particularly on the Victorian woman reader, has been well documented,19 and at various points, similar concerns have been raised about the influence of YA fiction on young, impressionable readers. In 1965, American literary critic J.  Donald Adams described ‘[t]he teen-age book’ as ‘a phenomenon which belongs properly only to a society of morons’.20 Writing in 1978, Maia Pank Mertz observed that ‘many Americans believe that some young-adult novels defy, or indeed attempt to subvert, society’.21 More recently, concerns have been raised over Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Rowling’s Harry Potter and Meyer’s Twilight series. Several religious groups have condemned Rowling’s novels, claiming they promote witchcraft and Satanism,22 while the Catholic Church has criticised 17  Modules on YA literature are available at Cardiff, Hull, Newcastle, Oxford, and the Open University, amongst others. 18  These include the Michael L. Printz award and the Bookseller YA Book Prize, amongst others. 19  See Janice M. Allan, ‘The Contemporary Response to Sensation Fiction’ in Andrew Mangham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 85–98. 20  J.  Donald Adams, Speaking of Books and Life (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 251. 21  Maia Pank Mertz, ‘The New Realism: Traditional Cultural Values in Recent YoungAdult Fiction’, The Phi Delta Kappan, 60:2 (October 1978) [pp.101–105], p. 101. 22  On the various religious reactions to the novels, see Laura Feldt, ‘Harry Potter and Contemporary Magic: Fantasy, Literature, Popular Culture, and the Representation of Religion’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 31: 1 (01/2016), pp. 101–114.

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Pullman’s work for its promotion of atheism and its anti-religious stance.23 Other critics have denounced YA bestsellers on the basis of the quality of the writing.24 Stephen King dismissed Twilight as ‘tweenage porn’,25 while feminist critics have criticised Meyer’s employment of gender stereotypes and the problematic messages the books offer to young women.26 The parallels between the sensation novel and YA fiction, then, provide a crucial insight into shifting attitudes towards popular culture over the course of the last 150 years.

The Victorian Sensation Novel as YA Literature Though there is a clear justification for tracing the emergence of the genre of YA literature to 1960s America, it is evident that there is—on both sides of the Atlantic—a longer history of fiction aimed at an adolescent audience. Examples of nineteenth-century fiction targeting a YA readership include works by Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard on this side of the Atlantic, and, in America, the work of Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, amongst others. As with sensation fiction, it is evident that examples of the form predate the emergence of a recognisable, marketable genre, and it is worth briefly considering the place of what would now be termed YA readers in the Victorian literary marketplace. Whilst children’s literature flourished in the nineteenth century, few works were specifically directed at an adolescent audience. Nonetheless, several prominent nineteenth-­century genres undoubtedly held a particular appeal for young adult readers, including Gothic, science-fiction fantasy, the Bildungsroman (with its emphasis on maturation and self-development), colonial adventure fiction, and the sensation novel. Sensation fiction might be seen to have a particular resonance with adolescent readers. Many of the central themes and motifs of the genre, as 23  See Jenn Northington, ‘The Religious Controversy Surrounding Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ (24 September 2013), http://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/banned-booksweek-philip-pullmans-his-dark-materials/. 24  See Nicholas Lezard, ‘Harry Potter’s big con is the prose’, The Guardian (17 July 2007), and Sarah Rainey, ‘You can’t be serious about Harry Potter!’, The Telegraph, 18 May 2012, n.p. 25  See Emma Brockes and Peter Walker, ‘Stephen King slams Twilight franchise as “tweenage porn”’, The Guardian, 21 September 2013, n.p. 26   See, for example, Danielle N.  Borgia, ‘Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege’, Journal of Popular Culture, 47:1 (Feb 2014), pp. 153–173.

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well as the protagonists, anticipate contemporary YA writing. While the construction of the canon in the early twentieth century may have emphasised highbrow, literary, realist Victorian fiction, the nineteenth century was also the era of the bestseller, and several popular fiction genres have their origins here. In 1919, Virginia Woolf described Eliot’s Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.27 The comment is telling, suggesting the reading of novels was not a serious intellectual pursuit, but something frivolous, for the immature reader. Q. D. Leavis similarly invokes the notion of the immature reader in Fiction and the Reading Public, suggesting ‘the book-borrowing public has acquired the reading habit while somehow failing to exercise any critical intelligence about its reading’.28 While these assertions are indicative of the literary snobbery of the early twentieth century, they nonetheless suggest both the domination of popular fiction in the literary marketplace and the relationship between popular fiction and intellectually immature readers—a relationship also pertinent to debates around contemporary YA fiction. The concern expressed by Victorian critics about the influence of sensation novels on young lady readers reinforces the idea that these works appealed to the demographic which would now be deemed ‘young adult’. In an article in The Argosy in 1874, one critic warned of the dangers of the sensation novel to one of its main readerships: ‘bearing in mind that this sort of reading forms a very considerable part of the amusement of young people at present, the amount of harm done by it is by no means insignificant’.29 Margaret Oliphant, in her scathing assessment of sensation fiction, suggested the inappropriateness of the form in relation to both the woman writer and young woman reader: were the sketch made from the man’s point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it […] is, that it is oftenest made from the woman’s side—that it is women who describe those sensuous raptures—that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food.30 27   Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1919, pp. 657–658. 28  Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 6. 29  E. B., ‘The Sensation Novel’, The Argosy (1874), p. 138, my emphasis. 30  Oliphant, ‘Novels’, September 1867, p. 259, my emphasis.

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It is clear here that ‘English girls’ are amongst the target readership for the sensation novel, reinforcing the notion of the form as a significant precursor to YA fiction. An article which appeared in The Christian Remembrancer in 1864, discusses the ‘many dangers to youthful readers’ presented by the sensation novel31 and subsequently refers to Braddon’s ‘young readers’.32 Another critical assessment of the sensation novel, by Victorian publisher Charles Knight, also points to an association with the adolescent reader: In a sensation novel of the genuine sort, are to be found a pleasant distillation of the topics that daily present themselves in the records of the criminal courts and police offices, all so softened down and made easy to juvenile capacities, that murders, forgeries, burglaries, arson, breach of trust, adulteries, seductions, elopements, appear the common incidents of an English household.33

YA fiction also parallels the sensation novel via its concern with the contemporary: both genres—with some exceptions, including the subgenre of YA historical fiction—are distinctly contemporary genres, concerned more with the present than the past. As H. L. Mansel put it in his much-­ quoted review of sensation fiction: ‘Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion’.34 Nilsen and Donelson note that ‘each generation scrambl[es] to find its own way to be unique, which is one of the reasons that literature for young adults tends to be a contemporary medium. Each generation wants its own stories’.35 This raises questions about YA historical fiction, and the manner in which the past is employed in such narratives as a means of addressing the present. A clear line of descent can be traced between the two genres: indeed, YA neo-Victorian fiction—with its strong engagement with popular fiction and emphasis on wayward heroines—in some respects is a more legitimate descendant of the Victorian sensation novel than neo-­ Victorian literary fiction which, in multiple ways, departs from many of the conventions of the original genre.

 Anon., ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, p. 212, my emphasis.  Ibid., p. 231. 33  Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1865), pp. 180–181, my emphasis. 34  H. L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, London Quarterly Review (April 1863), p. 255. 35  Nilsen and Donelson, Literature for Today’s Young Adults, p. 3. 31 32

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Genre-defining sensation novels all feature young adult heroines for all or part of the narrative. Laura Fairlie is ‘not yet twenty-one’ (120) in the opening of The Woman in White—only slightly older than the typical heroine of contemporary YA fiction. Isabel Vane in East Lynne is eighteen at the opening of the narrative; Lady Audley appears ‘very young […] little more than twenty’ (49)—the same age as Braddon’s other famous bigamist, Aurora Floyd, at the start of her narrative, though her rash marriage to her father’s groom takes place when she is even younger. Magdalen Vanstone, in Collins’s No Name, is ‘only eighteen’.36 All these narratives are concerned, in part, with the maturation of the heroine, and contain some descriptions of their childhoods, reinforcing the links with contemporary YA novels. Further, in both genres (as with all of these sensation protagonists), heroines are typically motherless, and often orphans—a literary device which ensures their independence, generally resulting in both the mistakes which drive the plot, and the lessons eventually learnt from them as (in the Victorian genre at least) they journey towards motherhood themselves. The representation of feisty, assertive female leads in contemporary YA neo-Victorian fiction, then, is a direct echo of the sensation novel, whose notable heroines include Marian Halcombe, Lady Audley, Aurora Floyd, and Lydia Gwilt. Both these characters and their contemporary neo-Victorian YA descendants can be seen in the context of broader cultural representations of women and the prevailing feminist movements of the respective periods.

YA Fiction and the New Literary Marketplace The sensation novel was intimately connected with the rapidly changing conditions of the Victorian literary marketplace. Developing print technologies, the emergence of the railway, and the rise of the middle classes and with them increases in disposable income, as well as rapid increases in serialised fiction, all contributed to the genre’s success. In today’s literary marketplace, technologies are exerting a similarly transformative effect, and this yields some interesting parallels between Victorian sensation ­fiction and contemporary YA literature. In particular, there is a democratisation of the marketplace taking place, indicated by the significant rise in self-publishing and by the replacement of the traditional arts correspondent, charged with reviewing new fiction, by online reviewers in forums  Wilkie Collins, No Name (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14.

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such as Goodreads and Amazon. These reviews reveal much about the popularity of neo-Victorian YA fiction, but also tell us something about the relationship between contemporary culture and the Victorian past beyond the academe. The increasing popularity of neo-Victorian YA fiction is indicated by the number of titles included, as previously mentioned, on the Goodreads list. This list provides a partial bibliography for the genre, and is of interest for several reasons. Goodreads is a platform for the general, rather than academic reader (though the two are not exclusive). With over 55 million members and 50 million reviews, it represents the literary marketplace and popular fiction in a way that academic scholarship often does not.37 The reviews generally do not offer critical analysis of the text but are instead focused primarily on the pleasures (or not) of the reading experience. Encounters, therefore, between the contemporary reader and Victorian literature, culture, and history frequently take a very different form to the manner in which they are envisioned in academic scholarship. In particular, the value of these in terms of the acquisition of a greater understanding of the Victorian past, or the recognition of points of similarity between the Victorians and ourselves is generally ignored, though reviewers do tend to mention flagrant historical inaccuracies. Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair note that ‘the historical aspects’ of YA historical fiction were traditionally seen as ‘an almost incidental backdrop to the novel rather than integral to it’ but suggest that this changed by the late twentieth century, by which time there was recognition of ‘the genre’s value in bringing the past alive for readers’.38 However, a survey of the reviews of YA neo-Victorian fiction on Goodreads suggests this may not be the case, and that readers—if not teachers and critics—continue to prioritise the plot and its ability to ‘hook’ the reader, as well as the appeal of character over and above the narrative’s engagement with the Victorian 37  Some qualification is needed here. Goodreads is not representative of the broader population in terms of age and gender: figures show the majority of those using the site are under 45 (almost 70%), and women (almost 70%). The largest group of users appear to be women aged 18–24 (18%), although these stats do not include users under the age of 18 (see https://www.statista.com/statistics/490362/gb-online-audience-of-goodreads-com2015-by-age-group-and-gender/). In terms of nationality, statistics from June–July 2017 show 25.1m visits to the site from the US, and 34.7m from the rest of the world, while the UK is ‘the largest market for Goodreads in Europe’ (Lisa Campbell, ‘Amazon Integrates Goodreads into UK Devices’, The Bookseller [September 2 2015], n.p.). 38  Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair, The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), p. 5.

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past. This focus on narrative drive, ‘readability’, and plot is not dissimilar to Victorian assessments of the sensation novel and its effect on nineteenth-­ century readers. This, then, has significant implications in terms of the encounter between YA readers and the Victorian past. Do these texts serve any kind of didactic purpose in terms of transmitting to the reader information about that past? Does the reader, seemingly primarily focused on plot and character, glean any understanding of the period through this fictional encounter? And, given that the popularity of a text is, in part at least, measured by the extent to which it succeeds in engaging the reader in an exciting and captivating story, does historical accuracy matter at all? Certainly, the priorities of many readers would seem to suggest they are unlikely to be aware of an author’s possible self-conscious engagement with the Victorian past. Many of these works, then, fit Heilmann and Llewellyn’s definition of ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth-century’, rather than neo-Victorian fiction, but via their status as products of popular culture, exhibit an important link to the Victorian sensation novel. Further, the setting cannot be entirely detached from other elements of the text: plot, character, narrative drive, themes, and motifs—all are inextricably intertwined with both geographical and historical setting. A number of these works draw on real historical events and/or persons, and employ detailed research to create an ‘authentic’ Victorian setting—with all the codicils necessarily entailed by the notion of fictional ‘authenticity’. This, then, implies that the reader, even if not by choice, inevitably engages with the Victorian period via these texts, and thus by virtue of reading them participates in the neo-Victorian experience. Nonetheless, reader reviews suggest a certain type of engagement which does not tend to prioritise the Victorian elements of the text. What, then, is the significance of this cross-­ cultural encounter, between the reader of YA fiction, and neo-Victorian constructions of the past? In what ways does neo-Victorian YA fiction, like other subgenres of neo-Victorian writing linked to the sensation novel (particularly Gothic and detective novels) present us with metaphors for reading the past? And, in turn, what do these metaphors suggest about the contemporary cultural moment and its relationship to the Victorian past? The remainder of this chapter considers these questions in relation to two specific neo-Victorian YA novels, both of which share affinities with the sensation novel: Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and Hooper’s Fallen Grace.

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Sensation and Symbolism in Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) and Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace (2010) The Ruby in the Smoke is the first in a series of four YA historical novels by Phillip Pullman featuring heroine Sally Lockhart.39 The series spans a period of ten years, from 1872, when Sally is aged sixteen, through to 1882. Although the final novel in the series was published over twenty years ago, there was a resurgence of interest following the success of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000) and again following television adaptations of the first two novels in the series in 2006 and 2007, respectively. The texts thus stand in relation to at least three temporal spaces: the mid-Victorian setting; the period of production in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally the space occupied by the twenty-first-­ century reader/viewer. Each of these spaces has significant implications in terms of our understanding and interpretation of the narratives, and, importantly, the texts’ engagement with the Victorian past, and specifically the nineteenth-century sensation novel. All four novels in the series employ conventions of Victorian sensation fiction to a greater or lesser extent, but there are also significant points of departure—particularly in the later novels, in which much of the action moves beyond Victorian England and some fantasy elements are incorporated—and it is The Ruby in the Smoke which stands as the clearest example of YA neo-sensation fiction. This first instalment of the series focuses on two plotlines, intertwined via the character of Sally: the mystery of the eponymous ruby, which is bound up with the heroine’s own origins, and the circumstances of her father’s death. Shortly after news reaches Sally of her father’s death, she receives a mysterious note warning her to ‘beware of the seven blessings’.40 Over the course of her investigations, assisted by photographer Frederick Garland and office boy Jim Taylor, she finds out her father was murdered after discovering his company’s dealings with organised crime and the opium trade. Prior to his death, he sends a message directing her to a Mr Marchbanks, who is subsequently murdered by 39  Pullman originally wrote this first novel as a school play, while working as a teacher. This link with the theatre is evident in some of the dramatic elements of the narrative, and suggests a parallel with the Victorian sensation novel and its association with nineteenth-century melodrama. It was followed by The Shadow in the North (1986), The Tiger in the Well (1991), and The Tin Princess (1994). Sally plays only a minor role in the final novel. 40  Philip Pullman, The Ruby in the Smoke (London: Scholastic, 2004), p. 8.

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the sinister Mrs Holland after passing on a diary to Sally containing ‘A Narrative of the Events in Lucknow and Agrapur, 1856–1857’ (34). The diary details the appearance of the intoxicating ‘Ruby of Agrapur’ (35), given to Captain Lockhart by the Maharajah as a reward for protecting him during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Sally eventually discovers that her father was in fact Mr Marchbanks, but that he gave her to Lockhart in exchange for the Ruby. Mrs Holland, as a young woman, engaged in sexual relations with the Maharajah after he promised her the stone, but he subsequently broke his promise; hence she sees herself as the rightful owner of the ruby. After Sally throws the jewel into the Thames, Mrs Holland goes mad, jumps in after it, and dies. Following a confrontation with Hendrik van Eeden, the head of the Chinese secret society the Seven Blessings, and the man responsible for Captain Lockhart’s death, during which Sally shoots him, she receives a final message from Lockhart, revealing the location of a ten thousand pound inheritance, which she subsequently invests in Fred’s photography business. The eventful plot marks the novel out as a high-adventure story for YA readers, but it also contains all the features of the typical Victorian sensation novel: a feisty, resourceful, and somewhat unconventional heroine, hidden identities, crime, mystery, and an inheritance plot. Other minor features, such as the inclusion of lawyers, an actress, and (identical) twins,41 also echo the sensation novel, as do elements of Pullman’s narrative style— in particular, his persistent use of cliff-hangers and inclusion of various documents relating to the mystery, such as letters and diary papers. The tale of the shipwreck, and the emphasis on ‘omens and portents’ (36) recall Collin’s 1866 novel Armadale,42 while the story of the ruby seems to deliberately echo The Moonstone.43 Dennis Butts notes the influence of the latter, but suggests ‘it is going too far to call The Ruby in the Smoke a

41  Examples of lawyers in sensation fiction include Mr Gilmore in The Woman in White and Archibald Carlyle in East Lynne. Actresses appear in several of Braddon’s novels, including Rupert Godwin (1867) and A Lost Eden (1904). The double is almost a defining feature of the genre (see Chap. 2). Twins appear in Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) and Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872). 42  Other sensation novels also feature shipwrecks, including Wood’s Trevlyn Hold (1864), Braddon’s Joshua Haggard (1876), and Haggard’s Mr Meeson’s Will (1888). 43  There are also strong echoes of Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, for which The Moonstone also serves as a key intertext.

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parody’.44 Though this is true, Collins’s novel is an important influence, and Pullman’s narrative functions as a clear example of the neo-sensation novel. Butts also posits Dickens’s unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) as a key intertext. This is certainly evident in the opium scenes, while Fred’s sister Rosa is perhaps a nod to Drood’s Rosa Bud. Indeed, a broader Dickensian influence is apparent: in the characterisation of the villains (Mrs Holland and the brutish Johnathan Berry—the latter a thug in a similar vein to Oliver Twist’s Bill Sykes), and in the evocation of Victorian London.45 Dickens’s influence is ubiquitous in neo-Victorian fiction, and particularly in YA texts. This can be ascribed in part to the prominence of London as a setting in these works: Victorian London is so closely aligned with Dickens’s work that it seems almost impossible to avoid his influence in neo-Victorian portrayals of the city. However, it is also apt that his work should feature so heavily as an influence in YA historical fiction. Although popular with a diverse range of readers, certain of his works hold particular appeal for the adolescent reader, given their focus on the maturation of the young protagonists—notably David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations, the latter two in particular subsequently adapted multiple times for a younger audience. Whilst Dickens’s plots, characterisation, and narrative style distinguish his fiction from work of the sensational novelists, like them he was a purveyor of Victorian popular fiction, so the dual influence of both Dickens and sensation fiction on the neo-Victorian YA novel is unsurprising. The Ruby in the Smoke makes few explicit mentions of its Victorian intertexts, which are discernible to the ‘knowing’ reader via plot and character similarities, and implicit references. The notable exception to this are the multiple allusions to Jim’s favourite reading material: the penny ­dreadful.46 The opening scene of the novel features a porter reading a penny dreadful, and the cryptic clue to the location of the missing ruby is 44  Dennis Butts, ‘’Tis a Hundred Years Since: G. A. Henty’s With Clive in India and Philip Pullman’s The Tin Princess’ in Ann Lawson Lucas, ed., The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature (Westport: Praeger, 2003), p. 85. 45  This is heavily influenced by Dickens’s son Charles’s Dictionary of London (1879), extracts of which are included in an appendix to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Pullman’s novel. 46  Pullman’s interest in the penny dreadful is also evident in his 1989 graphic novel for children, Spring-Heeled Jack, which reinvents a popular Victorian urban legend featured in several penny dreadfuls of the period, including Colin Henry Hazelwood’s Spring-heel’d Jack, The Terror of London (1867).

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solved by Jim at the end of the narrative as a consequence of his reading of these materials. As Rosa informs Sally: ‘It was Jim […] [Y]ou know these stories he’s always reading—I suppose he thinks like a sensational novelist. He worked it out some time ago’ (185). The penny dreadful thus frames the narrative, and this is significant given its relationship to Victorian sensation fiction. Rosa’s assertion suggests the two forms are one and the same, but this is not the case, although there are close links between them. As the name suggests, the penny dreadful was a cheap form of serial fiction, designed for a poorer class of reader than the sensation novel. When, in 1864, W.  F. Rae claimed Braddon had made ‘the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room’,47 he encapsulated mid-­Victorian concerns about sensation fiction whilst alluding to the relationship between the genre and the penny dreadful. Sensation novels, critics argued, were nothing more than penny dreadfuls for the respectable reader. There are indeed similarities between the two, particularly in their parallel emphasis on crime and mystery, but, as Pamela K. Gilbert observes, ‘Penny dreadfuls are both precursors to and continuous with sensation: indeed, sensation is arguably the middle-class reader’s version of the penny dreadful’s exciting plots and shocking revelations’.48 Andrew King, in his review of cheap serial fiction, suggests a narrower definition of the penny dreadful—one which coincides with Pullman’s references to the form in The Ruby in the Smoke—arguing that this is ‘a term which strictly refers to a form of boys’ serial dating from the 1860s’.49 Penny dreadfuls place a greater emphasis on sensation than the more ‘respectable’ works of Collins, Braddon, and their contemporaries. In her novel The Doctor’s Wife, Braddon—herself an author of cheap serial fiction as well as sensation novels50—offers an ironic portrayal of the writer of penny serials in the character of Sigismund Smith, who declares ‘the penny public require excitement and in order to get the excitement up to a strong point, you’re obliged to have recourse to bodies’.51 Despite a greater level of sophistication than is evident in most penny dreadfuls, it seems Pullman 47  W.  F. Rae, ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British Review, 43 (1865), p. 204. 48  Gilbert, Introduction, A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 3. 49  Andrew King, ‘“Literature of the Kitchen”: Cheap Serial Fiction of the 1840s and 1850s’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 40. 50  See, for example, The Black Band (1861–1862). 51  Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 47.

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himself may have had recourse to this formula in The Ruby in the Smoke, which features no less than seven murders,52 as well as several other sensational deaths.53 For Pullman, the excitement is a requirement of the YA, rather than penny serial reader. While Braddon references sensation fiction in The Doctor’s Wife in part to highlight the difference between the genre and her own attempt at ‘serious’ literature in the novel, Pullman’s allusions to the penny dreadful serve to emphasise the text’s position as a contemporary reworking of the form. Via these repeated references, Pullman situates his novel as a direct descendant of this popular genre, while at the same time his narrative clearly belongs to that self-conscious form of neo-Victorian writing that reaches beyond the boundaries of quasi-historical fiction. To this end, Pullman appears to indicate a desire to dismantle the literary hierarchies embedded in prevailing attitudes towards popular and ‘literary’ fiction. Jim, the narrator informs the reader, ‘was good with words; the Penny Dreadful had taught him well’ (49). Reading, this seems to imply, is inherently valuable, regardless of content: Jim is both articulate and savvy as a result of his consumption of sensational serial fiction, thus Pullman challenges both Victorian and neo-Victorian attitudes towards popular fiction. While the multiple references to the penny dreadful establish Victorian penny thrillers as a key influence on The Ruby in the Smoke, the strong plot similarities with Collins’s The Moonstone reinforce the narrative’s status as a key example of neo-sensation fiction. Both novels are concerned with the fate of a precious stone, the history of which is strongly bound up with the history of colonial India. In each narrative, the stone has an intoxicating effect on those who encounter it, and is linked to several murders. Both works detail the manner in which the stones have come into the possession of the heroine, via the immoral behaviour of Englishmen and the consequences of this (Collins’s John Herncastle murders the three protectors of the stone and steals it; Pullman’s Marchbanks gives up his daughter in return for the ruby—both, incidentally, are opium eaters). The texts engage with some of the conventions of detective fiction (although unlike The Moonstone, Pullman’s novel does

52  Characters murdered include Captain Lockhart, Mr Marchbanks, Mr Hopkins, Mr Selby, the Maharajah, Mr Berry, and Matthew Bedwell. 53  These include the death of Mr Higgs, scared to death by the mention of ‘the seven blessings’ (4–5), as well as Mrs Holland’s mad jump into the Thames in pursuit of the ruby (192).

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not feature a professional detective),54 and in both the solution to the mystery is discovered in part through the use of drugs—specifically opiates. Collins’s diamond and Pullman’s ruby are described in similar terms: The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves.55 [S]omething in its depth and beauty, in the blood-red liquid fire that seemed to fill it, fascinated me and held my attention […] the red glow at the heart of it seemed to swirl and part like smoke, to reveal a series of ledges and chasms—a fantastic landscape of gorges, peaks and terrifying abysses whose depth was impossible to plumb. (35)

Much of the wealth of criticism around The Moonstone is concerned with the symbolism of the jewel. It is variously posited as symbolic of female sexuality (specifically Rachel Verinder’s virginity), menstruation, capitalism, power, and India.56 Pullman’s ruby lends itself to a similar range of symbolic interpretations. Anca Vlasopolos suggests it ‘stands for colonial subjection, crimes against persons and peoples, as well as unmerited because unearned wealth’.57 It is associated specifically with women (as Mrs Holland observes to Sally, ‘I was bought with that stone—same as you. The pair of us, each bought for a ruby’ [192]), with an amoral desire for wealth (Mrs Holland is willing to trade her body for the stone; Mr Marchbanks exchanges his daughter), and thus with capitalism. Its history links it with India and empire, and with drugs—like the opium and laudanum consumed by various characters in both texts, the stones have an intoxicating effect. The ruby’s colour is suggestive of menstruation and coming of age, and this is reinforced by its association with the adolescent Sally. These parallels support the notion of The Ruby in the Smoke as a 54  In the next novel in the series, The Shadow in the North, Fred has established a private detective agency. 55  Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), p. 118. 56  On menstruation and The Moonstone, see Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction, p. 80. For a useful overview of critical approaches to the novel, see Steve Farmer, Introduction to The Moonstone, pp. 9–34. 57  Anca Vlasopolos, ‘Family Trauma and Reconfigured Families: Philip Pullman’s NeoVictorian Detective Series’ in Kohlke and Gutleben, eds., Neo-Victorian Families, p. 304.

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reimagining of The Moonstone, and are worth interrogating further, particularly in relation to Pullman’s reworking of the sensation genre and his representation of both women and empire for a YA audience. There are crucial differences between Collins’s heroine and Pullman’s Sally Lockhart, which speak to the different periods of production, but also, paradoxically, reflect the fact that Sally is, in some respects, a more typical sensation heroine than Rachel. These differences are, in part, symbolised by the two jewels and their fates—in particular their association with femininity and sexuality. Rachel is, on the whole, a passive participant in her own story, while Sally epitomises the feisty, unconventional nature of the typical sensation heroine, and is central to solving the narrative mysteries. Susan Zieger notes that the theft of the diamond in The Moonstone ‘throws Rachel into ambivalence and confusion, which the story ultimately resolves into marriage and child’,58 thus her fate is typical of that of the sensation heroine, safely ensconced in marriage at the conclusion of the narrative.59 That the diamond may symbolise Rachel’s virginity is reinforced by Franklin Blake’s theft of the jewel while under the influence of drugs, and his subsequent marriage to Rachel. The ruby too is associated with female sexuality: it is the price accepted by Molly Edwards (later Mrs Holland) for her body, although the debt is never paid. Sally, though, can be seen to eschew this association when she throws the stone into the Thames, symbolically rejecting the notion of women as sexual objects to be bartered for by wealthy men. She experiences feelings of ambiguity and confusion towards Fred, but rejects his advances, and the narrative concludes with her wealth and independence.60 For Sally, then, the ruby and her rejection of it comes to symbolise female autonomy, marking her out as a feminist heroine for a modern YA readership. Indeed, at one point the narrator intervenes to draw attention to this, disrupting the Victorian narrative to emphasise to the reader the potential parallels between the heroine and themselves: ‘Her upbringing had given her an independence of mind that made her more like a girl of today than one of her own time’ (63). This level of autonomy is rarely achieved by Victorian sensation heroines: though they may obtain happiness in marriage (in itself a subversive 58  Susan Zieger, ‘Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco: The Substances of Memory in The Moonstone’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 208. 59  For those sensation heroines who prove too subversive, of course, death concludes their narratives. 60  In The Shadow in the North, Sally does agree to marry Fred, but he dies before the event, leaving her pregnant with his child.

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conclusion for those heroines, such as Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, who radically depart from Victorian expectations of femininity), independence and personal fulfilment are rare (The Woman in White’s Marian Halcombe might be seen as an exception here, although she is financially dependent on her sister and brother-in-law). Pullman thus updates the Victorian sensation narrative for a contemporary YA audience, suggesting an alternative to the typical marital conclusion of the earlier form. The novel’s treatment of the issues of race and empire, however, seems less progressive. Discussing representations of history in children’s fiction, Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan note that ‘The ethical obligations and constraints are especially acute where authors are writing for an audience, such as children, unlikely to have an extensive background knowledge against which to measure any account of the past’.61 These ethical issues are particularly pertinent to contemporary works representing aspects of Britain’s colonial past, especially in light of the history of depictions of empire which for a long period from the nineteenth century onwards tended to glorify Britain’s role, and downplay atrocities perpetuated by the British. Linked to this is the tendency to reinforce notions of racial hierarchy in the Victorian novel. While we see some evidence of this in The Moonstone, the text is also unequivocal in its condemnation of Herncastle’s behaviour during the Storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when he killed at least three Indian officers of the palace in order to steal the moonstone. The restoration of the diamond to India and the forehead of the deity Vishnu at the conclusion of the novel can be read in terms of reparation for Herncastle’s crimes—and, by inference, those of the British more generally in India, though, as many critics have noted, the novel is equivocal in its overall condemnation of empire and imperial practice. Nonetheless, The Moonstone, as Lyn Pykett points out, can be read as ‘an early example of the “reverse colonisation” narrative, a type of fiction […] associated with the “cultural guilt” at the end of the nineteenth century’.62 A. D. Hutter also suggests Collins’s progressive sympathy, noting his ‘sensitivity to British colonial exploitation is apparent in the political moral of The Moonstone, which closes when the gem is restored to its proper and original shrine’.63  Butler and O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books, p. 73.  Pykett, Wilkie Collins, p. 156. 63  A.  D. Hutter, ‘The Implications of Detective Fiction’ in Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, p. 180. 61 62

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In light of the period of production, a greater emphasis on issues of morality and justice as they pertain to nineteenth-century British colonial and imperial practices in The Ruby in the Smoke might be anticipated. The history of the ruby in Pullman’s novel is bound up with the Indian Rebellion,64 and given the ethical issues associated with this event, and its representation to a younger audience, we might expect some detailed focus on this aspect of the text’s historical context. This, however, is not the case, and indeed, not only are the moral issues associated with India and the East not fully addressed, to some extent the narrative perpetuates nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, continuing to follow the formula established by the Penny Dreadful. As Jim observes, ‘the Penny Dreadful line on anything Eastern was unequivocal: it meant trouble’ (102). Much of the criminality in the novel is associated with foreign countries and foreigners, perpetuating a problematic ‘othering’, echoing Victorian prejudices without fully interrogating them: Sally’s father, and several other members of the ship’s crew, are killed by foreign pirates, working under the direction of Hendrik van Eeden, a Dutch-Chinese criminal mastermind, head of the Seven Blessings, and the grandson of an infamous Chinese pirate; Mrs Holland’s motivation for revenge is her ill-treatment at the hands of the Maharajah. Contrary to events in The Moonstone, the ruby is given to Captain Lockhart by the Maharajah ‘as payment for protecting him during the Mutiny’ (188), so the question of its rightful repatriation to India is evaded, granting Sally some legitimacy when she throws the stone into the river at the end of the narrative (though Mrs Holland arguably has some moral claim to the stone, in spite of her murderous tendencies). Despite the role of the Rebellion in initiating the chain of events in the novel, little detail is provided about it within the narrative. The exception to this is found in Mr Marchbank’s brief account of events leading up to the exchange of Sally for the ruby, but this proves strangely

64  Susan Zieger suggests Collins deliberately situates the history of the moonstone around the siege of Seringapatum rather than the Rebellion as the latter remained in living memory, so ‘he had to gingerly approach English fury against “savage” Indians in the aftermath of the Mutiny’ (‘Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco’, p.  210). Pullman’s narrative employs the term ‘Mutiny’, in contrast to the now preferred terms ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolt’, due to the former’s association with colonial discourses. On the terminology used in relation to events in India in 1857, see Nicola Frith, ‘French Counter-Narratives: Nationalisme, Patriotisme, and Révolution’ in Shaswati Mazumdar, ed., Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857 (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 43–62.

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ambiguous and evasive, particularly so in the context of a YA audience who may have little knowledge of the events which took place: The year which passed after I first saw the stone was a time of omens and portents—signs of the terrible storm which was about to break over us in the Mutiny, and signs which, to a man, we failed to read. On the horrors and savagery of the Mutiny itself it is not my present concern to dwell. Others more eloquent than I have told the story of this time, with its deeds of heroism shining like beacons amid scenes of hideous carnage[.] (36)

This brief allusion to the events of the uprising, particularly the reference to ‘deeds of heroism’, coupled with the Maharajah’s gratitude for the protection received from British forces, seems to perpetuate an image of colonial Britain as an unproblematic force for good in the world in the nineteenth century—an almost nostalgic view of the empire and imperial practices, at odds with the bloody and problematic history of the rebellion which has since been subject to much historical and fictional interrogation, though perhaps a reflection of attitudes still fairly common in the 1980s when the novel was produced. In her work on neo-Victorianism and empire, Elizabeth Ho notes that ‘postcolonial neo-Victorianism […] acknowledges and reckons with colonial brutality and atrocities’ while ‘neo-Victorian texts simultaneously give voice to feelings of regression and return that manifest themselves in often noncontestatory, even celebratory evocations of the nineteenth century’.65 If Pullman’s novel does not quite celebrate British imperialism, neither does it challenge it, or indeed adequately represent it for the YA reader. For all the narrative’s generic playfulness, and its deliberate echoing of the penny dreadful, this replication of the penny serial’s attitude towards empire and foreigners is problematic. If this representation is intended as ironic, as Jim’s assertion regarding the East might imply, this is far from conclusive, and certainly too subtle for a reader unschooled in the history of empire. This returns us to the issue of the moral obligation of fiction, and YA literature in particular, as raised by Butler and O’Donovan. Though Pullman creates a convincing Victorian landscape in his portrayal of London—the ‘heart’ of the empire—this is clearly neither a realist nor a didactic fiction. While its engagement with the nineteenth century goes far beyond the superficial encounters represented 65  Elizabeth Ho, Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 11.

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in quasi-historical fiction, Pullman nevertheless resorts to problematic stereotypes and generalisations in his representation of both the rebellion and foreigners. In doing so, he replicates attitudes often evident in the Victorian sensation novel, in which Britain and the British are persistently privileged, and outsiders viewed with suspicion. To this end, it might be concluded that the text cements its position as a descendant of the Victorian sensation novel, even if this problematic stance does call into question the narrative’s ‘neo’ credentials. In spite of this, while The Ruby in the Smoke features many of the typical tropes of the sensation novel and the penny dreadful, it also includes some of the motifs common in neo-Victorian fiction which are suggestive of the relationship between past and present and offer metaphors for the manner in which the Victorian period might be read and interpreted. These include the use of the diary form,66 the detailed representation of the Victorian city,67 and repeated allusions to Victorian photography. Several neo-­ Victorian critics have discussed the role of photography in the genre, including Rosario Arias and Kate Mitchell.68 Mitchell notes that ‘for many neo-Victorian novels, memory, history and fiction come together in the trope of the photograph’.69 In The Ruby in the Smoke, photography comes to represent the complex relationship between artifice and reality, and thus between fiction and history. Sally first encounters Fred as he photographs the bleak landscape of the Kent coast, in an experiment to ascertain the best procedure for photographing a particular kind of light. His card describes him as a ‘Photographic Artist’ (26), and this, along with the experiment he is engaged upon, indicate that photography does not capture reality exactly as it is, but is, like other art forms, including fiction, an artistic impression. When Sally first visits Fred’s shop, he is engaged in an argument with his sister, an actress, in which both insult the other’s profession: ‘“I will not have my work insulted by a second-rate … daguerreotypist whose only idea of art is–” “Daguerreotypist? Second-rate? How dare you, you ranting puppet–”’ (66). The exchange is significant for two 66  On the use of diaries in neo-Victorian fiction, see Kym Brindle, Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and Letters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 67  See Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds., Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015). 68  Rosario Arias, ‘(Spirit) Photography and the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 19:1 (2008), pp. 92–107; Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, especially Chap. 6. 69  Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, p. 144.

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reasons: in questioning each other’s art, Fred and Rosa draw attention to notions of artistic hierarchies, including those with which the novel itself engages in its blurring of popular and literary fiction. These are not merely determined by artistic merit, but also by economics, as Trembler, assistant in the shop, subsequently indicates to Sally: ‘[Fred’s] an artist, miss, that’s the trouble, […] There’s plenty of money in the photography game for them as wants to make it, but Mr Fred ain’t interested in yer portraits and yer weddings’ (71). Secondly, the references to both photography and the stage suggest a parallel with the performative nature of the text—particularly relevant in relation to a historical fiction which, we might infer, offers not a snapshot of a historical reality, but rather an artistically constructed performance, arranged in a similar manner to the photographer arranging a shot, or the actress performing a role. This notion of the text as ‘make-­ believe’ rather than an authentic reality is further reinforced when Fred begins to take images of Rosa and others performing scenes from literature to sell in the shop, again simultaneously highlighting the economics of the artistic endeavour. In the tension which exists between Fred’s desire to be an artist and the need to make money we find an apt metaphor for the tension between ‘literary’ and popular’ fiction, which the novel also encapsulates through its adoption of the forms and motifs of popular fiction in a work which is nonetheless self-consciously engaged with the Victorian past. The narrative bridges the generic gaps between literary and popular fiction, presenting a convincing Victorian landscape, whilst demonstrating its own position as a self-consciously neo-Victorian narrative via meta- and intertextual references, and at the same time offering a high-­ adventure, neo-sensational mystery, and feisty appealing heroine for its YA audience. Via this narrative complexity, it functions as a kind of microcosm for the afterlife of the Victorian sensation novel, as it moves far beyond its original, unstable generic boundaries to influence a wide range of forms, types, and genres of fiction. This narrative play is also evident in Hooper’s Fallen Grace.70 Hooper’s heroine, Grace Parkes, bears some similarity to Sally Lockhart. Like Sally, Grace is an orphan, struggling to survive against poverty and malign forces in Victorian London. In The Shadow in the North, Sally falls pregnant with 70  The novel was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and some reviewers drew comparisons with Pullman’s earlier novel. The Times review noted, ‘Not since Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke has there been such a gorgeous evocation of Victorian life’ (5 June 2010, n.p.).

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Fred’s child, shortly before he is killed, and Grace, too, is an unmarried mother.71 Hooper’s novel opens in 1861, the height of the sensation craze, and its central themes and concerns are those of Victorian sensation fiction, though like Pullman’s work it also has strong Dickensian elements. The novel opens with Grace travelling on the Necropolis Railway to Brookwood Cemetery to secretly bury the body of her illegitimate child, who has apparently died in childbirth. Grace had fallen pregnant whilst living at a training house, where girls were routinely raped by one of the benefactors of the charitable institution. Whilst at the cemetery, she encounters James Solent, a legal clerk, and Mrs Unwin, whose husband runs a successful funeral business and who invites Grace to work as a mute. Grace declines and returns to her lodgings in Seven Dials, where she lives with her sister, Lily, who suffers from some form of mild mental disability, which renders her naive and susceptible.72 The sisters earn money by selling watercress and pawning the few possessions they have left, following their father’s abandonment of the family and their mother’s subsequent death. Eventually finding themselves destitute, Grace accepts Mrs Unwin’s offer and begins working as a mute. Lily is taken in at the Unwin’s Kensington residence—ostensibly to train as a servant, but in reality because the Unwins have discovered she is heiress to a large fortune, left by her father. After Lily is kidnapped in order that the Unwins’ daughter may steal her identity, Grace enlists James Solent’s help, and discovers she and her sister are heiresses. She manages to secure the false adoption certificate, through which the Unwins have switched Lily’s identity, and discovers Mr Unwin’s brother, Sylvester, was the man who raped her. Hiding in a coffin, she literally scares him to death. Lily returns, having been sent to an asylum, and the sisters inherit a fortune. At the end of the narrative, Grace discovers her unborn child survived, and was sent to live with a childless couple, where she agrees to leave him. Here again, then, we find the central themes and motifs of the Victorian sensation novel: the orphan heroine, a complicated inheritance plot, a ‘fallen’ woman, illegitimacy, hidden and switched identities, and a plot overly reliant on coincidence. In the attempt to steal the sisters’ inheri71  In representing unmarried mothers, both narratives inevitably touch on the issue of sexuality—a subject explored extensively in both YA and neo-Victorian literature, often marking a stark departure from mainstream Victorian novels, in which the subject is alluded to only in implicit, often ambiguous terms. Other examples of this trend in neo-Victorian YA fiction include Newbery’s Set in Stone and Eagland’s Wildthorn. 72  Lily bears some similarity to Sally in Collins’s The Fallen Leaves (1879).

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tance and in Lily’s incarceration in an asylum, there are clear echoes of The Woman in White, while the fallen woman narrative parallels Collins’s The New Magdalen (1873). There is also a somewhat problematic representation of disability, and here again we find echoes of both the sensation novel (Collins’s Miserrimus Dexter in The Law and the Lady) and Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series. Although Lily is represented in a positive light, there is a much more negative portrayal in Sylvester Unwin, who has only one hand. In the figure of the physically disabled rapist, the narrative seems to echo Victorian stereotypes of physical disability, which was frequently associated with moral shortcomings. The disabled (and indeed foreign) villain also features in the Sally Lockhart series, when Ah Ling is left a quadriplegic after Sally shoots him. As with The Ruby in the Smoke, Fallen Grace combines elements of the sensation novel with typical characteristics of neo-Victorian writing, to offer a commentary on the relationship between past and present. Grace is fifteen at the opening of the narrative, and travelling by train in order to place the bundle she believes to be carrying her dead baby in one of the coffins on the Necropolis Railway so he might receive a decent burial. The opening thus establishes Grace as a heroine with close ties to both the figure of the Victorian sensation and YA heroine. That Grace is not an entirely authentic Victorian heroine is suggested by her feeling of alienation when she boards the train: she has never travelled by train before and does not belong to any of the funeral parties travelling to Brookwood Cemetery. Indeed, she lies to the railway clerk, informing him that she is visiting the grave of her mother. This initial deception calls attention to her role as a neo-Victorian heroine—a contemporary creation posing as Victorian—while her sense of unease at her surroundings potentially mirrors that of the YA reader, unfamiliar with the Victorian landscape. Grace, like so many YA heroines, is marginalised—by her orphan status, poverty and by her position as an unmarried mother—and this is symbolised by the image of the body of the illegitimate baby being placed into the coffin of a ‘respectable’ corpse. This scene takes on new resonance at the end of the novel, when it is revealed that her child is still alive, and the bundle she placed in the coffin was, in fact, a penny loaf73—a plot twist worthy of a Victorian penny dreadful as much as sensation fiction. The poignancy of the earlier scene is thus subsequently undercut by a sense of the ridiculous, in a manner which further serves to hint at the performative nature of the  Mary Hooper, Fallen Grace (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 293.

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neo-Victorian narrative: what appears to be a Victorian tale is, in fact, something else, something other—and potentially something very different from its literary ancestor, signified by the substitution of the baby with a loaf of bread. Grace’s role as heroine is, in part, to bridge the gap between the Victorian world and the contemporary reader, and her own ignorance here can be seen to assist in that process. The allusions to death and grief contained in the opening chapter introduce a motif which runs throughout the novel, which is permeated by images of Victorian mourning and death rituals. These images link the narrative to the neo-Victorian Gothic, and hint at its role in uncovering the (Victorian) dead. Closely associated with this imagery of death is the representation of the Necropolis Railway. The railway plays an important role in the Victorian sensation novel, emphasising the genre’s contemporariness, and frequently being employed as a (sensational) device to move the plot forward. In some instances it functions as a symbol of progress; in others, as a dangerous threat, or even as a means of exacting retribution or moral justice. In Lady Audley’s Secret the subversive heroine employs the fast train service to London to enable her to destroy evidence of her true identity, whilst in East Lynne, a train crash leaves the adulterous heroine severely disfigured and kills her illegitimate child. Pullman also uses the railway to progress the sensational plot in The Ruby in the Smoke, in which Sally, travelling alone in a railway carriage, falls asleep and is robbed. In Fallen Grace, the railway fulfils a connective function between the living and the dead, as it carries mourners and caskets to Brookwood Cemetery, and thus between the contemporary reader and the Victorians, the present and the past. It represents, then, the crossing of boundaries, and thus symbolises the move between Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives, literary and popular fiction. On discovering, at the end of the novel, that her child has survived, Grace is offered the opportunity to reclaim him, but, seeing that he is ‘greatly loved, and loved back in return’ (293), she decides to leave him with the family to whom he has been given, thus ensuring her son’s life will follow a different path from her own. Here too, then, we find a useful metaphor for the neo-Victorian project—a reminder that a story’s origins may differ significantly from its own narrative path. There is also a reminder of the dangers of nostalgia: Grace’s life has encompassed extreme poverty, sexual abuse, and other dangers inherent for a young woman struggling to earn enough money to survive in Victorian London. Her son, the narrative suggests, will grow up in comparative luxury, and in the security of the respectable Victorian family. The divergence between the two echoes the

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potential for the neo-Victorian novel to recreate Victorian history through a deeply nostalgic, and thus inauthentic lens. Hooper seeks to remind the reader of this, not only through her heroine’s story, but through the emphasis she places on the history of the Victorian poor, both within the confines of the narrative, and in the extraneous materials included in the book, which cite a number of authorial sources and influences—what Butler and O’Donovan term the ‘external apparatus’ of historical fiction.74 This ‘apparatus’, also employed by Pullman throughout the Sally Lockhart series,75 is intended both to educate the YA reader, who may be unfamiliar with Victorian history, and to lend the narrative authenticity, to suggest it is not merely popular historical fiction. Hooper sets out to achieve this through three addendums to the novel, sections entitled ‘My Inspiration for Fallen Grace’ and ‘Some Historical Notes from the Author’, and a Bibliography. In addition, many chapters begin with an epigraph, some fictional, others quoting historical sources, which function as internal apparatus, reinforcing the notion of the novel as a blend of fiction and ‘authentic’ Victorian history. Historical sources quoted here include Charles Dickens Jr’s Dictionary of London and a report from The Times of the funeral of the Prince Consort in 1861. In addition, there are several adverts included, and here the ‘authenticity’ is unclear: some of these form part of the story, such as adverts for the Unwin’s funeral business, while others appear genuine. Again, there is an echo here of the sensation novel, which was frequently serialised alongside numerous adverts. While the use of historical sources as part of the internal and external apparatus of the novel serves the purpose of reassuring the reader of the text’s ‘authenticity’ and credibility in terms of its representation of the Victorian period, the blurring of history and fiction via both the supporting apparatus and the novel itself highlights the dual nature of both disciplines: history as fiction, and fiction as history—including, in the case of the latter, the tendency to view the sensation novel as an important historical narrative, revealing information about class, gender, and identity in the mid-­ Victorian period. Historical fiction, particularly that which evidences the research behind it, encourages an engagement with the past which is  Butler and O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books, p. 7.  Each of Pullman’s four novels in the series is prefaced by a short section detailing ‘Certain items of historical interest’ for the year in which the book is set. These generally do not have a direct bearing on the story, suggesting they are there to educate the (YA) reader in the broader Victorian context. 74 75

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simultaneously problematised by its fictive nature, but this is paralleled by the modern reader’s experience of the Victorian sensation novel: it is ‘authentic’, in so far as it is the product of the nineteenth century, but it nonetheless remains a fictional representation of the past, subject to the artistic liberties, and (mis)representations of the author. The Ruby in the Smoke and Fallen Grace serve as exemplars of the way in which YA neo-Victorian fiction engages with the Victorian sensation novel. They blur the boundaries between popular and literary fiction, thus mirroring the trajectory of the sensation novel itself following its critical recovery in the late twentieth century, whilst interrogating the critical distinctions drawn in neo-Victorian discourses. Like neo-sensation fiction more generally, they offer a series of metaphors for the relationship between the Victorian past and the present, suggesting both continuities and points of departure. Their heroines, Grace and Sally, as with their Victorian predecessors, struggle against the forces operating against them, reflecting both the position of women in Victorian society, and ongoing struggles for equality at the time of their production. Sally and Grace are inevitably granted greater freedoms than the Victorian heroine—unlike the fallen women of most nineteenth-century narratives, for instance, Grace survives the novel. However, they are also relatively traditional in their replication of Victorian (sensation) narrative conclusions: though transgressive, the heroines are comparable to characters such as Magdalen Vanstone and Aurora Floyd, rather than criminal anti-heroines such as Lady Audley and Lydia Gwilt, and like Magdalen and Aurora, they are ‘rewarded’ with a romantic union (Sally and Fred; Grace and James). To this end, the novels offer a replication of the heteronormative romantic conclusions of Victorian sensation fiction (just as they offer problematic echoes of discourses around empire and disability). This, though, is not entirely representative of YA neo-Victorian fiction: Eagland’s Wildthorn, for instance, offers a lesbian alternative to these discourses.76 Nonetheless, the focus on the experiences of the heroine—in Pullman and Hooper’s work, and in YA neo-Victorian fiction more broadly—is both an echo of the Victorian sensation novel, and an indication of the continuities between the experiences of the Victorian and contemporary adolescent woman. In foregrounding this figure, contemporary YA neo-sensation fiction posits her as the centre of the nexus of connections between the Victorian age and the modern world. 76  Wildthorn reworks the asylum plot from The Woman in White, and, with its emphasis on lesbian desire, seems to position Waters’s Fingersmith as another of its key intertexts.

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References Adams, J. Donald. 1965. Speaking of Books and Life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Allan, Janice M. 2013. The Contemporary Response to Sensation Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham, 85–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anon. 1864. Our Female Sensation Novelists. The Christian Remembrancer 46: 209–236. ———. 1868. Review of The Moonstone. The Spectator, July 25, 881–882. ———. 2010. Children’s Fiction: Fallen Grace by Mary Hooper. The Times, June 5. ———. 2018a. Distribution of the Online Audience of goodreads.com in Great Britain (GB) in 2018, by Age Group and Gender. https://www.statista.com/ statistics/490362/gb-online-audience-of-goodreads-com-2015-by-agegroup-and-gender/. ———. 2018b. Victorian YA Novels. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/ list/show/4736.Victorian_YA_Novels. Arias, Rosario. 2008. (Spirit) Photography and the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel. LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 19 (1): 92–107. Borgia, Danielle N. 2014. Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege. Journal of Popular Culture 47 (1): 153–173. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2008. The Doctor’s Wife. 1864; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brindle, Kym. 2014. Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and Letters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brockes, Emma, and Peter Walker. 2013. Stephen King Slams Twilight Franchise as “Tweenage Porn”. The Guardian, September 21. Brown, Mark. 2016. Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree Wins Costa Book of the Year 2015. The Guardian, January 26. Brown, Joanne, and Nancy St. Clair. 2006. The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Butler, Catherine, and Hallie O’Donovan, eds. 2012. Reading History in Children’s Books. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butts, Dennis. 2003. Tis a Hundred Years Since: G. A. Henty’s With Clive in India and Philip Pullman’s The Tin Princess. In The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature, ed. Ann Lawson Lucas, 81–87. Westport, CT: Praeger. Campbell, Lisa. 2015. Amazon Integrates Goodreads into UK Devices. The Bookseller, September 2. Cart, Michael. 2001. From Insider to Outsider: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature. Voices from the Middle 9 (2): 95–97. ———. 2010. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

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Collins, Wilkie. 1999. The Moonstone. 1868; Peterborough, ON: Broadview. ———. 2006. The Woman in White. 1860; Peterborough, ON: Broadview. ———. 2008. No Name. 1862; Oxford: Oxford University Press. E. B. 1874. The Sensation Novel. The Argosy, 137–143. Farmer, Steve. 1999. Introduction. In The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, 9–34. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Feldt, Laura. 2016. Harry Potter and Contemporary Magic: Fantasy, Literature, Popular Culture, and the Representation of Religion. Journal of Contemporary Religion 31 (1): 101–114. Forman, Ross G. 2011. Queer Sensation. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 414–429. Oxford: Blackwell. Frith, Nicola. 2011. French Counter-Narratives: Nationalisme, Patriotisme, and Révolution. In Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857, ed. Shaswati Mazumdar, 43–62. London: Routledge. Gilbert, Pamela, ed. 2011. A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell. Ho, Elizabeth. 2012. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire. London: Continuum. Hooper, Mary. 2010. Fallen Grace. London: Bloomsbury. Hutter, A.D. 1998. Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction. In Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, ed. Lyn Pykett, 175–196. New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, Andrew. 2011. “Literature of the Kitchen”: Cheap Serial Fiction of the 1840s and 1850s. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 38–53. Oxford: Blackwell. Knight, Charles. 1865. Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century. London: Bradbury & Evans. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———, eds. 2015. Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Leavis, Q.D. 2011. Fiction and the Reading Public. New York: Random House. Lezard, Nicholas. 2007. Harry Potter’s Big Con Is the Prose. The Guardian, July 17. Mangham, Andrew. 2007. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mansel, H.L. 1863. Sensation Novels. London Quarterly Review, April, 251–267. Mertz, Maia Pank. 1978. The New Realism: Traditional Cultural Values in Recent Young-Adult Fiction. The Phi Delta Kappan 60 (2): 101–105. Mitchell, Kate. 2010. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morey, Anne, and Claudia Nelson, eds. 2012. The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse: Renegotiating Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Childhood. Special Issue. Neo-Victorian Studies 5 (1).

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Nelson, Claudia. 2018. Foreword to Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day. In The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture, xi–xiv. Abingdon: Routledge. Northington, Jenn. 2013. The Religious Controversy Surrounding Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, September 24. http://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/ banned-books-week-philip-pullmans-his-dark-materials/. Oliphant, Margaret. 1867. Novels. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (September), 257–280. Pace Nilsen, Alleen, and Kenneth L. Donelson. 2001. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. 6th ed. New York: Longman. Pullman, Philip. 2004. The Ruby in the Smoke. London: Scholastic. Pykett, Lyn. 2005. Wilkie Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rae, W.F. 1865. Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon. North British Review 43: 180–204. Rainey, Sarah. 2012. You Can’t Be Serious About Harry Potter! The Telegraph, May 18. Reynolds, Susan. 2009. Dumbledore in the Watch Tower: Harry Potter as Neo-­ Victorian Narrative. In Harry Potter’s Worldwide Influence, ed. Diana Patterson, 271–292. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Stetz, Margaret. 2013. The ‘My Story’ Series: A Neo-Victorian Education in Feminism. Neo-Victorian Studies 6 (2): 137–151. Trupe, Alice. 2006. Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Vlasopolos, Anca. 2011. Family Trauma and Reconfigured Families: Philip Pullman’s Neo-Victorian Detective Series. In Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual, and Cultural Politics, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 297–320. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wood, Mrs Henry. 2008. East Lynne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1919. George Eliot. Times Literary Supplement, November 20. Zieger, Suan. 2011. Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco: The Substances of Memory in The Moonstone. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela Gilbert, 208–219. Oxford: Blackwell.

PART II

Neo-Sensational Tropes

CHAPTER 5

(Re)Presenting (Sexual) Trauma

The notion of the past haunting the present is central to both Victorian and neo-Victorian sensation fiction. The reason for this haunting often lies in the traumatic events of the past and their long-lasting effects on those involved. This trauma and its after-effects take on a variety of forms, but are most persistently focused on the experiences of women, and in particular those of the (neo-)sensation heroine. In some cases, the heroine’s body bears witness to this trauma. In Wood’s East Lynne, Isabel Vane is disfigured in the train crash which kills her illegitimate child. Though this trauma manifests itself in her appearance, it functions as a symbolic reflection of earlier traumatic events, which saw her abandon her husband and children and embark on a disastrous liaison with the villainous Frances Levison. It is this earlier trauma which provides the catalyst for the novel’s events and her physical disfigurement contributes to the traumatic after-­ effects she is forced to endure as part of her repentance. These culminate in her witnessing the death of her eldest child, ‘whom she no longer dared to call hers’.1 Her appearance reflects the trauma of the train crash, but An earlier version of part of Chap. 5 was published as ‘Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’ in Nadine Böhm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss (eds.), Fashioning the Neo-­ Victorian: Iterations of the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 137–150. 1

 Mrs Henry Wood, East Lynne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 347.

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also a kind of self-imposed punishment that together transform her from the beautiful heroine of the opening of the narrative: [H]ow strangely she is altered! Yes, the railway accident did that for her, and what the accident left undone, grief and remorse accomplished. She limps as she walks, and slightly stoops, taken from her former height. A scar extends from her chin above her mouth, completely changing the character of the lower part of her face; some of her teeth are missing, so that she speaks with a lisp, and the sober bands of her gray hair—it is nearly silver—are confined under a large and close cap. […] [S]he wears disfiguring spectacles and a broad band of gray velvet, coming down low upon her forehead. Her dress, too, is equally disfiguring. […] What resemblance was there between that gray, broken-down woman, with her disfiguring marks, and the once loved Lady Isabel, with her bright color, her beauty, her dark flowing curls, and her agile figure? (389)

Thus the trauma of her past renders Isabel Vane a disfiguring spectacle, even as she seeks to avoid the gaze that may reveal her true identity. Her physical transformation reflects her fall from grace and the trajectory of her life’s narrative: from beautiful young wife and mother to fallen woman. Wood’s novel, then, is essentially a trauma narrative, and this trauma is closely associated with the heroine’s marital relations, and more generally with her association with patriarchal culture. This is fairly typical of the sensation novel and a similar narrative is found in The Woman in White. This chapter focuses on representations of trauma in Collin’s novel and some of its later literary, screen, and stage adaptations. The Woman in White opens with an image of a woman traumatised: Anne Catherick, the woman in white of the title and the illegitimate daughter of a gentleman and a servant woman, has escaped from a lunatic asylum where she has been imprisoned by Sir Percival Glyde. Encountering Walter Hartright in the narrative’s pivotal sensation scene, she tells him: ‘I have been cruelly used and cruelly wronged’ (68). The subsequent narrative details Laura Fairlie’s traumatic marriage to Glyde, her incarceration in an asylum under Anne’s name and her recovery from these events. The novel focuses persistently on women traumatised by their encounters with a repressive patriarchal system which enables, with relative ease, the systematic abuse of the Victorian woman. As in East Lynne, the traumatic experiences of the heroine are apparent in her appearance: following Laura’s imprisonment in the asylum at the hands of her husband and Count Fosco, the uncanny resemblance between her and

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Anne grows stronger: ‘The outward changes wrought by the suffering and terror of the past had fearfully, almost hopelessly, strengthened the fatal resemblance between Anne Catherick and herself […] [S]orrow and suffering […] had set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of her face’ (440–441). Following her escape from the asylum, she appears ‘sorely tried and sadly changed; her beauty faded, her mind clouded’ (423), and remembers ‘little of the trouble and the terror’ (422) of her marriage and incarceration, thus exhibiting via her memory loss a classic symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Both Isabel Vane and Laura Fairlie bear witness to the trauma they have experienced in their altered appearance, but trauma also has a dramatic effect on the behaviour of the sensation heroine, and female transgression in the sensation novel is persistently associated with past trauma. Lady Audley’s ‘madness’—whether real or feigned—and the criminal behaviour it begets, originates in her husband’s abandonment of her and her child; Eleanor Vane’s ‘unwomanly’ determination to seek vengeance at the expense even of her marriage in Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory is a direct response to her father’s suicide; Mercy Merrick’s adoption of a false identity in Collins’s The New Magdalen represents an attempt to escape her traumatic past as a prostitute. Trauma is not always associated primarily with the heroine in the sensation novel: in both Armadale and The Moonstone it is linked to past crimes, with the notion of the ‘sins of the fathers’, and in the latter text, with the traumatic history of empire, signified by the titular flawed diamond of the title. Its most persistent association, though, is with the figure of the heroine and it is via representations of marital trauma in particular that the genre gains its proto-feminist credentials, critiquing patriarchal structures and their often devastating effects on women. Trauma, then, is central to the Victorian sensation novel and further manifests itself in the genre’s narrative techniques. Like the gaps in Laura Fairlie’s memory, narrative gaps point to the presence of trauma and its immediate effects, and the manner in which these defy representation. These narrative gaps are often crucial to the novels’ sensation effects, and thus trauma and sensation become inextricably linked. In one of the most sensational scenes in The Woman in White, Walter Hartright encounters Laura Fairlie at the site of her own grave. The effects of this dramatic, traumatic revelation, though, are concealed from the reader: ‘The history of the interval which I thus pass over must remain unrecorded. My heart turns faint, my mind sinks in darkness and confusion when I think of it’

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(421). Similarly, the encounter between Laura and her uncle following her rescue from the asylum, when he refuses to believe she is who she claims, is excised from the narrative—‘too painful to be described’ (436). The narrative fragments which frequently play a crucial role in sensation plots are similarly suggestive of trauma: the partial remains of George Vane’s suicide note in Eleanor’s Victory, for instance. These narrative features, so prevalent in the sensation novel, are typical of trauma literature, as well as postmodern literature, thus emphasising significant parallels between sensation, trauma, and neo-Victorian writing.

Neo-Victorian Trauma To this end, then, much (neo-)sensation fiction functions as a form of trauma narrative. The development of neo-Victorian critical discourses coincides with the emergence of the field of trauma studies and the two share obvious affinities. Trauma is a prevalent feature in contemporary literature—from post-colonial writing, to trauma memoirs, to historical fiction. This reflects a broader trend within modern culture in which trauma narratives (personal, political, national, and international) are a persistent presence in news media, magazines, soap operas, and the cinema. This pervasive interest in trauma is also evident in the neo-Victorian project, in which authors and screenwriters repeatedly emphasise historical traumas. Laurie Vickroy suggests one possible reason behind the historical author’s interest in trauma: ‘Testifying to the past has been an urgent task for many fiction writers as they attempt to preserve personal and collective memories from assimilation, repression, or misrepresentation’.2 Kohlke identifies trauma as one of the key features of neo-Victorianism in her introduction to the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, in which she proposes that trauma functions as a central motif in neo-Victorian fiction: the [Victorian] period is configured as a temporal convergence of multiple historical traumas […] These include both the pervasive traumas of social ills, such as disease, crime, and sexual exploitation, and the more spectacular traumas of violent civil unrest, international conflicts, and trade wars that punctuated the nineteenth century.3 2  Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 1. 3  Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), p. 7.

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These traumas, Kohlke suggests, have clear parallels with contemporary culture, functioning ‘as a harbinger of our own trauma culture’,4 hence providing another possible reason for the persistent presence of trauma narratives in neo-Victorian texts and the apparent desire to rewrite Victorian ‘trauma’ narratives such as The Woman in White. In their edited collection on neo-Victorianism and trauma, Kohlke and Gutleben suggest that the genre lends itself particularly well to explorations of trauma as a double temporal consciousness […which] mimic[s] the double temporality of traumatic consciousness, whereby the subject occupies, at one and the same time, both the interminable present moment of the catastrophe which, continuously re-lived, refuses to be relegated to the past, and the post-­ traumatic present that seems to come after but is paradoxically coterminous.5

From this perspective, the neo-Victorian novel itself becomes a traumatic reliving of Victorian trauma narratives. In light of the sensation novel’s concern with trauma, it is unsurprising that neo-Victorian texts should frequently enact a cultural return to the genre. As this book evidences, The Woman in White has become a central source text for neo-Victorian authors, screenwriters, and stage producers, along with several other key Victorian narratives, including Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The Turn of the Screw.6 Significantly, all these novels contain images of traumatised women: Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie, Brontë’s Bertha Mason, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, and James’s unnamed governess. This indicates an ongoing contemporary concern with exploring trauma through a return to the traumatic narratives of the past. In contemporary adaptations and reworkings of Collins’s novel, trauma continues to play a central role, and a number of literary and filmic texts which draw explicitly on the novel introduce elements of sexual trauma, which are significantly absent from both Collins’s original text and from Victorian literature more generally. Amongst these recent reworkings are Wilson’s The Dark Clue, written as a sequel to The Woman in White, Waters’s Fingersmith, Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Newbery’s Set in Stone, all of which adapt aspects of the Laura Fairlie-­  Ibid.  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century’, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma, p. 2. 6  See Chap. 1. 4 5

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Anne Catherick plot from Collins’s novel, and television adaptations by David Pirie (BBC, 1997) and Fiona Seres (BBC, 2018). These suggest interesting intersections between Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives in terms of representations of (sexual) trauma, as well as reflecting contemporary concerns, recently evidenced in the #MeToo movement. The persistent return to this issue within the Victorian context illustrates the neo-Victorian desire to revisit traumas of the past and to highlight an issue which remained largely veiled in Victorian literature and culture. However, if these works bring the issue to the fore, they also simultaneously speak to the ongoing problems of articulation inherent in contemporary portrayals of sexual abuse and trauma. The adaptations of The Woman in White with which I am concerned here focus not on trauma in its broader historical sense—in relation to empire, trade wars, and conflicts, or ‘social ills’ in terms of disease or even the organised exploitation of Victorian women—but, like the original novel, on individual, personal narratives of trauma, and (in a departure from Collins’s narrative) specifically sexual trauma (sexual abuse, incest, rape). While these works are concerned with individuals’ personal experiences of trauma, together they suggest an overarching concern with the prevalence and representation—or rather, the lack of representation—of sexual abuse in Victorian literature and culture. To this end, like those narratives which seek to explore the ‘pervasive traumas’ of Victorian society, they can be seen as an attempt to offer a ‘corrective’ to the Victorian past, to acknowledge the widespread existence of traumas which were all too frequently concealed from public view. As Vickroy observes, ‘[w]ider cultural traumas are contained in the psychological and physical experiences of a few characters’7; ‘representative characters’ can ‘exemplify social conflicts and wounds’ and ‘the individual body becomes a historical marker to unspeakable experience but also a marker for potential change if healed’.8 Further, the neo-Victorian trauma narrative, in uncovering the repressed traumas of the past, has the potential to ‘critique culturally dominant views of identity and marginality and resist suppression of traumatic events’.9 In this respect, there is a clear parallel between neo-Victorian (neo-sensation) fictions (literary and screen) and one of the central aims of Victorian studies: to identify those discourses which remain hidden within  Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, p. xv.  Ibid., p. xiii. 9  Ibid., p. xiv. 7 8

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Victorian literature and culture and to challenge those narratives and views which assist in this process of concealment. The persistent concern with individual experiences of sexual trauma in contemporary reimaginings of The Woman in White thus suggests a broader concern with the Victorian experience of such traumas, and the need to return to the past in order to uncover and ultimately heal those wounds, to address and redress the fact that ‘much of traumatic history, particularly that which affects the socially marginal, has remained repressed, unwritten’.10 Hadley notes that neo-Victorian novels often ‘incorporate narrative descriptions of private acts and desires that would have been elided in Victorian fictional accounts’, including sexual abuses.11 Paradoxically, however, the return to the sexual traumas of the past suggests a displacement: the traumas of the present are obscured, veiled even as they are reimagined within a historical setting. The repeated engagement with the theme of sexual trauma in reworkings of Collins’s sensation novel raises significant questions: about contemporary narratives’ deviation from the original text, and more broadly about the manner in which the neo-Victorian seeks to revise both the Victorian sensation novel and the Victorian past. These narratives offer a commentary on contemporary concerns and anxieties, as well as suggesting possible parallels between Victorian and contemporary literature and culture in terms of the problems of representation inherent in narratives of sexual trauma from both the past and present. Narratives of trauma suggest the potential cathartic effects of writing trauma and point to a possible reason for the prevalence of trauma narratives in the neo-Victorian project: the traumas of the past—so often ignored at the time—must be written in order for us to come to terms with our collective history; we must write the traumas of the past in order to confront and ultimately deal with them. Dominick LaCapra hints at the need to write history’s traumas: ‘There are reasons for the vision of history […] as traumatic, especially as a symptomatic response to a felt implication in excess and disorientation which may have to be undergone or even acted out if one is to have an experiential or empathetic basis for working it through’.12 The notion of writing trauma as a means of catharsis is also  Ibid., p. 167.  Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 157. 12  Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. xi. 10 11

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associated with nineteenth-century psychoanalytic discourses and this provides another link between Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives of trauma. In parallel to this, the act of writing functions as a central motif in neo-Victorian trauma fiction: it is frequently through writing that characters resolve, or at least confront, past traumas. This is evident in a number of adaptations of The Woman in White. In both Wilson’s The Dark Clue and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, the protagonists are engaged in biographical projects, and through the act of researching and writing about others’ traumatic experiences, confront their own repressed past and emotions. In Set in Stone and Pirie’s and Seres’s screen adaptations, diaries, letters and the act of narration play pivotal roles in the unfolding of the story, echoing Collins’s original novel, which presents a series of different narratives. Discussing Setterfield’s novel in relation to Dori Laub’s work on trauma, Heilmann and Llewellyn note the importance of narrating the past as a means of dealing with the past: ‘it is only in narrating the experience, and “being listened to—and heard,” that “the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to”’.13

Wilkie Collins’s Trauma Narratives Though Collin’s original novel, like sensation fiction more generally, exhibits a concern with trauma, specifically as it pertains to women, it is not concerned with the issue of sexual trauma, although it references illicit sexual relations (Philip Fairlie’s affair with Anne Catherick’s mother, resulting in the birth of an illegitimate daughter) and includes a portrayal of an abusive marriage (between Laura Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde). Although Glyde represents the figure of the abusive husband who wields total control over his legally disempowered wife, the narrative strongly implies that this abuse does not take a sexual form. His assertion that his wife is ‘not in the least likely’ to bear children (342), considered in light of the infrequent use and unreliability of contraceptive methods at this time, suggests that the marriage is a celibate one. Hence, while the narrative is concerned with the offences committed by the figure of the abusive ­husband against his wife, sexual abuses—which, like the excessive control Glyde wields over Laura, were effectively condoned by the Victorian legal system—are notably absent from the text, hinting at their unspeakable nature within a Victorian context. Nonetheless, the novel’s portrayal of an  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 54 (quoting Laub).

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abusive marriage goes some way towards explaining the inclusion of sexual trauma in recent adaptations and rewritings of the text, and in this respect, The Woman in White clearly lends itself to a reworking as a contemporary trauma narrative. In a later novel, Man and Wife (1870), Collins does offer a representation of the sexually abused woman through his portrayal of the character of Hester Dethridge, a mute, who suffers various abuses at the hands of her husband, culminating, the narrative implies, in rape.14 However, hardly surprising in a mainstream Victorian novel, the nature of the abuse is obscured and it is left to the reader to interpret the true meaning of her confession. In the narrative about her married life she writes, ‘No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shall only say this. I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands’.15 In order, no doubt, to avoid outraging Victorian sensibilities, Collins’s text only hints at what has occurred; thus the narrative masks the rape of Hester by her husband, just as nineteenth-century law masked the abuse of women behind the veil of the sanctity and respectability of marriage. Lisa Surridge reads Hester’s self-imposed muteness, following the murder of her husband, as representative of ‘the unspeakable in the novel’,16 and suggests that ‘Hester’s silence seems to represent society’s inability to listen rather than her literal inability to speak’,17 indicating Victorian society’s tendency to ignore the (sexual) abuse of women for propriety’s sake. It is further significant that what is ‘unspeakable in the novel’, is, as Hester’s confession suggests, also unwriteable: Hester cannot bear to commit the details of her husband’s abuses against her body to paper, even when there is no one to ‘bear witness’ to her narrative. Unlike later protagonists in the neo-Victorian novel, she is unable to work through her traumatic experiences, to find catharsis through writing. Her failure to adequately deal with the trauma she has experienced ultimately results in an extreme reaction against the patriarchal system which she views as responsible for the abuse she has suffered; she murders her husband and later attacks the novel’s villain, Geoffrey 14  Under Victorian law, there is no crime committed in respect of this: marital rape was not criminalised until 1991. 15  Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.  599 (my emphasis). 16  Lisa Surridge, ‘Unspeakable Histories: Hester Dethridge and the Narration of Domestic Violence in Man and Wife’, Victorian Review, 22:2 (1996), p. 105. 17  Ibid., p. 106.

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Delamayn, who subsequently dies. Though Collins cannot fully articulate the sexual trauma endured by Hester, the effects of her inability to process her past are clearly apparent in his narrative: unable to ‘bear witness’ to her own traumatic experience, she enacts a violent revenge on those she perceives as responsible for the systematic abuse of the Victorian wife. While her acts of violence in themselves may represent a form of catharsis, a step towards healing the wounds inflicted by the past, they ultimately inflict further damage on the abused woman: Hester is rendered mute following her attack on her first husband, while as a consequence of her later attack on Geoffrey she is imprisoned in an asylum. While sexual abuse is rendered an ‘unspeakable’ act in Man and Wife, Collins nevertheless succeeds in highlighting the existence of such crimes in Victorian Britain. Furthermore, the narrative is significant in terms of its portrayal of the long-term results of traumatic experience. This represents a significant development from his earlier novel, in which the lasting effects of traumatic experience are underplayed. Although The Woman in White opens with an image of the traumatised woman and subsequently details the traumatic events endured by Laura Fairlie, it concludes with no visible effects of the past apparent in any of the three central characters (Laura, Marian, and Walter), although the past remains something which must be forgotten, suppressed, silenced. Laura does not narrate her own story of traumatic suffering; indeed, she rarely speaks in the novel. When, at the conclusion of the narrative, she threatens to refer to the past, she is silenced by Marian: ‘My darling Walter,’ [Laura] said, ‘must we really account for our boldness in coming here? I am afraid, love, I can only explain it by breaking through our rule, and referring to the past.’ ‘There is not the least necessity for doing anything of the kind,’ said Marian. ‘We can be just as explicit, and much more interesting, by referring to the future.’ (617)

The end of the novel, then, looks to the future, rather than the past: the past is to be forgotten, laid to rest; it cannot be seen to exert an influence on the present. Contemporary trauma narratives, in contrast, suggest the impossibility of this: the past will influence the present, and the future—it will rear its head through bad dreams, flashbacks, and other manifestations. Indeed, Vickroy defines trauma as ‘a response to events so overwhelmingly intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive

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responses and bring lasting psychological disruption’.18 While Anne Catherick undoubtedly suffers ‘lasting psychological disruption’ as a consequence of her treatment at the hands of her mother, Glyde, and Fosco, the image of Laura at the end of the novel as contented wife and mother would appear to call into question the extent to which she endures a significant degree of ongoing trauma as a consequence of her experiences. In The Woman in White, the central characters are able to move beyond their traumatic ordeals and eventually to experience a ‘new sense of freedom from the long oppression of the past’ (611). This happy ending, however, is not granted to the novel’s other key traumatised character, Anne Catherick, though the fulfilment of her desire to be buried with Mrs. Fairlie implies she has achieved in death a freedom and subjectivity which she was frequently denied in life. Like Hester Dethridge in Man and Wife, prior to her death she displays symptoms indicative of trauma, and indeed, in an echo of the questions raised by the representation of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, we might ask whether her mental instability is the consequence of the traumatic treatment to which she is subject at the hands of her mother and Glyde, rather than the reason for her incarceration in the asylum. In the contrast she offers with Laura Fairlie, who in many respects appears to recover from her traumatic experiences, she anticipates the differences between Hester and Anne Silvester— the heroine of Man and Wife. In both narratives, the heroine not only survives her experiences, but is presented as happy and contented at the end of the novel, in contradistinction to the marginalised and, significantly, lower class figures of Anne Catherick and Hester. In this respect, the narratives appear to posit trauma as a more significant threat to the figure of the poorer woman, who lacks the support systems which enable the recovery of the heroines. And yet, Laura’s recovery may not be as dramatic as the narrative conclusion appears to imply. There are some indications in the novel that the events of the past have had a significant effect: the refusal to talk of the past implies that traumatic events have been deliberately suppressed as a means of coping with them. Further, while Laura is forbidden to speak of the past, others speak of it through the construction of the narrative of The Woman in White, collated by Walter after the events in the novel have taken place, a process which might be viewed as a cathartic working through of past traumas, paralleling the idea of writing as catharsis sug Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, p. ix.

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gested by the neo-Victorian novel. However, the exclusion of Laura Fairlie from this process—the character at the centre of the novel’s traumatic events—undermines its effectiveness as a means of processing the consequences of these traumas: not only is she forbidden from speaking of the past, she is further silenced through the presentation of a narrative consisting of multiple accounts with the notable exception of her own. The image of the happy wife at the conclusion of the novel suggests that either she has suffered no lasting effects from her experiences or that she has repressed events to such an extent that there is no outward sign of them. Either way, there is no evidence that she has undergone a process of healing, which the neo-Victorian trauma narrative implies is so important. Collins’s refusal to explicitly acknowledge the long-term effects of traumatic experience in The Woman in White, his representation of sexual abuse in Man and Wife as something unspeakable/unwritable and the broader concealment of sexual abuse within Victorian culture points to one possible reason for the inclusion of narratives of sexual trauma in later adaptations of Collins’s work: an attempt to redress a historical injustice and to highlight the extent to which Victorian literature and culture sought to conceal the abuses that took place. Indeed, the neo-Victorian concern with (sexual) trauma stands in direct contrast to the Victorian refusal to acknowledge the widespread existence of such abuses. The refusal to look to the past, to consider its influence, to work through its traumas, marks a point of distinction with the neo-Victorian project, which is frequently concerned with revisiting, acknowledging, and working through the traumas of the past.

Revisiting/Reimagining Trauma in Adaptations of The Woman in White While allusions to sexual trauma are notable by their absence in The Woman in White,19 such abuses play a central role in recent adaptations of Collins’s novel: in Pirie’s 1997 screen adaptation of the novel, the ‘secret’ which Glyde attempts to protect is his abuse of the young Anne Catherick, rather than his illegitimacy; in Waters’s Fingersmith, Maud is exposed to 19  The implication that Collins should address this issue in his novel is obviously problematic. However, the representation of the abuse of women under a patriarchal system is central to the novel, hence the suggestion that the absence of any reference to sexual abuse is in itself significant.

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pornographic materials from a young age20; in Wilson’s The Dark Clue, Walter’s desire for Marian (evident in the original narrative) culminates in rape; in The Thirteenth Tale, there is a strong suggestion that the three sisters (the twins Adeline and Emmeline and the third sister, whose identity is unknown but who is given the name ‘Shadow’) are the product of incest (the twins) and rape (‘Shadow’); in Newbery’s Set in Stone, the apparently respectable Ernest Farrow is discovered to have repeatedly abused his daughter, Julianna, who subsequently bears a child by him; and in the BBC’s 2018 adaptation of Collins’s novel, Glyde’s abuse of his wife is sexual as well as physical. However, although reworkings of The Woman in White include an insistent focus on sexual trauma, paradoxically, these acts are frequently obscured from the reader/viewer: scenes of explicit sexual violence and abuse are omitted or veiled. While rape and sexual abuse are almost entirely absent from the Victorian novel, neo-Victorian fiction and film frequently references such abuses in no uncertain terms, yet it is often the case that they do not fully represent these traumas. These narratives seek to make visible that which the Victorian novel obscures: the sexual abuse of women in Victorian culture (linked to the notions of repressive patriarchy with which The Woman in White and Collins’s other fiction, is overtly concerned). Paradoxically, however—like Victorian fiction—they struggle to fully articulate the instances of sexual abuse which are so central to the characters’ lives and which have such profound effects. Sexual abuse, in both the present and the Victorian past, remains to some degree unspeakable. Whilst these various neo-Victorian narratives acknowledge it, they nonetheless refuse to fully articulate it. This evasiveness speaks to a continued need to repress sexual trauma, but also potentially to a desire to avoid explicit representations of sexual abuse which might facilitate a deeply problematic reading pleasure.21 The opening scene of David Pirie’s 1997 screen adaptation hints at the trauma which lies at the centre of the secrets revealed. In a deviation from 20  On (sexual) abuse in Fingersmith and in the BBC television adaptation, see Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘“Abominable Pictures”: Neo-Victorianism and the Tyranny of Sexual Taboo’ in Simon Grennan and Laurence Grove, eds., Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism, and Nineteenth-Century Word and Image (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015), pp. 161–162. 21  Marie-Luise Kohlke discusses this issue in relation to child abuse in ‘Perverse Nostalgia: Child Sex Abuse as Trauma Commodity in Neo-Victorian Fiction’ in Elisabeth Wesseling, ed., Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 184–200.

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Collins’s original narrative, and one which places Marian, rather than Walter, centre stage, it is Marian’s narration that opens the film, with the words, ‘The bad dreams always come back again’,22 hinting at the traumatic nature of the character’s experiences. The film includes several significant departures from the original narrative: Gothic elements are privileged; the three sisters all share the same father; sexual trauma forms a key part of the story. This theme is introduced initially by one of the servants in Glyde’s pay, who accuses Walter of sexual harassment, asserting that ‘he tried to make me undress’ (00.32.33). The notion of false accusations of sexual harassment as a source of power is further suggested by Marian forcing the doctor to give her information about the imprisonment of Anne Catherick by threatening to accuse him of improper behaviour. On the one hand, this speaks to a modern concern regarding the legitimacy of accusations of rape and sexual abuse, but it also serves to highlight the powerless position of the Victorian woman, whose body often represented her only limited source of power. The problematic nature of such power is suggested by the inclusion of two characters who suffer rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Glyde: Laura Fairlie, who, unlike her original, is subject to sexual as well as other forms of abuse by her husband, and Anne Catherick, abused by Glyde as a young child. Laura tells Marian: ‘I do not want children—not the way he touches me when he …’. The significant gap here is suggestive of the problems of articulation relating to narratives of (sexual) trauma, though she continues, ‘I never knew men could enjoy the act, even in hatred’ (00.41.50), making clear the nature of her husband’s abuse. Similar problems of articulation pervade Anne Catherick’s story. The doctor responsible for her treatment informs Marian that ‘When she was twelve, she came to see me because she was morally degraded’ (01.31.23) and later revelations confirm that this ‘moral degradation’ was the consequence of the sexual abuse she suffered—emphasising Victorian attitudes towards victims of sexual abuse, who were generally perceived as ‘fallen’ regardless of the circumstances which led to the abuse. Like other victims of sexual attacks, Anne has problems articulating her traumatic experience: she records it in a diary paper, but then buries it in her father’s grave, recalling the buried letter in Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel,—hinting at the unspeakable nature of her experience, and suggesting significant paral22   David Pirie (screenwriter), The Woman in White (Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, 2005), first aired 1997, 00.03.02.

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lels with the character of Hester in Man and Wife, whose inability to articulate her experience of sexual trauma is, as we have seen, symbolised by her self-imposed muteness.23 In Pirie’s adaptation, the literal burying of the narrative of sexual abuse has obvious symbolic connotations: unable to confront the implications of her experience, Anne ‘buries’ the memory of it. The potential healing process offered by articulating her experience through writing is disrupted by her subsequent burial of the narrative, which suggests an element of regression in terms of dealing with sexual trauma: details are recalled only to be repressed again.24 Exhuming the grave some years later in an attempt to discover a missing will, Walter and Marian discover her confession, written when she was twelve years old: ‘My own secret is I have one who comes to my bed at night as a husband’ (01.40.43). The words anticipate those used to describe the abuse of Juliana in Newbery’s Set in Stone (‘her father had been regularly coming to her bedroom during the night. He had—in short, he had used her as a substitute wife’),25 while the burial of the diary paper in the grave of the father emphasises the expectation that the father should/will protect the vulnerable daughter—an expectation which is entirely undermined in both texts.26 Seres’s recent five-part television adaptation for the BBC is, on the whole, faithful to Collins’s original narrative, with relatively few alterations made to the plot.27 Nonetheless, a Guardian review described it as ‘the Victorian classic updated for the #MeToo era’,28 and there are subtle 23  Similar problems of articulation are apparent in relation to Anne Catherick in Tim Kelly’s stage adaptation, Egad, The Woman in White (see Chap. 1). 24  There is an echo here of Freud’s conceptualisation of repression as a repetitive act. See Havi Carel, Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 120–124. 25  Linda Newbery, Set in Stone (London: Random House, 2006), p. 252. 26  In Pirie’s adaptation, Philip Fairlie takes no responsibility for his illegitimate daughter, while in Set in Stone, it is the victim’s father who is the actual perpetrator of the abuse. 27  Changes made include the introduction of Mr Nash, whose interviews with the various characters essentially frame the production; the murder of Fosco by Pesca at the end of the series; and the inclusion of a more spirited Laura, in contrast to Collins’s very passive heroine. Fosco is not the corpulent villain of Collins’s novel, but a younger, more attractive version, whilst questions of historical accuracy emerge with regard to clothing: Marian, for instance, wears divided skirts, which did not appear until the end of the century. On the whole, though, the basic plot remains close to that of Collins’s novel. 28  Sam Wollaston, ‘The Woman in White: the Victorian classic updated for the #MeToo era’, The Guardian (22 April 2018), n.p.

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changes to the details of Laura’s abusive marriage which echo the focus on sexual abuse in other reworkings of Collins’s novel. As with Pirie’s adaptation, the opening foregrounds the story’s emphasis on trauma. The first image is of Anne/Laura in the coffin: a white veil is drawn over her face and the coffin lid closed. Marian, speaking to Mr. Nash, who has been appointed to investigate the circumstances of Laura’s apparent death, is distraught, and experiences a flashback in which she lies in bed screaming—an image suggestive of sexual violence. She tells him: ‘these are dark memories, Mr Nash’.29 Immediately, then, the focus is on the traumatic past and the manner in which it haunts the present. The role of men—and more broadly patriarchal culture—as abusers of women is articulated by Marian here, in an exchange which resonates particularly with the recent revelations about the abuse of (male) power in Hollywood: ‘There is nothing to suggest these men are guilty.’ ‘Of course they’re guilty. How is it men crush women time and time again and go unpunished? If men were held accountable, they’d hang every hour of the day, every day of the year. […] We need to show the world who these men really are’ (1: 00.40–01.08).

Her words are interspersed with a further flashback showing Glyde with his hands around Laura’s neck. The use of flashback, and the introduction of Mr. Nash, who plays a similar role to Walter in Collins’s novel in attempting to collect evidence and collate the story, suggest the need to revisit the past and work through its traumas in order to find a resolution. As in Collins’s novel and other adaptations, the figure of the traumatised woman is centralised in the uncanny doubling of Anne/Laura. Encountering Anne in the middle of the night, Walter asks her where she has come from. Her response—‘I’ve been in hell’ (1: 08.22)—is both a declaration of her traumatised state and an evasion which serves to obscure the details of that trauma. This is similarly evident in her later warning to Walter about Laura’s forthcoming marriage: ‘She will suffer if she marries him […] He has done terrible things, and he will do worse’ (1: 53.06– 54.00). This, though, is as clearly as she is able to articulate Glyde’s treatment of her. When Walter questions her further, she responds with an inarticulate scream: as in previous adaptations, the nature of Glyde’s abuse is rendered unspeakable.  Fiona Seres, The Woman in White (BBC, 2018), 1:00.32.

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Anne’s foreboding at the impending marriage is realised in Laura’s experiences as Glyde’s wife. In Collins’s novel, Glyde neglects his wife and makes it clear he does not care for her, but here his abuse of her is more extreme, and it is strongly implied, sexual as well as physical. Shortly after they return from honeymoon to Blackwater Park, Glyde enters his wife’s bedroom whilst she is partially dressed. Dismissing the maid, he touches her breasts and informs her that he will come to her that night, to which she responds, ‘very well’ (2: 56.17). She is compliant but evidently uncomfortable—a combination which indicates the problematic status of the Victorian wife, unable (legally) to refuse her husband’s advances. Laura’s detachment as Glyde gropes her breasts is further evidence of the trauma she experiences in her marriage. This is rendered more explicit in her description to Marian of her marriage: You have no idea what I’ve had to endure […] At first I thought it was just my inexperience with a man. But when we were in Rome … he … he tried to force himself on me. He dragged me from my bed and he threw me to the floor so violently. And he stared at me with such hatred. And it was not the only time. (3: 22.24–23.09)

She does not elaborate further, and walks off, ignoring Marian when she calls out to her. Again, then, this adaptation both introduces a narrative of sexual abuse and goes some way towards obscuring that abuse. Problems of articulation in relation to sexual trauma are also evident in Wilson’s The Dark Clue. Towards the end of the novel, the character of Walter, who has been engaged to write a biography of the painter, J. M. W. Turner, supposedly driven to madness by his attempts to unravel the details of his subject’s life, rapes Marian.30 The incident is recorded by Marian herself in her diary, but although the events immediately before the rape are detailed in a manner too explicit for the Victorian reader, the rape itself is obscured by a significant gap in her narration of events. At the point at which the rape takes place, Marian’s diary contains her reflections on the event rather than a description of what actually occurs: [W]as not this the hellish parody of something that—despite myself—I had thought of? Had I not sometimes dreamed about it, even; and for a moment after I’d woken fancied I felt him beside me? […] [M]ixed with the horror 30  Significantly the label of madness as a convenient excuse for sexual transgression echoes Victorian medical discourses on women and sexuality.

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and the pain—I cannot deny it—there was a throb of pleasure too. A mockery—an inversion, like a Black Mass—of the joy I had imagined. So it was not enough that Walter should betray me, his wife, his children, himself. I must betray them all, too.31

Hadley, commenting on the elision of the rape from Marian’s narrative, offers the following explanation: ‘Given that the account is taken from Marian’s diary, it is perhaps not surprising that she chooses to omit the terrifying moment and instead ponder Walter’s mental state as he committed the act’.32 However, this explanation overlooks both the significance of this omission in terms of trauma narratives (the repression of traumatic events) and the importance of what replaces her description of the rape: an acknowledgement of her own desire for Walter, and positioning of herself as perpetrator (betrayer) as well as victim in this scenario. On a simplistic level, Wilson’s inclusion of Walter’s rape of Marian, and particularly her admission that she experiences ‘a throb of pleasure’ during the act appears problematic, raising questions about issues of consent which are common in contemporary discourses on rape. However, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma, Marian’s admission links her to images of trauma victims in contemporary culture, where feelings of guilt and responsibility are acknowledged as common amongst victims of sexual abuse. Wilson’s reimagining of Collins’s ‘hero’, Walter Hartright, as a rapist is also potentially problematic in terms of the liberties contemporary writers take with Victorian narratives, although Heilmann and Llewellyn propose that Wilson’s portrayal ‘is but an example of how contemporary writers use nineteenth-century texts as an imaginative repository’, and suggest that Wilson’s reimagining of Turner is ‘more ethically questionable’.33 Wilson reinvents Collins’s character for a contemporary audience, and blurs the boundaries between hero and villain: just as Marian perceives herself as both victim and betrayer, Walter is presented as victim as well as criminal. Nevertheless, the manner in which not only the narrative as a whole, but Marian specifically seeks to absolve him of responsibility for the attack (‘what he had done to me was an act of despair’ [378]) makes for uncomfortable reading. While both Marian and Walter are forced to deal with the personal traumas that result from the latter’s investigations into Turner’s own ‘dark’ life, the narrative, like Collins’s original novel, con James Wilson, The Dark Clue (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 367.  Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 47. 33  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 21. 31 32

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cludes with the suggestion that trauma will be repressed rather than confronted. Marian records in her diary the agreement she makes with Walter regarding what has passed between them: ‘You may talk to me of what happened between us if you will, but neither you nor I will ever mention it to Laura or to any other living soul, and it will never happen again’ (386). The postscript to the narrative refers to ‘the invisible threads that run between us [Marian and Walter]’ (389), indicating that the traumas of the past are not as easy to suppress as Collins’s novel appears to suggest, and yet, the problems of articulation and the desire to suppress the past which are evident in the neo-Victorian novel link it to its Victorian predecessors. Problems of articulation around the issue of sexual abuse are also evident in Newbery’s Set in Stone. Julianna Farrow, the victim of the abuse, like Collins’s Laura Fairlie, is effectively silenced in the narrative. As in Collins’s novel, Newbery’s work presents multiple narrative voices, but Julianna’s is not one of them. The story of her abuse at the hands of her father and the birth of the child fathered by him is not only related by other characters, but comes to them indirectly as well. Samuel Godwin, based on Collins’s Walter Hartright, hears of Ernest Farrow’s abuse of his daughter through his predecessor, Gideon Waring, in whom Julianna has confided. The novel’s other central narrator, Charlotte Agnew, based partially on Anne Catherick, becomes aware of the abuse through a conversation with her predecessor, Eliza Dearly, who has learnt of it from the suicide note of Julianna’s mother, whom Julianna had also told. When Samuel confronts Mr. Farrow about the accusations, he is effectively unable to speak of the act itself, which instead is initially conveyed through significant gaps in his speech: ‘You have—I—I know!’ (276). Realising that his ‘inarticulacy seemed to give [Mr Farrow] relief’ (ibid), Samuel finally manages to convey his meaning: ‘Juliana has been most foully abused, and by yourself –’ (277). Even here, however, the nature of the abuse is veiled, obscured. It is, as Samuel notes, ‘something so repellent that I cannot bring myself to give it words’ (ibid). The gaps in place of explicit articulation of the act itself recall both Pirie’s adaptation and Wilson’s novel, and indeed such instances are a distinctive feature of trauma narratives. As Heilmann and Llewellyn note of Adeline’s inability to articulate her grief at the loss of her sister in The Thirteenth Tale (‘There was a fire … I lost everything … Oh, Emmeline’),34 ‘Miss Winter’s frac Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale, pp. 52–53.

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tured speech reflects the impact of traumatic memory’.35 In all these works, then, significant narrative gaps stand in place of scenes of sexual trauma, raising important questions about neo-Victorian articulations of trauma. These gaps echo those few Victorian texts which do touch on the issue of sexual abuse, but which effectively elide it from the narrative, via a refusal to articulate it, as in Man and Wife, or, as in these neo-Victorian works, in the form of narrative gaps—as in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), in which the reader does not bear witness to Alec’s rape of Tess. While Newbery’s narrative, like Pirie’s and Wilson’s works, struggles to fully articulate the scenes of sexual trauma which drive it, it is, nevertheless, concerned with the long-term effects of traumatic experience. The setting for the main action of the narrative shifts from the 1850s of Collins’s original novel to the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the first chapter dated June 1898. However, the central narrative is framed by a prologue and an epilogue, both dated 1920. This neo-Victorian novel, then, speaks of its belatedness not only through its own date of publication, but also through its emphasis on the time that has passed for the characters of the novel, for whom the Victorian age is constructed as a distant memory. Through this narrative framing, the portrayal of the sexual abuses hidden behind a facade of Victorian respectability is doubly contained: relegated to a past that is distant for both reader and narrators. In its conclusion, Newbery’s novel shifts the focus to the aftermath of the war and presents an image of the traumatised soldier, allowing for a shift in emphasis, a displacement even, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma. The image that closes the novel is not of the traumatised victim of sexual abuse, but the shell-shocked soldier traumatised by war, though it is significant that the victim of shell-shock is also the product of an incestuous and sexually abusive relationship: the son of Julianna and her father. There is a parallel here with the simile Marian employs in the conclusion to The Dark Clue, in which she refers to the ‘shared pain’ she and Walter experience, ‘such as soldiers may feel who have endured a battle together’ (389). These allusions to war in the conclusion of the two novels and the implication that the personal trauma resulting from sexual abuse is in some way comparable to the broader traumas of war, suggests the significance of both private and public, individual and societal trauma as a point of return for the neo-Victorian project. The sensation novel is largely concerned  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 49.

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with narratives of personal, individual trauma, but the concealment of domestic and sexual abuse in Victorian culture suggests there is a wider discourse beyond that of the individual’s experience that requires revisiting. The inclusion of sexual trauma in these narratives reflects contemporary concerns and anxieties, but the replication of Victorian narrative conventions enables both displacement and closure. As in the typical Victorian novel, the perpetrators of wrongdoing—with the significant exception of Wilson’s Walter in The Dark Clue—are suitably punished: Julianna’s father in Set in Stone is drowned, while in Pirie’s version, as in Collins’s original narrative, Glyde dies in a fire. In both these later texts, however, the heroine is responsible for the villain’s death: in Pirie’s adaptation, Marian acts the role of avenging angel, deliberately locking Glyde in the burning building, effectively killing the figure of the rapist in an act of vigilante justice, while in Set in Stone, Charlotte refuses to allow Mr. Farrow, who has jumped into the lake in an effort to save his daughters, into the boat and he subsequently drowns. Significantly, both characters seek to absolve themselves of full responsibility for the abusers’ deaths: Marian’s act of revenge is undermined by her realisation that there is no other way out, implying that she did not mean to kill him, while Charlotte tells Samuel, ‘I did not mean to kill him, it was not my intention’ (290). Though Pirie and Newbery ensure that justice is done—that the good survive and the wicked are punished—it cannot, it seems, come at the expense of undermining the characters’ ‘goodness’. Seres’s depiction of Glyde’s death in the 2018 BBC adaptation remains relatively true to Collins’s original narrative: Glyde is trapped in the church as a consequence of his own actions and Walter attempts to save him (despite his vested interest in the death of the husband of the woman he loves). Nonetheless, Laura’s reaction suggests a degree of guilt: ‘Oh God, forgive me! I wished him dead, I did, many times […] I hope he is forgiven. I hope he knows that I forgive him’ (5: 30.38–52). Here, it seems, Glyde’s death is rendered more explicitly cathartic in terms of the working through of Laura’s traumatic marital experiences: the guilt she briefly expresses contrasts with the acknowledgement she makes of his abuse of her via her forgiveness. These returns to a typical Victorian ‘ending’ counteract the suggestion that trauma narratives rarely reach the neat, conclusive ending that the Victorian ­ novel suggests. There are striking similarities between contemporary adaptations of The Woman in White in terms of their insistent focus on trauma as part of their reworking of Collins’s novel. Like the original narrative, all of these texts

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are concerned with family secrets and hidden identities, but they also represent (even as they obscure) what remains largely hidden in the Victorian novel—incest, sexual abuse, suicide—and portray the lasting effects of these traumatic legacies. In mimicking the structure of The Woman in White, with its multiple narrators and emphasis on storytelling as ‘truth’, these narratives articulate a desire to reveal the ‘truth’ about the Victorian family and the possible abuses concealed therein. Marian’s final words in Pirie’s version suggest that the sisters’ traumatic experiences have lasting effects, in contrast to Collins’s narrative—‘I have one waking prayer—let it be over’—implying that the effects of sexual trauma continue to permeate the lives of the survivors and those close to them. These adaptations also suggest the importance of telling the ‘truth’ as a form of catharsis through which trauma and its effects can be processed and the ghosts of the past laid to rest. The introduction of narratives of sexual trauma into reworkings of Collins’s novel reflects a central concern of society today, but simultaneously suggests significant parallels with Victorian literature and culture: problems of articulation persist in contemporary narratives of sexual trauma, and indeed the displacement of these narratives into a Victorian setting provides further evidence of this. These works also reflect broader trends within neo-Victorianism and specifically within the cultural afterlives of the sensation novel. As in the work of Collins, Braddon et al., trauma frequently plays a pivotal role in adaptations and reimaginings of sensation fiction. This trauma is frequently focused on the individual or the family and thus is rendered distinct from those wider historical traumas—of Empire, for instance—which neo-Victorian fiction frequently seeks to address. Nonetheless, the central figures of the traumatised woman in both sensation and neo-sensation narratives speak not only to a desire to address the hidden traumas of the past (the obscuring of sexual abuse in Victorian culture) but also to the traumatic continuities between past and present.

References Carel, Havi. 2006. Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Collins, Wilkie. 1998. Man and Wife. 1870; Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. The Woman in White. 1860; Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2008. Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-­ Victorian Encounter. Neo-Victorian Studies 1 (1): 1–18.

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———. 2015. “Abominable Pictures”: Neo-Victorianism and the Tyranny of Sexual Taboo. In Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism, and Nineteenth-Century Word and Image, ed. Simon Grennan and Laurence Grove, 151–174. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2018. Perverse Nostalgia: Child Sex Abuse as Trauma Commodity in Neo-Victorian Fiction. In Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture, ed. Elisabeth Wesseling, 184–200. Abingdon: Routledge. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutelben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam: Rodopi. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Newbery, Linda. 2006. Set in Stone. London: Random House. Pirie, David. [screenwriter]. 1997; The Woman in White. Boston, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation, 2005. Seres, Fiona. [screenwriter]. 2018. The Woman in White. BBC. Setterfield, Diane. 2006. The Thirteenth Tale. London: Orion. Surridge, Lisa. 1996. Unspeakable Histories: Hester Dethridge and the Narration of Domestic Violence in Man and Wife. Victorian Review 22 (2): 102–126. Vickroy, Laurie. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Wilson, James. 2001. The Dark Clue. London: Faber & Faber. Wollaston, Sam. 2018. The Woman in White: The Victorian Classic Updated for the #MeToo Era. The Guardian, April 22. Wood, Mrs Henry. 2008. East Lynne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Excavating the Victorians: Digging Up the Past

Tracey Chevalier’s neo-Victorian bio-fiction, Remarkable Creatures (2009), details Mary Anning and her brother Joseph’s sensational discovery of the fossilised remains of an ichthyosaur in the cliffs at Lyme Regis in 1811.1 The skull is discovered first and removed in three parts; the body is found some months later. After painstaking reconstruction, the creature is sold and subsequently displayed at William Bullock’s Museum of Curiosities in London. When fellow fossil-hunter Elizabeth Philpot views the display, she discovers alterations have been made to the carefully preserved specimen: the new owners have rearranged the bones so the paddles had clear forms, stacked the vertebrae in a straight line, and even added what were probably plaster of Paris ribs added where some had gone missing. Worse, they’d put a waistcoat around its chest, with the paddles sticking out of the arm holes, and perched an oversize monocle by one of its prominent eyes. Near its snout was spread a tempting array of animals a crocodile might feed on: rabbits, frogs, fish.2 1  The setting of the novel is largely pre-Victorian, so Chevalier’s novel fits the broadest definition of neo-Victorianism, as ‘literature re-imagining and engaging the nineteenth century’—not necessarily specific to the exact dates of the Victorian period (Kohlke and Gutleben, eds, ‘Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century’, NeoVictorian Tropes of Trauma, p. 10). 2  Tracey Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures (London: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 119–120.

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Further compounding this misconstruction of the creature, the sign next to the display reads: Stone Crocodile Found by Henry Hoste Henley In the wilds of Dorsetshire (120)

Even as the ichthyosaur provides clues to the origins of life on Earth, the origins of its discovery are obscured, and it is misidentified as something other than what it is (a type of crocodilian rather than an extinct species). The fragmentation of the creature suggests the fragmented nature of our understanding of history—not only ancient history, but of the Victorian era as well: evidence must be painstakingly pieced together, but the resulting restoration is susceptible to misconstruction. The reconstruction of the ichthyosaur by Bullock is a deliberately sensational misconstruction and presents an analogy for the sensational reconstruction/misconstruction of the Victorian period in contemporary literature and culture.3 Despite attempts to create a coherent ‘whole’, it is only ever partial. Fossils are by their nature partial, incomplete: those attempting to interpret them need to put flesh on the bones. This serves as a metaphor for the (Victorian) past and thus provides some explanation for the historical tropes which populate neo-Victorian, and specifically neo-sensation fiction, which this chapter explores—in particular, via a critical interrogation of representations of archaeology in popular historical fiction, including Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969) and Elizabeth Peabody’s Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975). The interest in nineteenth-century encounters with deep time in Remarkable Creatures reflects a broader concern in neo-Victorian fiction. Other examples of neo-Victorian narratives engaging with this issue include Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (like Chevalier’s novel, set partially in Lyme Regis), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988; Oscar’s father collects fossils), Byatt’s Possession (in which Ash and LaMotte go fossil hunting together), Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), Tom Holland’s The Bonehunter (2001), Hardinge’s The Lie Tree, and Sarah 3  Whilst Remarkable Creatures provides a useful illustration of the effectiveness of the trope of palaeontology in neo-Victorian fiction, it cannot accurately be classed as a neo-sensation novel.

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Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016). Byatt, in On Histories and Stories (2000), notes that in historical novels engaging with the nineteenth century, ‘the Victorian hero’s encounter with a fossilized creature, representing deep time’ has become ‘[a] regular topos, almost a cliché’.4 The reasons behind the neo-Victorian interest in Victorian palaeontology are not difficult to conjecture: nineteenth-century developments in this field forced a reconsideration of Victorian understandings of the world, creation, and human origins. With its persistent focus on questions of identity, the neo-­Victorian novel’s engagement with these issues is unsurprising. As John Glendening notes, ‘fossils called into question the significance and future of humans’:5 consequently, they speak to both Victorian and contemporary anxieties about identity, origins, the past, and the future. The prevalence of this trope also reflects a broader neo-Victorian interest in archaeology and history, which encompasses historical artefacts, the processes of historical discovery (literally digging up the past), and a consideration of various ancient peoples and civilisations. The tropes of palaeontology, archaeology, and historical exploration tend to distinguish the neo-Victorian novel from its nineteenth-century forebears, few of which explore in any detail the geological and archaeological discoveries that were changing human understanding of the history of the world in the nineteenth century. The dinosaur trope, in particular, does not become popular until the publication of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in 1912, followed by Edgar Rice Burrough’s works later in the same decade. Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) is one of only a few Victorian novels to engage with the subject, although we find passing references to the Earth’s prehistoric past in Victorian works including Dickens’s Bleak House (1853; ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborne Hill’)6 and Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873; in which Henry Knight, hanging precariously off a cliff, is greeted by the sight of ‘one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites’ staring back at him).7 Paleontological discoveries do not sit comfortably with the  A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 72.  John Glendening, Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels: Eye of the Ichthyosaur (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 57. 6  Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 3. 7  Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 213. 4 5

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c­ entral concerns of the Victorian novel, which tends to explore origins and identity from a different, individual perspective, or perhaps it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the full implications of nineteenth-century fossil discoveries become clear. The sensation novel evinces a concern with history, with the effects of the past on the present, but it is recent, family history that is the focus of anxiety. Few sensation novels engage in any significant way with the subject of (distant) history and archaeology. Historical artefacts feature in some of Collins’s novels: Frederick Fairlie in The Woman in White collects coins, whilst a colonial artefact (the Indian diamond) plays a central role in The Moonstone. Sites of archaeological interest feature in some of Rider Haggard’s later sensation and colonial adventure fiction, including King Solomon’s Mines (1885), and Amelia Edwards published articles on Egyptology and archaeology, as well as writing sensation novels.8 Edwards’s Barbara’s History (1864)9 references deep history via the well-travelled hero, Hugh Farquhar, and his interest in palaeontology and the history of the earth. He tells the eponymous heroine: ‘Fossilized remains, indicative of torrid heats, are found underlying the upper strata of our northern lands, and the beds of many European rivers are paved with the ones of elephants and other “very strange beasts”’.10 He is reflecting here on the earth’s history and the implications of climate change, particularly for humankind. The reference to deep time and the possibilities of change (including degeneration) can be seen as a broader reflection of the novel’s concern with questions of identity, but it is a minor intervention and does not form a substantial part of the narrative. Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial (1864) engages in a more sustained manner with geology and deep time (Yonge herself had an interest in fossil collecting).11 Mia Chen has argued that Yonge, who was extremely religious, successfully reconciles theories of deep time with Christian belief in The Trial, and so assuages Victorian anxieties around this issue. More pertinent to this study is the use Yonge makes of this trope, which anticipates 8  Amelia Edwards is a possible influence on Peters’s Amelia Peabody. See Elizabeth Steere, ‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts: The Amelia Peabody Mystery Series’, NeoVictorian Studies, 10:2 (2018), pp. 19–20. 9  Maunder includes Barbara’s History in his ‘Bibliography of Sensation Fiction’ but its engagement with the genre is somewhat ambiguous. See Anne-Marie Beller, ‘Amelia B. Edwards’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, pp. 349–360. 10  Amelia Edwards, Barbara’s History, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1864), p. 271. 11  See Mia Chen, ‘“To Face Apparent Discrepancies with Revelation”: Examining the Fossil Record in Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial’, Women’s Writing, 17:2, p. 149.

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later neo-Victorian texts. As Chen’s analysis makes clear: ‘Just as the traces of prehistoric sea life can survive for millions of years, other kinds of traces survive to reveal long-hidden truths’.12 This geological trace, which reveals secrets of the earth’s history, parallels those clues which surface to reveal hidden crimes and secrets from an individual’s past. Thus, though rarely used in the Victorian genre, geological and archaeological tropes appear particularly suitable as a symbol for the central concerns of (neo-)sensation fiction. In Excavating Victorians (2009), Virginia Zimmerman writes: ‘Through geology—and archaeology […]—scientists fashioned narratives out of fragmented remains. The evidence they excavated revealed at once the extraordinary depth of time and the awesome ability of the writer to measure time and to craft its story’.13 This process of recovering evidence and producing narratives based around that evidence is also the task of the historian, and, by degrees, the historical novelist. The neoVictorian writer, then, is challenged with taking the measure of the Victorian age and crafting its story, and the geological/ archaeological trope draws attention to this process. Just as ‘the scientist […] interprets the traces of the past writ on the landscape’,14 the historian/neo-Victorian novelist interprets the traces writ on the texts of the past and constructs a narrative around it. The Victorian text, then, becomes analogous with the historical artefact, unearthed from the depths of the Earth: both represent Paul Ricouer’s ‘trace’, the past and the present, and stories are crafted around these material and textual traces. As Rosario Arias has noted in her discussion of the trace in neo-Victorianism, ‘the Victorians are today made present and visible through vestiges, fragments, and ruins’.15 Zimmerman’s work also considers the significance of the trace, though in relation to Victorian rather than neo-Victorian culture, but in doing so emphasising the parallels between the two: ‘[T]he trace is an object in its own right, not simply an indicator of the current absence of another object, and it exists in the present. In its dual function as a sign of the past and a thing of the present, the trace seems to exist outside  Chen, ‘To Face Apparent Discrepancies with Revelation’, p. 363.  Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2009), p. 2. 14  Ibid. 15  Rosario Arias, ‘Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction’ in Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss, eds., Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 111. 12 13

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time or across all time’.16 Zimmerman observes that ‘It is from his or her position grounded in the present that the geologist or archaeologist examines fossils or ruins and draws conclusions about the past’,17 and the neo-Victorian novelist performs a similar role: writing of the past from the perspective of the present, and constructing a narrative that is of both past and present. The presence of the Victorians—their streets, parks, buildings, objects, books, and materials—and their relatively recent ‘passing’, means they are not subject, by and large, to archaeological investigation (there are some exceptions to this—the archaeological investigation into Manchester’s nineteenth-century slum areas, for example).18 They are, then, with their own prevailing interest in archaeological exploration, not part of that past which is dug up, unearthed, but, like us, the ones doing the digging. While the archaeological trope in neo-Victorian fiction presents an obvious metaphor for the neo-Victorian project (excavating and reconstructing the past), it also highlights the similarities between us and them, rather than placing them under the historical microscope, subjecting them to archaeological investigation. The Victorian interest in the ancient past puts them on a path towards a modern understanding of the universe—in contrast to outdated (religious) views of the age of the earth and the process of creation that marks earlier periods. Again, then, geological and archaeological interventions in neo-Victorian fiction serve to highlight the similarities between the Victorians and ourselves. However, this trope simultaneously stands as a warning about the potential misinterpretation and misconstruction of the Victorian period, as a consequence of the historian’s (and the novelist’s) reconstruction of the past based on its surviving traces and objects, and so simultaneously highlights the differences between Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction. The archaeological object in the neo-Victorian novel suggests a past which is tangible: the notion of touching something from the past evokes the idea of a physical link with that past. As Arias observes, ‘Neo-Victorian fiction […] offers ample space to bridge the gap between the (Victorian) past and the present through the trope of excavation and fossil creatures’.19  Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 10.  Ibid., p. 3. 18  See Mike Pitts, ‘Unearthing Manchester’s Victorian Slums’, The Guardian (28 August 2009), n.p. 19  Arias, ‘Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction’, p. 114. 16 17

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Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss discuss the ‘dual relationships of continuity and difference (or revisitation) between “then” and “now”’ in their work on neo-Victorian literature and culture. They argue that neo-Victorian negotiations of historical difference are culturally operative in today’s self-fashionings and identity constructions as the Victorian age, due to its historical proximity and its medial, technological, political or cultural after-effects in the twenty-first century, serves like no other era as an imaginary point of origin and provides a sense of permanence in a globalised society subject to changes of increasing pace[.]20

The archaeological trope serves as an emblem for this ‘dual relationship of continuity and difference’: representations of the ancient past emphasise our proximity, our ‘closeness’ to the Victorians, but the insistent emphasis on history simultaneously serves to highlight the Victorian age as one of many historical epochs, on which the present looks back. Discussing the example of a fossilised footprint, Zimmerman notes: ‘With the passage of time, the action of water and wind has caused the footprint to erode; its edges become less distinct and its depth diminishes. Thus, the footprint that we observe in the present is a function of the original action and also the passage of time’.21 The Victorian age functions in a similar fashion to the ‘footprint’. Over a hundred years have passed since its close: it is beginning to erode (no longer part of living memory); thus, attempts to understand and (re)imagine it through its narratives and objects need to take account of this erosion and its effects.

Neo-Sensational Excavations Allusions to deep time appear particularly characteristic of neo-Victorian literary fiction—those narratives which meet Linda Hutcheon’s definition of ‘historiographic metafiction’ and engage self-consciously with Victorian literature and culture. However, historical and archaeological explorations are also recurring motifs in neo-Victorian popular fiction, echoing Victorian interests in and appropriation of other ‘ages’. The nineteenth century was a period marked by historical investigation and an obsessive focus on the past (signified by the cult of medievalism) as well as a  Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.  Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 10.

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­ urgeoning interest in archaeology and palaeontology. Examples of these b tropes in neo-sensation fiction are found in Victoria Holt’s The Shivering Sands, Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody series (1975–2010), Robin Paige’s Death at Bishop’s Keep (1994), Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily series, Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre (2007), and Nick Rennison’s Carver’s Quest (2013), amongst other works. They serve not only to illustrate the potential pitfalls of the neo-Victorian project (the possibility of misconstruing or misrepresenting the past), but paradoxically to emphasise both the similarities and the differences between the Victorian age and our own. Their persistent reoccurrence in popular historical fiction speaks to a level of self-conscious engagement at odds with some neo-Victorian critical constructions of this type of fiction, whilst at the same time offering an example of a key trope employed in those works indebted to the Victorian sensation novel. Explorations of history within a Victorian setting serve to distinguish the neo-sensation novel from most of its Victorian predecessors, which were predominantly concerned with contemporary events. At the same time, the interest in the buried ‘secrets’ of the past (as the chapter on the Gothic indicates) clearly echoes the sensation novel’s central concerns. These secrets take a variety of forms: hidden or suppressed wills, altered identities, the burial of bodies under false names, or the concealing of evidence—the clues buried in the sand in The Moonstone, for instance. The discovery or recovery of these secrets parallels the archaeological process. This is invoked by the language employed by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas in her analysis of the genre’s engagement with the Gothic: [S]ensation writers’ Gothic revisions often suggest that the crimes of the past must be dug up to resurrect the truth. The truth lies beyond the smooth surface of the skin—or of the earth—a buried manuscript waiting to be discovered and deciphered […] [T]he search for buried texts in sensation novels aligns the quest for the secret with a search for origins […] The secret must be exhumed’. 22

The process of uncovering the buried secret in the sensation novel is often undertaken by the character of the detective—whether amateur or professional. This figure, with the central aim of uncovering secrets from the 22  Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Sensation Fiction: A Peep Behind the Veil’ in Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds., The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, pp. 31, 33, my emphasis.

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past, anticipates the role of the archaeologist-detective in the neo-­sensation novel, including in Peters’s Amelia Peabody series, and this in turn echoes a nineteenth-century literary trope.23 As Talairach-Vielmas notes of the Victorian sensation novel, ‘the detectives’ ‘excavating’ activities convincingly trope modern fears directly linked to research into the history of the earth and the place of man in that history. […] [T]he narratives […] highlight man’s desperate attempt at connecting the body to a history’.24 The attempt to connect narrative to history is central in the neo-sensation novel, and the broader neo-Victorian project: not only through the obvious interrelation of present and (Victorian) past, but more specifically through the archaeological trope which further draws the reader’s attention to ideas of connectivity between past and present. While the sensation novel and neo-sensation novel are rendered distinct by the latter’s participation in the genre of historical fiction,25 in contradistinction to the former with its emphasis very much on the present and the very recent past, modern readers are engaged in a similar process in reading both genres: historically distant from both the contemporary Victorian setting of the sensation novel and the historical setting of the neo-­Victorian novel. Victorian narratives, then, are in a sense transmuted into historical fictions for modern readers, rendering the distinction between Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction blurred. We create stories around the discoveries of the past, which themselves can only produce a partial version of events. These narratives frequently evoke images of an almost physical relationship with the past, via the handling of its objects, and this notion of physically touching something which belongs to the past renders the relationship a tangible one. The element of serendipity in terms of archaeological discoveries—most objects are lost to time and decay but some random few survive for future generations—suggests the breakdown of hierarchies: 23  Lawrence Frank explores at length the relationship between Victorian detective fiction and various developing scientific discourses, including geology, palaeontology, and archaeology, in Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Archaeologists also feature in several of Agatha Christie’s novels, including Death on the Nile (1937), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), and They Came to Baghdad (1951), possibly influenced by Christie’s husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. 24  Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Sensation Fiction’, p. 34. 25  Some sensation novelists produced historical novels—notably Charles Reade (The Cloister and the Hearth [1861]) and Collins (Antonina [1850])—but these cannot be considered sensation novels.

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which objects survive is not determined by their value (financial, cultural, or intellectual), and this suggests a particularly apt metaphor for the neo-­ sensation novel. Neo-Victorian critical discourses point to Victorian sensation fiction’s survival in ‘respectable’ literary fiction, which obscures its disreputable popular roots, but its legacy is just as—if not more—evident in popular historical fiction. Narratives themselves, then, function as objects from the past, even as they rewrite that past, and, like the artefacts unearthed from the ground, they represent both ‘high’ and ‘low’ (literary and popular) culture: their survival is a fact, though their value is culturally determined. The sensation novel’s legacy in contemporary popular fiction parallels the experience of the working-class Mary Anning, whose contribution to the fields of palaeontology was for a long time obscured by those male, middle- and upper-class scientists who took her discoveries and wrote her out of the scientific discourse. In a similar manner, the legacy of sensation fiction in popular culture has been largely obscured in neo-Victorian critical discourses. Whilst both neo-Victorian literary and popular fiction repeatedly return to archaeological tropes and feature protagonists engaged in the unearthing of history, there is no consensus in terms of the period of history which forms the subject of these investigations. As noted above, literary neo-­ Victorian fiction in particular seems to exhibit a concern with deep time— with geology, palaeontology, and the ancient creatures who once walked the earth—the effect of which is to emphasise our comparative closeness to the Victorians: ‘traces of past life simultaneously reveal the distance and closeness of the past to contemporary experience’.26 Neo-sensation fiction tends to focus more on ancient civilisations: Alexander’s Lady Emily series and Rennison’s Carver’s Quest are concerned with ancient Greek artefacts, narratives, and history; Peters’s Amelia Peabody series focuses on Egyptology, reflecting the author’s own interest27; whilst the Roman empire, and particularly Roman Britain, is the site of the archaeological concern in Holt’s Shivering Sands. This focus on ancient civilisations on the one hand mirrors Victorian interests: all three of these ancient civilisa Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 20.  Peters published works on ancient Egypt under her real name Barbara Mertz. Steere comments on the significance of this in relation to the Amelia Peabody series, suggesting that ‘Through the oppression Peabody faces as a Victorian woman in Egyptology, Mertz draws a parallel to the sexism she experienced herself as an Egyptologist in academia in the midtwentieth century’ (Steere, ‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts’, p. 1). 26 27

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tions were the subject of extensive investigation in the nineteenth century. Egypt and its history were linked to Britain’s ongoing imperial project, which in various ways looked to ancient Rome as both an example and a warning. Both Rome and Greece—but particularly the former—were invoked in fictional, philosophical, and political discourses, and clear resonances were identified with Victorian culture. Simon Goldhill observes that Victorian culture was obsessed with the classical past, as nineteenth-century self-consciousness about its own moment in history combined with an idealism focused on the glories of Greece and the splendor of Rome to make classical antiquity a deeply privileged and deeply contested arena for cultural (self-)expression’.28

The association made here between ancient civilisations and Victorian culture’s ‘self-consciousness’ in terms of its own historical moment is reminiscent of neo-Victorian critical discourses and the emphasis on ‘self-conscious engagement’ with the Victorian past, suggesting a parallel between Victorian evocations of the ancient world, and contemporary returns to the nineteenth century. In both cases, this implies, the past may be able to teach us something about the present, as well as providing a mirror in which both culture and civilisation are reflected. There is, then, a certain irony in the invocation of these ancient civilisations—bastions of cultural excellence—in neo-sensation popular fiction, which lays no claims to cultural greatness. Nonetheless, in recalling the continuities between ancient civilisations and Victorian Britain, they suggest the continuities between the contemporary age and the nineteenth century. For all their interest in these ancient civilisations, however, the Victorians were notorious for plundering cultural objects to which they had no (or at least questionable) moral rights. As Zimmerman notes: many artefacts were only discovered because of the total disregard for local peoples and customs, were removed from their sites because of assumptions of cultural superiority, and were transported to England where they were reinterpreted in their new context with little to no thought of the living heirs of the cultures that crafted the vaunted remains.29 28  Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 1. See also Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Hoboken: Wiley, 1997). 29  Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, pp. 11–12.

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The archaeological trope in neo-Victorian fiction is closely associated with questions of colonisation and imperialism. This, too, suggests a potential metaphor for the (albeit blurred) differences between neo-Victorian literary and neo-sensation popular fiction. If the former seeks to offer some form of historical reparation via its engagement with Victorian history (whilst at the same time asserting its ‘cultural superiority’), the latter might be seen as more of a ‘plunderer’ of Victorian literature and culture: reclaiming those elements which serve its purpose, whilst ignoring the nuances and detail which inform those ‘self-consciously engaged’ narratives, ‘transporting’ the Victorian age itself into a ‘new context’. Ironically, though, this reinforces popular historical fiction’s association with Victorian cultural and imperial attitudes: just as ancient civilisations were invoked to fit a particular narrative constructed by the Victorians (about themselves and their history), so too does the neo-sensation novel employ those aspects of Victorian culture which suit its own agenda. These narratives exhibit their relationship to the Victorian sensation novel in multiple and various ways: through implicit and explicit references, the intertexts which influence and inform them, and via the conventions typically associated with the genre: the focus on family secrets, the use of Gothic sensationalism, the depiction of transgressive heroines and so forth. The portrayal of heroines—particularly those involved in the narrative’s historical investigations—is itself significant, suggesting a reclamation of history which again resonates with the experience of Mary Anning, and the recognition of her significance in contemporary historical and fictional discourses, in contrast to her erasure from Victorian scientific discourses. In the cases of Paige, Peters, and Holt, both their prolific outputs and use of pseudonyms, like Emily Brightwell (discussed in Chap. 3), suggest a comparison with Braddon. All three published in excess of fifty novels (Holt close to 200), under various names (Holt, real name Eleanor Hibbert, published under a total of eight different names; Peters [Barbara Mertz] under three; and Paige [Susan Wittig Albert] also under three— with Paige the pseudonym for novels co-authored with her husband Bill Albert).30 These parallels reinforce the notion of the authors as the sensational heirs of Braddon and her contemporaries and point to their position as novelists of popular fiction. Whilst this is undoubtedly the case, both 30  Holt’s various pseudonyms included Elbur Ford, Jean Plaidy, and Kathleen Kellow. Mertz published under her own name and Barbara Michaels, as well as Peters. Albert has also published under her own name, and as Paige and Carolyn Keene.

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Wittig Albert and Mertz obtained PhDs, with the former working as an English academic, suggesting that, though prolific, their fiction is nonetheless informed by a firm understanding of the period represented. Steere notes that Peters’s Amelia Peabody books are ‘intelligently written and meticulously researched’.31 To this end, the line between neo-Victorian literary fiction and ‘historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’ once again becomes blurred. Holt’s popularity in particular echoes that of Braddon and Wood in the nineteenth century: she has sold over 100 million copies of her books and in the late 1980s was amongst the top ten most borrowed authors from British libraries.32 This is important not merely as an echo of the success of the Victorian sensation novel, but, more significantly, because it evidences a mass cultural engagement with the Victorian period via those of her works set in the nineteenth century. This type of engagement may be at odds with the intellectual relationship envisioned by neo-Victorian scholars between contemporary and Victorian culture, but it represents a crucial aspect of the afterlife of the period. Popular fiction, then, plays as significant a role as literary fiction in unearthing the secrets of the past, as its use of the archaeological trope demonstrates. This trope is employed to various effects in neo-sensation popular fiction, but frequently draws attention to the blurred lines between, or shared commonalities of, different historical epochs. The beginning of Paige’s Death at Bishop’s Keep is a case in point. It is the first of twelve novels in Paige’s Victorian Mystery series, published between 1994 and 2006, and set between the 1890s and the early twentieth century. They fall broadly into the historical detective genre and, like other neo-­sensation detective novels, feature the figure of the female detective in the (American) protagonist Kate Ardleigh Sheridan, who is also the author of several sensational serial stories. In the opening to this first novel, which persistently references Victorian sensation fiction and penny dreadfuls, the body of a murdered man is discovered at the site of an archaeological dig. The image of the recently deceased man at the location of an investigation into the different strata of the past is oxymoronic—juxtaposing images of past and present (in terms of the novel’s setting), but also of past and past (the various historical strata and the Victorian past). This is further suggested by the presence of what appears to be an ancient Egyptian artefact—a ‘gold  Steere, ‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts’, p. 2.  See Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (2nd edition; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 364. 31 32

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ring in the shape of a scarab’33—on the dead man’s finger. Multiple pasts, then, intersect at this single site. This notion of temporal convergence is reinforced by the presence of a photographer, who signifies Victorian modernity, and whose presence alerts us to the chronological closeness, and the parallels, between the Victorians and ourselves—reinforced by the reference to the more distant past via the archaeological dig. The image of the recently deceased man in the trench which conceals artefacts from the distant past suggests a sense of ‘unbelonging’, similar to that evoked by the neo-Victorian novel, which replicates, imitates Victorian narratives but remains distinct from those narratives in a myriad of (un)subtle ways, thus imposing a sense of the present onto the Victorian past. The scene also suggests contamination: the archaeological site is literally contaminated by the presence of the (Victorian) present: ‘The floor of the excavation, onto which [the body] had fallen facedown was blood-soaked’ (18). Archaeology is not central to the plot of the novel, but this early image, which introduces the reader to Victorian England, is suggestive in terms of the neo-­ Victorian project. In introducing the present to the past through neo-Victorian narratives, is this past more fully realised, understood, or contaminated, resulting in a false impression based on desires for a particular type of Victorian past? Sally Shuttleworth comments of the neo-­ Victorian genre: ‘with much of this material there remains the danger that in creating an atmospheric, re-imagined Victorian age, [neo-Victorian novels] actively undermine our attempts to understand, historically, the culture of the nineteenth century and its relations to our own’.34 The image of the body in the trench, of the present imposing on and contaminating the past, symbolises that process of undermining and distortion, while the prevalence of archaeology and historical artefacts in the neo-­sensation novel reinforces the genre’s concern with multiple and entangled pasts.

Archaeology and Cultural Value in Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975) Similar subtexts emerge from a reading of the more fully developed archaeological tropes in Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first in Peters’s Amelia Peabody series. Set in 1884–1885, it is influenced by—and  Robin Paige, Death at Bishop’s Keep (New York: Avon Books, 1998), p. 18.  Sally Shuttleworth, ‘From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond’, in BoehmSchnitker and Gruss, eds., Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 190. 33 34

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­ arodies—not only the sensation novel,35 but also late-Victorian colonial p adventure fiction (via its focus on archaeological adventures in foreign lands),36 and the New Woman novel (signified by its late-Victorian feminist heroine with a penchant for rational dress,37 although the protagonist’s masculine features also recall Collins’s Marian Halcombe).38 Peters herself acknowledged the narrative’s indebtedness to the sensation novel, noting that in Crocodile on the Sandbank, she ‘took pleasure in borrowing a number of devices from nineteenth-century sensational fiction’, whilst later books in the series draw liberally on ‘Doyle, Collins, and other masters of the genre’.39 Like one of the typical iterations of the sensation heroine, Amelia is orphaned (albeit at the age of thirty-two) by the death of her father at the start of the novel and inherits his substantial fortune. Unlike her sensational predecessors, she has a taste for both travel and Egyptology, and, along with her companion Evelyn Barton-Forbes (who, having been abandoned by her Italian lover, Alberto, following their elopement, represents another incarnation of the sensation heroine), travels to Egypt and becomes embroiled in an excavation in Amarna, which is seemingly haunted by the figure of an Egyptian mummy. The focus on adventures in foreign lands, as well as the narrative’s parodic tone, distinguish it from the Victorian sensation novel, though the latter marks it out as an example of neo-sensation fiction as it gently mocks its Victorian antecedents. However, it also includes subplots focused on both family drama ­(including 35  Steere also notes the series’ indebtedness to the sensation novel (‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts’, p. 1), citing Collins and Haggard as particular influences (ibid., p. 3). 36  The narrative makes explicit reference to ‘Rider Haggard’s tales’ (Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank [London: Constable & Robinson, 2006], p. 138)—indeed, he is referenced three times in the novel. 37  She complains about ‘the abominable garments forced on women by the decrees of fashion’ (238). 38  She describes herself thus: ‘My nose is too large, my mouth is too wide, and the shape of my chin is positively masculine’ (5). The description seems to parody Victorian physiognomical heroine description, with unfeminine features often indicating an unconventional heroine. 39  Barbara Mertz, MPM: A Bulletin on the Doings and Undoings of Barbara Mertz/Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels, 41 (2002/2003), p. 4. Names of minor characters in the series are borrowed from Collins, including Alan Armadale in Curse of the Pharaohs (1981) and Inspector Cuff in Deeds of the Disturber (1988). The Moonstone is explicitly referenced in The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991). Steere considers these influences, although she identifies Haggard as a more significant influence (see ‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts’, pp. 3–9).

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an inheritance plot) and romance, which further serve to reinforce its links to the sensation novel. The ‘mummy’ turns out to be a creation of Evelyn’s former lover, Alberto, and her cousin, Lucas, who are working to secure her grandfather’s inheritance. This rational—if improbable—explanation echoes the Victorian sensation novel’s engagement with the supernatural: following the revelation of the plot against them, Amelia notes ‘only a frivolous, amoral man, who had been reading too many wild romances, would think of such a thing’ (245), thus aligning the narrative with those ‘wild romances’. The image of ‘the mummy costume lying limp and harmless on the floor’ suggests an allegory for the sensation novel and its legacy: ‘It seemed absurd when I looked at it closely that it could have frightened anyone’ (253–254). In its afterlife, the sensations provoked by the genre are inevitably diluted. The revelation of the villains as an Italian and an English gentleman is also significant—paralleling the roles played by Fosco and Percival Glyde in The Woman in White. Amelia’s love interest, Radcliffe Emerson, is an archaeologist, and, despite her proclaimed spinsterhood, the heroine ends the novel married and expecting her first child—a knowing nod towards the typical Victorian narrative conclusion, but one that simultaneously departs from it as Amelia intends to ‘fit the child in quite nicely between seasons, and be back in Cairo ready for work in November’ (259–260): unlike the Victorian heroine, her priority remains her archaeological activities, rather than her child. If the sensation heroine’s feminism is ambivalent, Amelia’s is not, and her position as an outspoken feminist provides a potential link with the figure of the modern (1970s) reader, speaking to the concerns of the historical moment in which the work was produced, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. Via this process, the historical distance between the reader and the (neo-)Victorian heroine is lessened, and this is reinforced by Amelia’s archaeological investigations into ancient Egypt, for Amelia’s sensibilities are closer to those of the neo-Victorian reader than the subjects of her historical investigation. At the same time, the archaeological theme provides a commentary on the narrative’s own investigation and treatment of the (Victorian) past. Amelia’s usurpation of the place of the (nineteenth-century) male archaeologist might be celebrated by feminist readers, but the narrative also draws attention to the often unethical practices of Victorian archaeologists, who frequently laid claim to ancient artefacts and sites belonging to cultures not their own. Though to some extent the novel parodies these practices and in doing so offers a critique informed by historical distance, it is equivocal in its implied

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c­ondemnation. Amelia’s interest in Egyptology is construed as entirely legitimate (reflecting her creator’s interests), and if archaeological practices are called into question it is in relation to good and bad practices, rather than the ethics of cultural appropriation. To some extent at least, English archaeologists are portrayed as having a moral right to the cultural artefacts they seek to uncover and preserve, although the narrative references a shift in practice following the foundation of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in 1859.40 What is unequivocally condemned is the destruction of irreplaceable historical artefacts, such as the ancient pavement which falls victim to Lucas and his cronies. There is, then, a sense in which the past—no matter whose past—is a legitimate site of investigation, and can be legitimately reclaimed, as long as that reclamation does not inflict harm. This clearly offers a useful metaphor for the neo-Victorian project and perhaps an explanation for the critical snobbery towards popular historical fiction: neo-Victorian writers, like archaeologists, have, according to this approach, a moral duty and responsibility to preserve the past as faithfully as possible. In order to do this, neo-Victorian cultural productions must be rooted in a detailed knowledge of the period they seek to produce. The danger with popular cultural forms is that they will, in excavating the past without due care and attention, alter or transform it, much as Anning’s ichthyosaur is transformed into a ‘stone crocodile’. Zimmerman notes that ‘the oppressive layers of dust that entomb not just individuals but entire cultures are plumbed by archaeologists, whose discoveries give life to the very cultures and individuals that seem to have been destroyed’,41 echoing the archaeological processes undertaken by Amelia and Radcliffe in Crocodile on the Sandbank. These are also the processes undertaken by neo-Victorian novelists, who seek to give life to Victorian culture and the individuals of the past. The archaeological trope also suggests a metaphor for the preservation of Victorian cultural ‘treasures’ and the distinction between nineteenth-­ century popular and literary fiction. Visiting the museum which houses the antiquities department, Amelia notes, ‘We had penetrated into a back room filled with objects that seemed to be leftovers from the more 40  Edwards (Mertz) claimed this aspect of the texts as historically accurate. Steere notes that ‘Mertz was clearly cognisant of the neo-Victorian risks of recycling pejorative stereotypes and ideologies under the exonerating guise of historical “fact” but expected her readers to be self-conscious enough to adopt a critical stance to some of her protagonist’s less acceptable attitudes’ (Steere, ‘Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts’, p. 25). 41  Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 2.

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i­mpressive exhibits in the front halls of the museum’ (33)—a statement which points to a privileging of certain cultural objects over others and is pertinent to both Victorian and neo-Victorian attitudes towards popular and literary fiction. The sensation novel has been construed—in part through the dismissal of its cultural significance—as a nineteenth-century literary ‘leftover’, whilst within neo-Victorian critical discourses its significance is generally only acknowledged in terms of its influence on literary fictions, thus it is the popular historical novel which is construed as unworthy of ‘exhibition’. The objects housed in this room are dismissed as ‘unimportant—a miscellany only […] common as sand’ (35) by Gaston Maspero,42 reinforcing their symbolic significance in relation to attitudes towards popular fiction. Significantly, though, both Amelia and Evelyn recognise the value of these ‘leftovers’. Though the pieces of jewellery are ‘imitations of coral, turquoise, lapis lazuli, made from a coloured paste common in ancient Egypt’ (suggesting an analogy with the vast number of sensation novels published in the nineteenth century), Evelyn observes that they are ‘very interesting’, whilst Amelia notes ‘They are lovely, all the same’ (35). Subsequently, Emerson argues that ‘Every object, every small scrap of the past can teach us something’ (42). Like the (neo-)sensation novel, then, these objects hold some cultural value despite their abundance and it is apt that it is the neo-sensation heroine who recognises this. Elsewhere, though, the archaeological trope appears to suggest the necessity for approaching history with care, again suggestive of neo-­ Victorian critical discourse’s objections to popular historical fiction. Emerson bemoans the fact that ‘every year, every passing day sees destruction that cannot be remedied. We are destroying the past! Digging like children for treasure, wrenching objects out of the ground without keeping proper records of how and where they were found’ (42). The ironic notion of archaeological excavation ‘destroying the past’ seems to hint at the potential threat posed by the careless historical novelist who disregards the Victorian past in favour of an imagined and potentially false version. The narrative repeatedly emphasises the importance of order in relation to the discoveries of the past: Emmerson wishes to establish ‘a basic chronological sequence’ (42), whilst Amelia wishes ‘to see Egyptian history unroll before us in the proper sequence’ (70). There are echoes here of the stereotypical Victorian desire for order, reflected in the sensation novel’s tendency to restore order in its conservative narrative conclusions, but this  Maspero (1846–1916) was a French Egyptologist and Director of Antiquities in Egypt.

42

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also points to the potential dangers of a disordered approach to the past. The neo-sensation novel is significant in part because it represents a form of mass engagement with the Victorian past, but via misrepresentation, it may do more to obscure than to reveal that past to its readers. Just as ancient artefacts were sometimes ‘savagely mutilated’ (73) for profit, the Victorian past is at risk of ‘mutilation’ in the popular historical novel. Emerson hints at this when he expostulates to Amelia: ‘Good God, madam, you seem to think you are a trained archaeologist!’ (105), implying that she, like the popular novelists, does not have the requisite knowledge and expertise to assist in the process of preserving the past. He later objects to ‘Another amateur collection, ignorantly displayed and isolated from scholars’ (140), in a statement again suggestive of the popular historical fiction often overlooked in favour of a focus on more ‘literary’ productions, positing the former as ‘amateur’ in contrast to the latter’s ‘professionalism’. He continues: It is vital that excavations should be carried out only by trained archaeologists. Some objects are fragile and can be damaged by unskilled hands. Most important, the provenance of an object can sometimes tell us a great deal— where it was found, with what other objects, and so on. If visitors would not buy from dealers and peasants, they would stop their illicit digging (140).

Like the amateur archaeologist, the popular historical novelist might be construed as ‘damaging’ history via their ‘illicit digging’ into the past. However, historical misrepresentations are not unique to popular fiction: neo-Victorian literary fiction is under no obligation to faithfully represent the past, and indeed many novels seek to deliberately offer an alternative Victorian landscape. Like the stories that are told about the objects unearthed from archaeological digs, there is always a fictional, imagined element in contemporary cultural returns to the Victorian period. Further, the distinction between these types is not as clear as it may initially appear: like Emerson, the novelist’s aim may be noble—to seek ‘to rescue k­ nowledge from the vandalism of man and time’ but s/he remains, in ‘need [of] money for [these] excavations’ (184). Inevitably, for most authors popular appeal is necessary, and such appeal may involve sacrificing other values, just as certain of Emerson’s colleagues ‘would go to any extreme to exploit a sensational discovery such as a royal tomb’ (229). Sensationalism and historical investigation are, it seems, inextricably bound up together, and this is reflected in neo-Victorian literary and popular fiction.

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Historical and Personal Pasts in Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969) In Holt’s Shivering Sands, more explicit connections are drawn between the archaeological trope and the Victorian sensation novel. Holt’s fiction draws heavily not only on the sensation novel, but also on the genre’s antecedents and descendants—notably the Brontës and Daphne Du Maurier.43 All of these influences are evident in Shivering Sands, the title of which recalls the strange phenomena in Collins’s The Moonstone, so closely associated with female identity and sexuality, in which the evidence of Franklyn Blake’s guilt is buried, and where Rosanna Spearman eventually takes her own life. Although this positions Collins’s novel as one of the key intertexts for Holt’s narrative, and indeed explicit reference is made to Collins’s fiction,44 it is also heavily indebted to Wood, particularly in its employment of an inheritance plot, its invocation of ‘ghosts’, and its complex family relationships, fuelled by jealousy, envy, and questions of wealth and property, which recall Wood’s sensation novels such as Trevlyn Hold (1864) and Pomeroy Abbey (1878). As in Wood’s fiction, apparently supernatural events are eventually given rational explanations, and the ‘ghosts’ of the novel are metaphorical, rather than supernatural, but nonetheless, as the heroine is told, ‘it’s a sort of haunting whichever way’ (42). In addition, there are strong echoes of Dickens’s Miss Havisham in the character of an older woman, Sybil Stacy, previously thwarted in love, who appears somewhat mentally unstable, as well as vengeful. Other typical features of the Gothic (neo-)sensation novel are also in evidence: in the portrayal of the house at the centre of the narrative, and in the strange portraits painted by Sybil Stacy which threaten to reveal characters’ true identities, or at least their potential, which are strongly reminiscent of the portrait of the (anti-)heroine in Lady Audley’s Secret.45 The novel, set in the late nineteenth century, incorporates an excess of sensational plots and tropes. The protagonist, Caroline Verlaine, widow of a famous pianist (her widowhood connects her to other neo-sensation heroines—see Chap. 3), takes a job as music tutor to three young women 43  See Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History, and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 132–133. 44  The character of Alice ‘wants to write stories like Wilkie Collins … the sort that make you shiver’ (p. 219). 45  See Chap. 2.

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(Alice, Edith, and Allegra)46 at Lovat Stacy, the home of Sir William Stacy (an invalid in a similar vein to Collins’s Frederick Fairlie), so that she may investigate the disappearance of her sister Roma Brandon, who had been working on an archaeological dig to discover Roman remains on the Stacy estate. The family’s history is marked by scandal and sensation. Napier Stacy, the younger son, has recently returned having been previously exiled after accidentally shooting and killing his elder brother and heir to the estate, Beaumont Stacy. Beau’s death and the discovery of her husband’s affair with her companion prompted the boys’ mother, Isobel, to take her own life. Edith, an heiress and Sir William’s ward, has been forced to marry Napier in order that the family may secure her wealth and in the hope of a new heir for the estate, but she is in love with the local curate (a subplot which seems to directly echo the story of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White: married to Sir Percival Glyde at her dead father’s bequest, but in love with Walter Hartright). Part way through the novel she too disappears, whilst pregnant—apparently with her husband’s child. Allegra is allegedly the illegitimate daughter of a gypsy woman and Napier, though towards the end of the narrative it is revealed that Beau is her real father. Alice is supposedly the illegitimate daughter of Sir William and Mrs. Lincroft, the housekeeper and formerly companion to Sir William’s wife. Seemingly placid and good-natured, Alice is revealed at the end of the narrative as a madwoman and a murderer, who lured both Roma and Edith to their deaths in the ‘shivering sands’: local quicksand which slowly sucks people in. Like the sensation anti-heroine, her deeds appear all the more terrible because of the ‘guileless mask’ she wears (314). Her crimes are disclosed when she attempts to kill Caroline as well, but her would-be victim is rescued at the last minute by Napier and the new curate, Mr. Wilmot. In a nod to the penny dreadful, Mrs. Lincroft reveals that Alice’s father is not Sir Thomas, but a homicidal maniac named ‘Gentleman Terrall’, who ‘behaves normally and with great charm’ (280) in order to lure women to their deaths. Alice, it seems, has inherited her father’s homicidal tendencies. Threatened with incarceration, she returns to the sands where she lured her victims and takes her own life, paralleling Rosanna Spearman’s fate in The Moonstone. In a subplot with strong echoes of Jane Eyre, which, like Collins’s stories,

46  The names, as is referenced in the novel itself, recall Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1860).

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is explicitly referenced in the novel,47 Caroline attracts the attentions of both a clergyman, Mr. Wilmot (an amateur archaeologist), and the damaged and, it seems, potentially dangerous Napier. Like Jane, she follows her heart rather than her head, and the novel concludes with her expected union with Napier. As with Jane Eyre, the Victorian sensation novel, and the neo-sensation fiction of Du Maurier, Shivering Sands is concerned with the buried secrets of the past, which are gradually revealed over the course of the narrative. But here, unlike in the earlier narratives, there is a clear association between these buried secrets and the narrative’s employment of the archaeological trope, which provides a useful metaphor for the neo-Victorian project and the manner in which it rewrites and reimagines the (fragmentary) Victorian past. Set on the Kent Coast, not far from the Roman lighthouse near Dover, the narrative repeatedly references the Roman invasion of Britain: the Romans who ‘came and saw and conquered’ (167). ‘This is where Julius Caesar landed’, Edith tells Caroline, as they look out over the shivering sands: ‘It didn’t look very much different then’ (74). Her comments here suggest the idea of timelessness, and the continuities between the distant past and the narrative present, which in turn seems to diminish the much shorter distance between the Victorians and the contemporary reader. The references to the Roman invasion also represent an obvious metaphor for post-Victorian invasions and colonisations of nineteenth-­ century literature and culture via neo-Victorian cultural productions. But in terms of the sensation novel and its legacy, it also speaks to an invasion by ‘high’ culture and its colonisation of Victorian popular cultural forms, as well as to the stronghold exerted by both the traditional and neo-­ Victorian canon over critical discourses, signified by the image of ‘that magnificent castle—the key and stronghold of all England’ which has ‘stood for eight hundred years defying time and the elements, a grim warning to any unwelcome invader’ (85). The later narrative return to this scene and the echo of the earlier description reinforces its significance: ‘Ahead lay Dover Castle, gray, impregnable and magnificent, standing like a sentinel guarding the white cliffs as it had for hundreds of years’ (175). The unwelcome invader, in this context, is the popular novel—both the Victorian and neo- sensation novel which threaten to undermine the credentials of the literary landscape. On her way to take up her position as a 47  Mrs Lincroft, engaged in tutoring the girls, sets them the task of reading and analysing Brontë’s novel (p. 178).

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music teacher, Caroline meets the vicar’s wife, who declares, ‘I am so pleased that you are not one of those archaeologist people. I was very much against letting them invade Lovat Stacy’ (24), suggesting Holt’s narrative can be read as a rebuttal to this ‘high’ cultural colonisation of the sensation novel (somewhat paradoxically insofar as it predates many of these neo-Victorian ‘colonising’ texts). The invasion metaphor also suggests the ongoing dominance of the sensation legacy, as the genre itself becomes a colonising force against a diverse range of cultural forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The novel’s heroine, Caroline, is the daughter and sister of archaeologists, and of the former she notes: ‘the discovery of ancient relics was of far greater importance than being parents’ (2). Again, we find here a neat metaphor for neo-Victorian cultural productions and the contemporary interest in the Victorian past. If the modernists sought to distinguish themselves from their Victorian antecedents, the prevailing cultural interest in the Victorian era suggests a desire for a return to the past as well as a need to uncover that history in order to make sense of it. For neo-­ Victorian writers, that (relatively) distant past, then, appears more appealing as a vehicle for literary and cultural productions than ‘original’ offspring: works set in our own time, or which look more directly to the future rather than the past. But, as both Caroline’s descriptions of ancient artefacts, and Victorian and indeed prevailing attitudes to popular fiction evidence, not all objects/texts hold the same cultural worth: I would try to assess my own value in my parents’ eyes. As much as a pieced-­ together necklace of the Bronze Age? Not quite. Not to be compared with a Roman mosaic floor. A flint from the Stone Age? Perhaps, for they were fairly common. (3)

The types of object referenced here are telling, and again suggestive in terms of neo-Victorian narratives and their textual indebtedness. Both the necklace and the floor are comprised of multiple pieces: the former broken up and subsequently reassembled, the latter the composite creation of the Romans themselves. These higher value objects parallel the cultural value placed on ‘composite’ neo-Victorian narratives: those texts which self-­ consciously piece together multiple intertextual and cultural references. This painstaking composition, though, is absent from the Stone Age flint, and further, this object, like the popular historical novel—and like the imitation treasures in Peters’s novel—is seemingly ubiquitous. Its value,

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then, is consequently much lower, and yet, it is nonetheless representative of the past, and, like the necklace and the floor, can tell us something about both its own origins and those who discover and subsequently categorise and (de)value it. Significantly, those who are involved in the painstaking restoration of historical artefacts in this narrative all meet appropriately sensational deaths, reinforcing the narrative’s own position as popular fiction: Caroline’s parents are killed in a train crash, whilst Roma falls victim to the psychotic Alice and the shivering sands. Unlike the rest of her family, Caroline has little interest in archaeology: ‘I was the odd one, the frivolous one, who liked to juggle with words, rather than relics of the past, who saw something amusing when she should have been serious’ (4). The statement (ironically—given the narrative’s own status as a work of popular fiction) suggests a self-reflective critique of the literary and the popular novel: the former with its tendency towards intellectual seriousness; the latter with its primary aim to entertain the reader. This is reinforced by Kohlke’s distinction between ‘light-hearted’ historical fiction which ‘seek[s] to entertain’ and neo-Victorian literature which ‘promote[s] serious historical insight or revision’.48 The narrative also suggests, via its references to unearthed objects and other historical artefacts, the impossibility of recovering an entirely authentic past, for time will inevitably damage or taint those objects from the past which remain. This is indicated by the gravestones in the churchyard near Lovat Stacy, which ‘looked as though they were so old they could no longer stand up straight’, with ‘some of the names and writing on them half obliterated by time’ (66). These textual fragments signify the past itself: what survives, what is recovered, is only every fragmentary, and from such fragments, a whole is imagined or envisioned. Those attempting to uncover the past may themselves inflict damage, as Peters’s narrative indicates, but even the most careful recoveries are subject to the effects of time. This is further reflected in the mosaics uncovered at the site at Lovat Stacy, in which there appears a ‘recurring motif’ (201), but which are so damaged it is difficult to interpret. In addition, the colours have faded; as Godfrey Wilmot observes: ‘What a pity time destroys the colours. These stones must have been very vivid originally’ (ibid). The fading of the colours over time suggests two, paradoxical, possibilities: the neo-­Victorian novel as a faded imitation of its Victorian original, or as restoring the vibrancy of the Victorian period. In either case, the need to treat these  Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein’, p. 34. See Chap. 1.

48

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objects with care to avoid further damage implies an authorial responsibility more closely associated with ‘highbrow’ literary productions. Caroline subsequently visits the restored mosaics in the British Museum, and discovers they depict the shivering sands, but ‘there were gaps in the scene which had been filled in with some sort of cement’ (288). The cement stands in contrast to the detail of the originals and appears a crude manner of restoration, again suggestive of the different ways in which contemporary (popular) culture may revisit and reimagine the past, and the manner in which this may consequently obscure it. Both the novel’s protagonist and her romantic interest, Napier Stacy, are haunted by their pasts: Caroline by her marriage, through which she sacrificed her own musical ambitions, and her husband’s premature death, and Napier by the death of his brother at his hand. The past, then, is rendered potentially dangerous; as Napier observes: ‘the past is like the sea … threatening to envelop us … and prevent our living free and full lives […] We have to protect ourselves against the encroaching sea of the past’ (166). Napier’s approach implies it may not be possible to process the traumas of the past, and that attempting this may prove damaging: ‘it is a mistake,’ he tells Caroline, ‘to brood on the tragedies of the past’ (272). There is, though, an irony in this, insofar as the narrative is predicated around those very tragedies. The dangers of the past lie in part in the desire for a reimagined version of it: at one point, Caroline weeps ‘for the past and long[s] to live it all again’ (125), paralleling the (neo-Victorian) cultural desire for a return to the past—sometimes informed by nostalgia, sometimes by a desire to revisit past wrongs and traumas. But Caroline’s marriage was not always happy, and her musical ambition was stifled, sacrificed for her brilliant husband’s career. This longing for the past, then, represents a desire for something unreal, and via its cultural productions neo-Victorianism—and particularly historical romances which romanticise the past—cater to that desire. As Napier notes, ‘you have built up an ideal which grows rosier with every year and quite unlike what it was in reality’ (127). This romanticising of the past is, of course, at odds with those ­neo-­Victorian discourses which seek to emphasise the genre’s interrogation of the Victorian past, its attempts to reveal its injustices, even to right its wrongs, and thus is particularly pertinent to those popular visitations to the past which are less concerned with this type of interrogation. Caroline draws a distinction between the historic and the personal past, but it is clear the two are bound up with one another, as the disappearance of her sister whilst engaged on an archaeological dig illustrates: ‘Our personal

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pasts are our own concern […] It is only the historic past which should be revealed’. Napier interrogates this assertion: ‘who made the historic past but the individuals?’ (94). The two, as he indicates, are inextricably entwined, inseparable from one another, and the neo-Victorian novel is engaged in a process of revealing (or at times obscuring or disguising), the historic past via the experience of individuals. Further, the narrative implies that public interest lies in the scandals of the past, rather than its relics. As Napier observes of Roma’s disappearance: ‘It drew attention to her discoveries. People came to see the place where the lady disappeared, not the remains of Roman occupation’ (97). This is suggestive of the role of the sensational in revisiting the past: without it, the past is rendered mundane, uninteresting to a wider public. This is further reflected in Caroline’s interest in the dig, which is associated with her sister’s disappearance, rather than her interest in history. The Victorian novel, with its tendency towards neat narrative conclusions, frequently finds an echo in contemporary popular fiction, which also drives towards conclusive endings. The narrative returns of the neo-­ Victorian novel, even when they reach similarly neat conclusions, suggest something unfinished in their repeated engagements with the past, in their expression of the need for this ongoing investigation of the Victorian period. Holt’s novel adheres to the pattern of both the typical sensation and popular novel in wrapping up its various plotlines: the mystery of the women’s disappearance is solved, the heroine chooses between her two potential lovers, and the anticipated union echoes numerous Victorian novels, sensation and otherwise. This desire for narrative resolution is suggested in Napier’s comments to Caroline earlier in the novel: ‘You like everything to be neatly rounded off with Finis written at the end’ (168). But while we might read this as a metatextual comment on the popular historical—and the Victorian—novel, Caroline’s response suggests an awareness of the ‘unfinished’ past which prompts these narrative returns: ‘Nothing is ever finished. What happened a hundred years ago is still having its effect on today’ (ibid). In light of the publication date (1969), the effect of this comment is to encourage the novel’s original readers to reflect on the way in which the past, and specifically the mid-Victorian period, informs the present moment. It also serves as a subtle acknowledgement of Holt’s literary influences, and the novel’s status as part of the broader legacy of the sensation novel. Both Crocodile on the Sandbank and Shivering Sands are unashamedly popular historical fictions, heavily indebted to the plots and conventions

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of the Victorian sensation novel. But both—particularly via their references to archaeology and history—also allow for interpretations which suggest a reflexive, sometimes metatextual commentary on their status as popular fiction, and on the ongoing tensions between popular and literary fiction, which are particularly evident in neo-Victorian critical discourses. Their archaeological and historical tropes link them to ‘serious’ neo-­ Victorian literature and to Victorian interests and concerns, whilst their focus on (transgressive) women, inheritance plots, and family secrets marks them out as legitimate descendants of the nineteenth-century sensation novel. Via narratives such as these, the limitations of critical constructions of neo-Victorianism, as well as the extensive legacy of Victorian sensation fiction, are made clear.

References Arias, Rosario. 2014. Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 111–122. London and New York: Routledge. Beller, Anne-Marie. 2011. Amelia B.  Edwards. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 349–360. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bloom, Clive. 2008. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. 2014. Introduction: Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, 1–17. Abingdon: Routledge. Byatt, A.S. 2001. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Vintage. Chen, Mia. 2010. “To Face Apparent Discrepancies with Revelation”: Examining the Fossil Record in Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial. Women’s Writing 17 (2): 361–379. Chevalier, Tracy. 2009. Remarkable Creatures. London: HarperCollins. Christie, Agatha. 1960. The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding. London: Collins. Dickens, Charles. 1996. Bleak House. 1853; London: Penguin. Edwards, Amelia. 1864. Barbara’s History. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. Frank, Lawrence. 2003. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Glendening, John. 2013. Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels: Eye of the Ichthyosaur. Abingdon: Routledge. Goldhill, Simon. 2011. Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Hardy, Thomas. 1998. A Pair of Blue Eyes. 1873; London: Penguin. Holt, Victoria. 2013. Shivering Sands. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2014. Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 21–37. New York: Routledge. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutelben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mertz, Barbara. 2002/2003. MPM: A Bulletin on the Doings and Undoings of Barbara Mertz/Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels 41. Paige, Robin. 1998. Death at Bishop’s Keep. New York: Avon Books. Peters, Elizabeth. 2006. Crocodile on the Sandbank. London: Constable & Robinson. Pitts, Mike. 2009. Unearthing Manchester’s Victorian Slums. The Guardian, August 28. Shuttleworth, Sally. 2014. From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond: Fearful Symmetries. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 179–192. New York: Routledge. Steere, Elizabeth. 2018. Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts: The Amelia Peabody Mystery Series. Neo-Victorian Studies 10 (2): 1–31. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. 2012. Sensation Fiction: A Peep Behind the Veil. In The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 29–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vance, Norman. 1997. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Wallace, Diana. 2013. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History, and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Zimmerman, Virginia. 2009. Excavating Victorians. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 7

Sensational Legacies: Tropes of Inheritance

In H. Rider Haggard’s Mr Meeson’s Will (1888), a relatively late example of the Victorian sensation novel, the titular will is tattooed onto the back of the heroine, Augusta Smithers. Her body is thus transformed into a legal document, and this material evidence is produced in court to prove the case of Mr Meeson’s rightful heir. Previous to this, the problem of how to file this ‘evidence’ is solved when a photograph is taken of Augusta’s back and used in place of her body. The photograph represents a more enduring material trace of the legal evidence: unlike her physical body, stored correctly it is not subject to decay and decomposition. The transient nature of the human form renders it ‘worthless’, as Haggard’s narrator notes as Augusta is tattooed: ‘Fiat experimentum in corpore vile’1—‘let experiment be made on a worthless body’. By contrast, the survival of the documentary evidence is further assured by the multiple reproductions which are made of the photograph: it appears in the evening paper and copies are sold as mementos to the public. The reproduction of the will in the form of a photograph serves to emphasise the transient nature of individual existence: while she lives, Augusta’s body represents a material trace, but this will eventually be effaced—as a consequence of death and decay. The material traces of the past, then, lie beyond the physical body, yet the body simultaneously represents a material link to that past, and within it may embody a physical inheritance, a trace transmitted to future 1

 H. Rider Haggard, Mr Meeson’s Will (London: Spencer Blackett, 1888), p. 137.

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generations—a notion which took on added significance in light of ­evolutionary theories in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The photograph, a more durable legacy of the past, as both documentary evidence and (legal) text, functions as a metaphor for the Victorian novel, the survival and reproduction of which creates a (textual) legacy, a (literary) inheritance: we cannot encounter the past through the bodies of those that lived it, only through the various texts, objects, and environs which survive them, through what Kohlke and Gutlben term ‘the material traces of their art, industry, and architecture and the more surreptitious legacies of their thought’.2 As with the historical artefact unearthed from the ground and the Victorian (sensation) novel itself, the photograph has the potential to become a Derridean trace—‘the mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present’.3 As Paul Ricoeur summarises, ‘the past survives by leaving a trace, and we become its heirs so that we can re-enact past thoughts’.4 These traces of the past represent part of the legacy of the Victorian age, and are mutated, though still discernible, in the neo-­ Victorian novel, in which the Victorian past is rendered temporarily present, through the resurrection of its places and people, even as these narratives serve to emphasise its ‘pastness’, along with the pastness of the contemporary moment which produces them. The ‘already absent’ Victorian presence in the nineteenth-century and contemporary novel are, though, distinct as a consequence of the respective ‘present’ moments which produce them. The neo-Victorian narrative’s status as a ‘material trace’ of the Victorian period is thus complicated, even undermined, by its contemporaneity. It masquerades as a Victorian trace, but is ultimately a trace of the present, or recent past, and through it can be traced not necessarily the Victorian past, but rather contemporary perceptions of that past and its legacy. In multiple neo-Victorian, and specifically neo-sensation narratives, this complexity, which marks the relationship between (Victorian) past and present, and the narratives’ status as traces of the past, is rendered explicit through the theme of inheritance, which functions as a distinct echo of one of the central themes of Victorian sensation fiction.  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, p. 5.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. xvii. 4  Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 146. 2 3

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Arias suggests that ‘In speaking for the other, we take an active role in memorialising the dead, and become their inheritors, giving meaning to their traces in contemporary culture’.5 This chapter explores the persistent return to the inheritance theme in neo-sensation fiction, its relationship to Victorian sensation fiction, and the implications of the pervasive use of the language of inheritance in neo-Victorian criticism. Drawing on various neo-Victorian narratives, notably Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989), it examines the ways in which the inheritance theme in the neo-sensation novel is used to both construct and deconstruct the symbolic relationship between past and present. The latter part of the chapter considers the usefulness of the inheritance motif as a metaphor for understanding the relationship between Victorian sensation and neo-Victorian (specifically neo-sensation) fiction, particularly in relation to those ideas of literary hierarchy which have hitherto dominated discussions of the neo-­ Victorian canon.

The Inheritance Theme in the Victorian Sensation Novel Haggard’s novel, with its foregrounding of the inheritance theme, is typical of the Victorian sensation genre, and anticipates the neo-sensation novel. It raises the question of the (textual/narrative) legacy of the Victorians, but it is also concerned with notions of moral inheritance, in line with the wider conventions of Victorian sensation fiction. The eponymous Mr Meeson is the head of a publishing firm and over the course of a long career, repeatedly exploits the writers who work for him (including Augusta, who has authored a successful novel), ensnaring them in unbreakable and exploitative contracts whilst reaping large profits for the firm (to this end, the narrative is also a critique of Victorian capitalism). Consequently, Meeson’s estate is worth some two million pounds at the time of his death. When his nephew, Eustace Meeson, questions his uncle’s business practices, Meeson disinherits him, but, when he is shipwrecked on a desert island and with death approaching, he regrets his decision and his final will is tattooed upon Augusta’s back. The court case which follows pits Meeson’s former business partners, who endorsed the exploitative practices of the firm, against Eustace, and when the latter succeeds, he buys the partners out of the firm and becomes ‘the sole owner of the 5

 Arias, ‘Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction’, p. 121.

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vast concern’ (276). He reforms the business, ensuring a fair share of the profits for those who generate them: the authors. Additionally, he agrees to Augusta (now his wife) establishing a fund for impoverished writers with part of the inheritance, which in the first instance will benefit those previously exploited by Meeson & Co. Meeson’s financial legacy thus goes some way towards countering his business legacy, ensuring a ‘just’ conclusion to the novel and adhering to typical Victorian narrative resolutions. In contrast to various neo-sensation fictions, including Cox’s The Meaning of Night, Eustace is evidently a deserving heir to his uncle’s estate, indicated by his willingness to use part of the money to make restitution for his uncle’s wrongdoings. In the neo-Victorian novel, the boundaries between moral right and wrong, good and bad, hero and villain, are not as clearly defined, and this serves to complicate the implied relationship between the legators and legatees of past and present, Victorian and neo-Victorian. The Victorian sensation novel persistently exhibits a concern with the inheritance of wealth, property, title, and names, as well as physical and mental health and characteristics. In The Woman in White, Percival Glyde conceals his illegitimacy in order to lay claim to an inherited title and estate, while Laura Fairlie’s wealth is falsely inherited by her husband when her identity is switched with that of Anne Catherick and she is declared dead. The sensational plot of East Lynne is set in motion when Isabel Vane is left destitute following the death of her father: as a daughter and only child, she is not entitled to inherit his entailed estates. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the eponymous protagonist’s fateful inheritance takes the form of (alleged) madness, inherited from her mother, echoing the description of Bertha Rochester in Brontё’s Jane Eyre as ‘the true daughter of an infamous mother’.6 Inherited madness also features in Collins’s short story ‘Mad Monkton’, James Payn’s The Clyffards of Clyffe (1866), and Wood’s St Martin’s Eve (1866), with the latter two dealing with legacies of various types, including the inheritance of wealth, property, and physical ill health. In Payn’s novel, the protagonist, following the death of her husband, seeks to gain possession of her home, to which she is not legally entitled, echoing numerous nineteenth-century novels, from the works of Jane Austen onwards, which address the issue of primogeniture and the disinheritance of women. Collins returns to the inheritance theme in several of his novels, including No Name, in which Magdalen and Norah Vanstone 6

 Charlotte Brontё, Jane Eyre (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 261.

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are disinherited as a consequence of the legal implications of their ­illegitimacy and their parents’ subsequent marriage. Both Armadale and The Legacy of Cain (1889) represent the children of murderers and deal with the sins of the father and the inheritance of criminal tendencies. Braddon, too, repeatedly returns to the theme, including in John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863), Birds of Prey (1867), Charlotte’s Inheritance (1868—a sequel to Birds of Prey), Run to Earth (1868), and The Fatal Three (1888). Inheritance, then, serves as a means of exploring a range of issues in the Victorian sensation novel, including social hierarchies, identity, madness, and women’s rights. The majority of these texts adhere to the typical morality of nineteenth-century fiction: almost without exception, the rightful heir eventually (re)gains their place, and those who attempt to usurp that position, including Percival Glyde in The Woman in White and Paul Marchmont in John Marchmont’s Legacy, are punished accordingly—in both these examples, through a fiery death. In most cases, a legal right to an estate is accompanied by a moral right, although Collins complicates this in No Name in arguing for the rights of illegitimate children (demonstrating markedly more sympathy than he did two years previously in his depiction of Glyde). The pervasiveness of the inheritance theme in Victorian sensation fiction marks it out as a defining motif of the genre and reflects broader Victorian concerns about law, identity, origins, justice, and shifting social orders. Throughout the period, it is a theme to which the novel repeatedly returns: in addition to the multitude of sensation novels dealing with the subject, Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights, Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) and Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles are amongst the plethora of other nineteenth-­ century novels to engage with the issues of inheritance and legacies of varying kinds. As Sophie Gilmartin notes, in the nineteenth-century novel, often the intricacies of the family tree reveal or become the crises of plot and subplot; problems of inheritance, younger brothers, arranged marriages, adoption, illegitimacy, misalliance, the need for an heir—these become the driving force of plot, and are centred in the family tree and the will to keep the family line going.7

7  Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 12.

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In the latter part of the century, these issues take on new significance in light of the debates around Darwinism, evolution, and eugenics. Evolutionary theory raised uncomfortable questions about ancestry and lineage. As Gilmartin observes, ‘Part of the anxiety over pedigree after Darwin was a haunting sense that a pedigree could possibly be traced back too far’.8 Radical shifts in the social order over the course of the period, including the political enfranchisement of working-class men in 1867 and the emergence of the women’s rights movement, further suggest the reasons behind the popularity of the inheritance theme in the Victorian novel. For certain classes of Victorians, as Gillian Beer observes in her seminal study on evolutionary narratives in nineteenth-century fiction, notions of inheritance were closely bound up with constructions of identity and social structures and hierarchies: ‘Succession and inheritance form the “hidden bond” which knits all nature past and present together, just as succession and inheritance organise society and sustain hegemony’.9 Narratives which threatened to disrupt the lines of inheritance and succession, or reveal hidden lines and so reconstruct social hierarchies, thus played on Victorian anxieties about identity and origins. In the Victorian sensation novel, while the inheritance theme reflects prevailing anxieties about identity and social structures, it also represents a useful plot device—particularly in terms of enabling the genre’s conventional cliff-hangers and intricate plotting. The complex legal context further explains the prevalence of the inheritance theme in sensation fiction, which persistently engages with the machinery of the law. The law of primogeniture, the relative prevalence of entailed estates amongst the wealthier classes, and the legal disempowerment to which married women were subject (particularly in terms of ownership of property) all serve to render inheritance an appealing theme for the sensation novelist looking to exploit cultural anxieties about social class and the stability of the family and bloodlines. The centrality of the theme takes on added significance because it represents something which seemingly stands in contrast to the contemporaneous focus of the genre: a prevailing concern with the past and its (dangerous) potential for influencing the present and the future. To this end, then, the Victorian sensation novel, like the neo-Victorian  Ibid., pp. 17–18.  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; third edition), p. 196. 8 9

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novel, concerns itself with the relationship between past and present, implying that it is only through an examination and understanding of the past that the present can be fully understood. Concealed marriages, forged documents, secret wills, and hereditary maladies all emerge from the mists of the past and frequently disrupt the present in sensation fiction, calling into question established social orders. The inheritance motif thus belies the notion of sensation fiction as distinctly contemporary in focus. Consequently, the theme emphasises the parallels between Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction: just as the focus on the past in the neo-sensation novel conceals the genre’s concern with contemporary issues (the ‘already absent present’ from which it emerges), so too does the Victorian genre’s engagement with the present obscure its interest in the influence of the past. It is via the inheritance theme, therefore, that one of the key differences between the Victorian and contemporary genre is rendered less distinct.

Literary Legacies: The Inheritance Motif in Neo-­ Sensation Fiction The parallels between Victorian and neo-Victorian sensation fiction are further evident in the foregrounding of the inheritance theme in the latter—in both the hitherto defining (postmodern) texts of the genre, including Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Byatt’s Possession, and those (popular/middlebrow) texts which engage, via plot, character, and/ or narrative conventions, with the Victorian sensation novel. Amongst the plethora of neo-sensation novels which focus on various forms of inheritance are Palliser’s The Quincunx, Waters’s Fingersmith, Alexander’s And Only to Deceive, Cox’s The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time, Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009),10 Harwood’s The Asylum, and Tracy Rees’s Amy Snow (2015). Fingersmith echoes various Victorian sensation narratives in its representation of notions of inherited criminality and madness, but also, as Muller has discussed, presents ‘a complex network of matrilineal narratives’.11 Matrilineal lineage is also the starting 10  Niffenegger’s novel stands in problematic relation to the neo-Victorian/sensation novel: it has a contemporary setting, and includes strong supernatural elements, but nonetheless engages in multiple ways with the conventions of the Victorian sensation novel. 11  Nadine Muller, ‘Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminism and Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Winter 2009/2010), p. 111.

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point for the inheritance plot in The Quincunx, Her Fearful Symmetry, and The Asylum, highlighting a trend in contemporary neo-Victorian novels for exploring issues of identity through the figure of the mother— notable by her absence in many Victorian (sensation) narratives.12 Kohlke and Gutleben emphasise the association between the inheritance theme and the Gothic in their introduction to Neo-Victorian Gothic, observing that ‘the neo-Victorian Gothic’s frequent reprising of the typical Gothic inter-generational plot surrounding genealogy, inheritance, contested legacies and family secrets […] thematically underlines the past’s continuing afterlife even when seemingly superseded’.13 As Heilmann and Llewellyn discuss, the ancestral home also features heavily in the contemporary neo-­ Victorian novel and is closely linked to both the inheritance theme and Gothic motifs. Exploring a range of texts, including neo-sensation novels (Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Harwood’s The Ghost Writer), Heilmann and Llewellyn contend that ‘[t]he central metaphor of (dis) inheritance and mourning in these novels is the ancestral home: a house haunted by past tragedy’.14 These texts, they suggest, represent an ‘attempt to reconstruct a sense of familial/literary/canonical inheritance from the Victorians themselves’.15 Of particular interest here is the suggestion that neo-Victorian novels are engaged in a process of reconstructing a canonical inheritance since many of these novels draw on the conventions of sensation fiction—a genre initially excluded from the canon. Several contemporary novels which privilege the inheritance theme fit neatly into the category of neo-Victorian ‘literary’ fiction, even as they draw on the tropes and themes of Victorian popular narratives. These include Harwood’s The Asylum and Cox’s The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time. These works are all page-turners, with dramatic and exciting plots, but are evidently self-consciously engaged with Victorian literature and culture, including sensation fiction. To this end, the authors position themselves as the ‘heirs’ of the Victorian sensation writers.16 This is 12  Motherless heroines appear in the majority of sensation novels. Notable examples include Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, Braddon’s eponymous Aurora Floyd, and East Lynne’s Isabel Vane. 13  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, pp. 10–11. 14  Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 35. For further discussion of the significance of the ancestral home, see Conclusion. 15  Ibid. 16  Harwood’s earlier novel, The Ghost Writer (2004) is also a clear example of neo-sensation fiction. See Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, pp. 55–63.

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­ articularly evident in The Asylum, which is in part a reimagining of The p Woman in White. In its review of the novel, The Spectator declared, ‘Harwood has a talent amounting to genius for channelling the spirit of nineteenth-century sensation fiction’.17 It opens with Georgina Ferrars waking to find herself in an asylum, with no memory of recent events. She is informed that she arrived at the asylum the previous day, giving her name as Lucy Ashton, and investigation suggests the ‘real’ Georgina Ferrars is at home with her uncle. In a complex plot worthy of Collins, it transpires that Georgina’s identity has been stolen by her half-sister and cousin, Lucia, to whom she bears a striking resemblance. Georgina had visited the asylum to investigate their family history and is, in fact, the rightful owner of the asylum, an earlier will having been repressed. Her father’s family—the Mordaunts—suffer from a ‘dark strain’ of ‘hereditary madness’,18 thus the novel deals with the inheritance of property and madness (in the latter respect echoing Collins’s short story ‘Mad Monkton’ [1855]), as well as literary inheritances. The latter is reflected in the narrative’s metatextual subtexts, which not only implicitly reference Collins’s fiction, but also the sensation novel’s other descendants: the asylum’s Cornish setting and name (‘Tregannon House’) recall Du Maurier’s earlier neo-sensation writing. This idea of literary descendants is also in evidence in Cox’s novels, in which, as in The Asylum, the plot hinges around inheritance. In The Meaning of Night, Edward Glyver attempts to reclaim his rightful inheritance from Phoebus Daunt. In its sequel, The Glass of Time, his daughter, Esperanza Gorst becomes enmeshed in this scheme. The latter, as a sequel, is effectively a direct descendant of The Meaning of Night, and this is reinforced by the shift in focus from father to daughter. Both, in turn, are descendants of the sensation novel, drawing on its key themes and motifs. Again, the narrative’s subtexts appear to reinforce this idea. At the end of The Glass of Time, Esperanza notes, in a comment which resonates strongly with the neo-Victorian project, and in particular with the neo-sensation novel’s concern with inheritance, We can never escape the legacy of what has been, especially here, in this house, where the past saturates the very air we breathe. Try as we may, […] we find that we are unable wholly to break free from the fetters that bind us to our former selves. I do not think we ever will.19  Andrew Taylor, ‘Crime Fiction – Review’, The Spectator (8 June 2013), n.p.  John Harwood, The Asylum (London: Vintage, 2014), p. 63. 19  Michael Cox, The Glass of Time (London: John Murray, 2009), p. 529. 17 18

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In the neo-sensation novel, then, the inheritance theme represents both an echo of Victorian sensation fiction and an attempt to explore the relationship between past and present—indeed, it offers itself as an important metaphor for understanding the (literary) legacy of the Victorians and contemporary culture’s relationship to the period. The prevalence of the theme suggests an anxiety about origins and identities which mirrors Victorian concerns, a desire to ‘know’ ourselves which might be fulfilled via encounters with the past, a continuing need to uncover that ‘“hidden bond” which knits all nature past and present together’, as Beer terms it.20 The current burgeoning interest in the nineteenth-century past suggests a parallel with the Victorian cult of medievalism, reflected in Victorian popular interest in the period, its narratives, and artistic conventions. There is, though, a greater immediacy to the relationship between ourselves and the Victorian past: we frequently encounter the material traces of that past in our everyday lives—in our streets, parks, galleries, as well as in less material structures such as our political system. We are, then, more obviously embedded in the Victorian past than the nineteenth century was in the medieval period. Further, while some contemporary cultural encounters with the Victorians are marked by the same nostalgic sentiment that informed the Victorian cult of medievalism, the relationship is rendered more complex by the problematic legacies of empire and trauma, for example. This desire to understand ourselves by exploring our past is articulated not only in fictional examinations of the Victorian past, but in contemporary culture’s multiple attempts to engage with that past, reflected in the burgeoning interest in genealogy and ancestry, as well as in the popularity of Victorian heritage attractions and screen documentaries about the period. Significantly, sensationalism features heavily in all these various cultural encounters.21 Television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? (2004–present) and Secrets From the Asylum (2014) are heavily focused on the sensational. Past crimes, false and broken marriages, and accounts of madness predominate: presumably, the more mundane events

 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 196.  ‘Sensation’ is increasingly featuring in a different sense in Victorian heritage attraction, through attempts to create an immersive Victorian experience: the Thackray Museum in Leeds, and Leighton House in London are amongst the attractions to experiment with this, including various smells as part of their exhibitions. 20 21

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of the past do not engage the viewers’ interest.22 The popular interest in the Victorian age is partly a consequence of a legacy deliberately and consciously created by the Victorians: as Matthew Sweet observes in Inventing the Victorians, ‘they moulded our culture, defined our sensibilities, built a world for us to live in’23—built, in effect, their own legacy. They project a particular image of themselves to future generations—one which has enduring appeal, but which is not necessarily accurate. As Maureen Moran observes, ‘there is a gap between the period’s self-projection as confident, accomplished and “proper”, and its untidy reality, marked by insecurity and doubt arising from vast social and intellectual change’.24 The neo-­ Victorian (narrative) concern with inheritance is thus closely linked to broader cultural encounters with the Victorian past, and to contemporary anxieties about identity and origins: what is the legacy of the Victorians, and how does this impact on contemporary British culture and a national sense of identity? The centrality of the inheritance theme in contemporary fiction represents both an echo and a mirror of the Victorian novel: a conscious attempt to replicate nineteenth-century narratives by neo-Victorian writers, but also an expression of a continuing anxiety about identity which replicates that of the Victorians. Simultaneously, it also serves as the mutated trace—not the legacy which the Victorians themselves sought to leave, or the reality of that legacy, but something else: a series of contemporary (re)imaginings of that legacy and its consequences. This is evidenced not only via the prevalence of the inheritance trope in neo-Victorian fiction, but also in the language employed within neo-Victorian criticism.

Neo-Victorian Scholarship and the Language of Inheritance Samantha J. Carroll argues that the ‘nostalgic impulse […] persists in neo-­ Victorian scholarship where the nineteenth century is often expressed as the present’s point of origin—an historical parent to whom the present 22  Producers on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? abandoned a planned programme on Michael Parkinson after researchers concluded his family history was ‘boring’ (Leigh Holmwood, ‘Michael Parkinson: My Family Was Too Dull for Who Do You Think You Are?’, The Guardian, 21 July 2009, n.p.). 23  Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians: What We Think We Know About Them and Why We’re Wrong (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 231. 24  Maureen Moran, Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 2.

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looks for guidance’.25 Consequently, she contends, ‘the Victorians become the parents from whose legacy we cannot, or choose not to escape’.26 The result of this is that we risk continuing to infantilise the present as we deify the Victorian past […] Such an inheritance model does little to individualise the contribution of neo-­ Victorian fiction and its criticism to the present. Rather, it is such persistent efforts to cast the Victorian referent as our literary halcyon days that garner neo-Victorian fiction’s associations with nostalgia and fetishism[.]27

Carroll’s central aim is to acknowledge the dual influence of the nineteenth century and postmodernism on neo-Victorian fiction, and while this is evidently applicable to a particular subgenre of neo-Victorian fiction (the ‘literary’ fiction of authors such as Byatt and Fowles, and certainly excluding popular historical fiction set in the Victorian age), there is an argument to be made against the dismissal of what she terms ‘the inheritance model’. The prevalence of the inheritance motif in both fiction and criticism is enough to warrant its acknowledgement and further investigation. To overlook it would be to ignore the centrality of the theme not only in neo-Victorian fiction (taking its cue from the Victorian novel), but also in neo-Victorian scholarship. Further, in contrast to what Carroll implies here, the inheritance model does not simply construct the Victorian period, and our relationship to it, in terms of ‘halcyon days’, but serves as a means of emphasising and exploring the less desirable aspects of the Victorian past. The concern with the past, which is evidenced by the preoccupation with inheritance in both Victorian and neo-sensation fictions, is echoed in neo-Victorian scholarship. While some critics, including Heilmann and Llewellyn, and Carroll, examine the issues of inheritance and legacies at length, the field more generally is infused with the language of inheritance. Scholars refer variously to the ‘enduring legacy’28 of the nineteenth century, the ‘divided inheritance we have secured from the nineteenth

25  Samantha J. Carroll, ‘Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 3:2 (2010), p. 173. 26  Ibid., p. 177. 27  Ibid. 28  Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), p. 169.

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century’,29 ‘our Victorian inheritance’,30 and ‘our nineteenth-century cultural inheritance’.31 In their introduction to Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma, Kohlke and Gutleben discuss the ‘legacies of imperialism’, ‘traumatic legacies’, ‘the complex legacy of cultural memory’ and the Victorian ‘legacy […] which returns to haunt us’.32 Elsewhere, Kohlke alludes to the ‘aesthetic and ideological legacies’ of the nineteenth century.33 Louisa Hadley contends that ‘Neo-Victorian fiction is clearly aware of the legacy of Victorian literature and culture, a legacy it seeks to incorporate rather than efface’,34 and references ‘our Victorian ancestors’.35 Mitchell, discussing Helen Humphreys’s Afterimage (2001) and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights (2005), suggests the texts, ‘through the notion of embodied and inherited memory, […] offer the Victorian era as part of our heritage, and inheritance’.36 Helen Davies, meanwhile, asks, ‘What voices of the Victorians are we preserving as our inheritance[?]’.37 And, of course, I repeatedly return to the language of inheritance in this exploration of the legacies of sensation fiction. What, then, are the significance and implications not only of the predominance of the inheritance theme in neo-­ sensation fiction, but of the repeated returns to the language of inheritance in neo-Victorian criticism? Why is the relationship between the contemporary age and the Victorian past repeatedly construed, in both fiction and criticism, in terms of inheritance? Does the employment of the language of inheritance in critical discourse suggest an investment in the field at odds with the notion of objective scholarly perspectives? The language of inheritance in neo-Victorian critical discourses is, evidently, pervasive, and it is frequently employed with a casualness which risks obscuring its significance. Textual discourses do not inevitably construct the past in terms of its relation to the present and the notion of ‘ourselves’, but the prevalence  Ibid., p. 172.  Christine L. Krueger, Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. xviii. 31  Andrea Kirchknopf, Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013), p. 38. 32  Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 12, 21, 57, 59. 33  Kohlke, ‘Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein’, p. 21. 34  Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 58. 35  Ibid., p. 11. 36  Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, p. 173. 37  Helen Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 174. 29 30

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of this trend in neo-Victorian scholarship, and the centrality of the inheritance theme in neo-Victorian fiction, suggests a particular anxiety about the Victorian age, its people, culture, and narratives, as though they may provide the missing link in the search for a contemporary collective identity. In both sensation and neo-Victorian fiction, the inheritance trope is often entwined with complex familial relationships, frequently spanning generations. The use of the language of inheritance in neo-Victorian criticism thus implies a tendency to construct the relationship between contemporary and Victorian cultures and identities in terms of a familial connection. Indeed, the associations of the terms ‘inheritance’ and ‘legacy’ prove telling in terms of analysing the critical tendency to construct the relationship between the Victorian past and the present in this way. The meanings evoked by the term ‘inheritance’ are significant in this respect and speak to some of the cultural anxieties of the present age: Inheritance: The action or fact of inheriting […] Hereditary succession to property, a title, office etc. […] A coming into, or taking, possession of something, as one’s birthright; ownership; right of possession […] Natural derivation of qualities or characters from parents or ancestry […] Property, or an estate, which passes by law to the heir on the decease of the possessor.38

Considered in light of the pervasive use of the language of inheritance in neo-Victorian scholarship, as well as the predominance of the theme in contemporary historical fiction, these definitions are significant, pointing to the complexity of the relationship between then and now, them and us, as perceived by contemporary culture. The trope of inheritance—associated with ‘the decease of the possessor’—serves to simultaneously draw our attention to the death of the Victorians (we inherit their legacy because they are no longer with us) and their continued presence (their legacy remains, and is continuously encountered in daily life). The sense of regret at the passing of the Victorian age gives way to the ‘nostalgic impulse’ to which Carroll refers, but also enables a reconsideration of the period. The inheritance trope serves to construe contemporary culture’s relationship to the Victorian era in a particular way—invoking notions of indebtedness, of a familial bond, ancestry, as well as possession and ownership—a legacy to which contemporary (British) culture is ‘entitled’. If the modernist impulse was to reject this ‘birthright’, the relationship between the Victorian age and the present time is more complex. Neo-Victorianism, in  ‘inheritance, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press.

38

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its multitude of forms, including literature, heritage, and criticism, often appears to celebrate this relationship, but is simultaneously uncomfortable with certain aspects of it. The sensation novel inevitably forms part of this complex legacy, and indeed is one of those aspects with which critical discourse has not always been entirely comfortable—at least in so far as its legacy lies in contemporary popular fiction. Meanwhile, ‘neo’ suggests an attempt to redefine Victorian identities. The ‘nostalgic impulse’, then, is undermined by the multitude of narratives which depict historical wrongs and traumas, highlighting the injustices of the period. These narratives suggest a desire to return to the past in order to redress historical wrongs, a cultural guilt that we continue to bear precisely because of our familial relationship to that past. This is evident not only in fictional narratives, but in political discourses as well. During his premiership, Tony Blair expressed sorrow and regret over Britain’s role in both the slave trade and the Irish potato famine. In the case of the latter, he explicitly blamed ‘[t]hose who governed in London at the time’,39 in a statement which served both as an acknowledgement of his political predecessors’ (ancestors’) failure and a means of distancing his own government from those historical wrongs (his lack of an explicit apology in both cases reinforces this).40 These cultural narratives together give credence to the idea that engagement with the Victorian past represents an attempt to both uncover ourselves, to learn about ourselves, and to distinguish ourselves from our Victorian ancestors. Prevailing cultural identities thus appear closely related to the manner in which we construct the relationship with the Victorian past and the prominence of the inheritance motif in neo-Victorian fiction further supports this.

Anxieties of Influence/Anxieties of Origin in Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989) As the title suggests, this ‘construction’, as well a dominant inheritance motif, is central to Charles Palliser’s epic neo-Victorian novel, The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam (1989), which follows the tri39  See Kathy Marks, ‘Blair Issues Apology for Irish Potato Famine’, The Independent (2 June 1997). 40  Of course, politics also engages in nostalgic referencing of the Victorian age – particularly Conservative rhetoric, which has habitually referenced ‘Victorian values’ from the Thatcher era to the present day. See, for example, Gaby Hinscliff, ‘Bring Back Victorian Values’, The Guardian (10 December 2006).

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als and tribulations of the protagonist amidst various attempts to identify and conceal the legitimate heirs of the estate of Jeoffrey Huffam. This epic novel, which exceeds by some margin those great Victorian narrative beasts such as Eliot’s Middlemarch and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House, with its multiple locations, sprawling, inter-­ generational plot, and dozens of characters, recalls Henry James’s description of a certain type of nineteenth-century novel as ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’.41 As the title suggests, though, the structure of The Quincunx is far from ‘loose’ and ‘baggy’, but carefully arranged so as to mirror a series of quincunxes: five parts, each part divided into five books, and each book divided into five chapters. This tightly-structured yet expansive narrative represents something of our Victorian inheritance: the sprawling landscape of the novel mirrors the Victorian age itself, emphasised by the focus on different strata of society, including the criminal classes, disenfranchised poor, and wealthy middle and upper classes. Yet the tight structure resembles a desire for order which both echoes Victorian sensibilities and speaks to a contemporary desire to order the Victorian age—to create structure and meaning out of chaos. This desire is reflected in the neo-­ Victorian project, not least in the multiple attempts to demarcate the neo-­ Victorian novel by establishing criteria which narratives must meet in order to entitle them to the label ‘neo-Victorian’. These criteria, though, frequently fail to acknowledge the inevitable blurred boundaries of narrative categorisation: between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’, ‘highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’—a tendency which echoes some Victorian literary critics, for whom the sensation novel represented a scourge, but who failed, or refused, to acknowledge the sensational elements of writers like Eliot and Hardy. Palliser, then, creates a narrative which speaks not only to the relationship between Victorian and contemporary fiction, but highlights the problematic connections between the literary and the popular: a metanarrative with multiple and varied intertexts, symbolising the complex legacy of the Victorian (popular) novel and contemporary culture’s relationship to it. The events of the novel are set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, before Victoria’s ascension to the throne, though related retro41  Henry James, Preface to The Tragic Muse (1908), in John Auchard, ed., The Portable Henry James (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 477. Carroll also makes this observation describing Palliser’s novel as ‘a “baggy monster” in the Dickensian mode’ (‘Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian’, p. 185).

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spectively. The narrative’s most obvious Victorian antecedents are the works of Collins, echoed in the novel’s complex plotting and sensational themes, and Dickens, evoked in the descriptions of the lower and criminal classes, the Bildungsroman element, and the relationship between John Huffman and Henrietta Palphramond, which deliberately invokes the relationship between Pip and Estella in Great Expectations, as well as in the name of the protagonist. Indeed, the use of Dickens’s middle names for the hero of the narrative positions the novel as part of Dickens’s legacy (Georges Letissier refers to Palliser’s novel as ‘an attempt to out-Dickens Dickens!’).42 Eliot’s Felix Holt and Middlemarch are also influential.43 The novel’s sensational plot includes several murders, fraud, the false imprisonment of the hero in an asylum, theft, secret marriages, disloyal servants, drug addiction, and illegitimacy, as well as (dis)inheritance, and is centred around the complex affinities between five families, thus the narrative clearly engages with the conventions of (neo-)sensation fiction. The complex inheritance plot revolves around the will of Jeoffrey Huffman. John Huffman’s mother is in possession of a codicil, which alters the terms of the will, while a subsequent will, which invalidates both the original will and the codicil, also exists. The identity of the legitimate heir of the Huffman estate shifts depending on both the materialisation and legal recognition of the various documents, and the lineage of the five families at the centre of the dispute. Much of the novel is concerned with John Huffman’s pursuit of evidence which will confirm him as the legitimate heir, although doubts over his paternity call the strength of his case into question. These doubts are not fully resolved in the novel as his mother’s confession is burnt at her instruction just prior to her death. This gap in the story forms the centre of the narrative and contributes to the novel’s ambiguity. As John Huffman pursues the truth surrounding the will and his family identity, he begins to question his moral right to the estate, thus the narrative engages with the theme of moral inheritance, in line with Victorian sensation novels including Haggard’s Mr Meeson’s Will and Collins’s No Name. As a neo-Victorian novel, The Quincunx conforms to the critical definitions espoused by Heilmann and Llewellyn, Kohlke, and

42  Georges Letissier, ‘Dickens and Post-Victorian Fiction’ in Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben (eds.), Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 121. 43  See Palliser, ‘Author’s Afterword’, pp. 1210–1211.

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Carroll,44 combining historical fiction with postmodernist conventions, although Gutleben questions the novel’s postmodern credentials, referring to it as a ‘Victorian chamber of echoes’, which contains only ‘limited violations of the Victorian fictional code’, and consequently concluding that it is ‘definitely pastiche Victorian—and not postmodern’.45 While Gutleben appears to delineate this as something of a failing on Palliser’s part, his reading is significant in its construction of the narrative as a relatively early example of a neo-Victorian novel which is not fully engaged in the postmodern project, thus strengthening the argument for a distinction between postmodernism and neo-Victorianism: individual narratives may participate in both genres, but the neo-Victorian is not dependent on an engagement with the postmodern, as some critics have contended.46 Palliser himself, writing in 1992 before the emergence of the term ‘neo-­ Victorian’, views the work as ‘an ironic reconstruction of the Victorian novel’,47 and thus appears broadly in agreement with Gutleben. Despite the strong echoes of Collins and Dickens, as well as the Victorian sensation genre more generally, The Quincunx nonetheless departs from the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel in a multitude of ways, notably through its complex mathematical structure (which mirrors the symbol of the quincunx), and its ambiguity and narrative gaps. In doing so, it betrays an anxiety about its Victorian ‘origins’, and about the Victorian novel itself. Although the ending of The Quincunx ostensibly resolves the mysteries of the plot—at least to the satisfaction of its central protagonist and primary narrator, John Huffam—various subtexts disrupt this. Consequently, as Palliser himself notes in his Afterword, the narrative ‘deliberately breache[s] the “implied contract” between writer and reader on which the nineteenth-century novel is based’, a contract which ‘assumes that everything to do with both plot and motivation is eventually explained in full by a narrator or author who is completely trustworthy—however much the reader might have been baffled and teased along the way’.48 Collins’s The Woman in White presents itself as a proxy for a legal case, piecing together various narratives and evidence, and The Quincunx both echoes and dis See Chap. 1.  Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, pp. 42, 45. 46  See Chap. 1. 47  Palliser, Afterword, p. 1212. 48  Ibid., pp. 1203–1204. 44 45

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rupts this technique, presenting some evidence but obscuring other important information—in particular, part of John’s mother’s personal account of the past, which she forces her son to burn shortly before her death (and which probably relates to the identity of his father). Consequently, the conclusions reached at the end of the novel are based on partial evidence, as well as particular interpretations. It is evident that John misinterprets some elements of the text, and the reader is encouraged to reach different conclusions—most obviously in relation to Henrietta’s pregnancy at the end of the novel. This tendency towards misinterpretation renders the protagonist’s account of events, which forms a large part of the novel, unreliable, and, consequently, the solution to the mysteries presented remains partly obscured. Palliser’s disruption of the Victorian novel in this respect suggests a broader analogy with contemporary culture’s perceptions and understanding of the Victorian past, which can only ever be based on partial evidence, an incomplete picture, and are thus subject to bias and misinterpretation. Additionally, Palliser draws attention to ‘the gap that inevitably exists between the author’s intention and the way in which readers interpret the work’,49 further highlighting the ambiguities of the text, and, to follow the analogy, the ambiguities of the Victorian age itself, which is repeatedly subject to particular and personal interpretations. The ambiguity of The Quincunx may be perceived, as Palliser suggests, as disrupting the ‘implied contract between writer and reader’, but we should be wary of overemphasising a distinction between the Victorian and neo-Victorian (and sensation and neo-sensation) novel on this basis. Indeed, the ambiguity of a neo-Victorian narrative such as The Quincunx potentially owes as much to Victorian narrative conventions as to postmodernism; thus, in contrast to Gutleben’s reading, The Quincunx might be read as the ‘heir’ of both Victorian and postmodern fiction. Palliser notes of his novel, ‘there is a perfectly plausible explanation offered at the most obvious level, but there is a second and equally plausible one that is left implicit’, and offers his own definition of a novel as ‘a structure of ­possible meanings which the reader is entitled to interpret in any way that is appropriate’.50 There are echoes here of Thomas Hardy’s claim that ‘a novel is an impression, not an argument’,51 and the narrative ambiguity of  Ibid., p. 1203.  Ibid., pp. 1204–1205. 51  Thomas Hardy, Preface to the Fifth Edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in Tim Dolin (ed.), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 463. 49 50

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the postmodern and neo-Victorian novel suggests similarities with Hardy, Henry James, and those other late nineteenth-century novelists who anticipate the emergence of literary modernism. However, a similar narrative ambiguity is evident in the mid-Victorian sensation novel, which, like The Quincunx, presents the reader with multiple possible readings, even while offering a ‘plausible explanation’ at an ‘obvious level’. Consider, for instance, the narrative bias resulting from the editorial control of Walter Hartright in The Woman in White, which is reflected in the subjectivity of John Huffman’s narrative in The Quincunx, or the ambiguity surrounding the madness of Lady Audley: on a superficial level, Braddon tells the story of a madwoman who commits terrible crimes, but alternative interpretations perceive the protagonist as ‘sane, and moreover representative’.52 The ambiguity of the neo-Victorian novel and the multiple potential meanings it generates, thus represent not only a legacy of postmodernism, but of Victorian literature and its conventions. Moreover, the tendency to view these narrative conventions as distinctly modern, divergent from Victorian literary forms, speaks to a skewing of the Victorian age and its texts based on commonly held assumptions which, once interrogated, begin to break down. However, while it is evident that the Victorian novel lends itself to multiple readings and interpretations, it is nonetheless clear that, generally speaking, it represents a more ordered narrative form than quintessential modernist and postmodernist texts. Palliser’s disruption of the reader/ writer contract and subversion of traditional Victorian literary conventions implies a discomfort with the nineteenth-century legators of his narrative and their productions, and a desire to create something ‘new’ (neo), at the same time as paying tribute to the narrative’s Victorian ancestors. The novel is more extreme in its portrayals of poverty and suffering than its nineteenth-century antecedents, and thus highlights the unreality of much mainstream Victorian fiction, with its tendency to sentimentalise suffering. Palliser’s motivation, then, clearly isn’t exclusively the ‘nostalgic impulse’.53 In its refusal to offer narrative resolution to the reader, marking its departure from the traditional nineteenth-century novel, The Quincunx offers a useful analogy for how we read the Victorian period itself: historical and literary criticism is involved in the practice of extracting meaning from the 52  Elaine Showalter, ‘Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s’, Victorian Newsletter, Vol. 49 (1976) p. 4. 53  Carroll, ‘Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian’, p. 173.

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past and its texts, but Palliser’s novel points to the potential for misinterpretation. Just as John and the reader must recognise the significance of what is missing at the heart of narrative—his mother’s journal—so too must the history and legacy of the Victorian age be viewed in light of its inevitable incompleteness. The Victorian novel, despite its potential for multiple interpretations, nonetheless speaks to a desire for order which is particularly peculiar to the Victorian mindset, reflected in both the typically chronological structure of Victorian narratives, and their tendency towards a suitably ‘moral’ outcome which resonates with notions of divine justice. The inheritance theme in the nineteenth-century novel is frequently employed as a means of temporarily disrupting that order, but, typically, the conclusions to these narratives focus on the restoration of order. By contrast, the ambiguity of Palliser’s novel is brought to the fore in its conclusion, and this disruption warns against a straightforward, nostalgic reading of the Victorian age and its narratives. The inheritance theme in The Quincunx, then, and in the neo-sensation genre  more broadly, encourages the interrogation of the Victorian period and its sprawling, complex, and often problematic legacies, and in doing so raises significant questions about the relationship between Victorian and neo-­ Victorian fiction.

Literary Inheritances: Mapping the Genealogy of the Neo-Sensation Novel The foregrounding of the inheritance theme in neo-sensation fiction emphasises the genre’s significance in terms of notions of literary inheritance, generic boundaries, and, as Heilmann and Llewellyn suggest, canon construction. The language of inheritance in neo-Victorian scholarship reinforces the notion of the neo-Victorian novel as part of the legacy of Victorian literature, but in circumscribing the genre of neo-Victorianism through a limited definition which works to exclude popular fiction,54 that legacy is transformed via literary criticism which effectively seeks to ‘disinherit’ the popular novel. The process of neo-Victorian canon construction undertaken by genre-defining scholarship thus functions as a ‘codicil’, shifting the terms of the legacy and dispossessing the popular descendants of the Victorian novel. Neo-Victorianism, according to certain critical definitions, thus constructs the popular novel as the bastard child of  See Chap. 1.

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Victorian literature and neo-Victorian literary texts as the ‘legitimate’ heirs. The process through which this occurs mirrors literary canon construction in the early twentieth century, which sought to emphasise the significance of a relatively small number of Victorian authors and novels, while underplaying—indeed, entirely overlooking—the role of popular fiction in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Neo-Victorian criticism, in its preferencing of ‘literary’ over popular fiction, has contributed to the construction of a hierarchy which places greater value on those narratives which are rooted in a detailed knowledge of the period and its cultural productions. While there is a clear justification for this, the legacy of the age lies as much in broader public encounters and understandings as in scholarly, ‘highbrow’ interpretations, including those of authors such as Waters and Palliser who are themselves Victorian scholars. The Quincunx, like Waters’s neo-sensation fiction, breaches the boundary between highbrow and popular fiction through both its plot and its wider appeal. This raises significant questions about the Victorian legacy in relation to contemporary culture: the legacy left by the Victorians is not necessarily the same as the legacy inherited by contemporary culture. Some fifty thousand novels were published over the course of the Victorian period55: even following the expansion of the canon in the late twentieth century, relatively few of these remain on the cultural radar. Those which are still read, taught, written about, and adapted, then, represent only a partial legacy: others form part of a lost inheritance, which may or may not be rediscovered one day. Indeed, until the expansion of the canon in the late twentieth century, the sensation novel, in one sense at least, represented part of this lost inheritance: though its influence on popular fiction and literary conventions can be traced from its initial emergence to the present day, for most of the twentieth century, it remained largely absent from university syllabuses and critical debates. The Victorian literary legacy, then, is the creation of both the Victorian age itself, and subsequent generations’ ­cultural preferences, not least those represented by both the neo-Victorian and wider literary canons. The focus of neo-Victorian scholarship, at least until relatively recently, on ‘literary’ and postmodern texts represents a shaping of the Victorian literary legacy: certain works, authors, and narrative conventions are celebrated, while others are excluded, implying a hierarchy of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ Victorian literary heirs. 55  John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, and Readers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 151–152.

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The influence of nineteenth-century popular fiction on the contemporary historical novel—both popular and ‘highbrow’—is pervasive: ultimately, then, neo-Victorianism cannot escape its low/middlebrow literary roots, though some critical voices remain as anxious as the Victorians themselves to disguise a ‘disreputable’ ancestry, to construct certain of its heirs as ‘illegitimate’. In The Woman in White, Mrs Catherick laughs derisively at the notion of Percival Glyde as ‘a powerful man—a baronet—the possessor of a fine estate—the descendent of a great family’ (489), because she knows he is illegitimate, and thus has no legal entitlement to his title, ‘fine estate’, and family name. Glyde is masquerading as something he is not—a respectable member of the aristocracy. This suggests a useful analogy for the neo-Victorian literary novel: awash with the evidence of the influence of Victorian sensation fiction, it—or at least its critics—make certain claims to its ‘respectability’, drawing a clear line between the genre and contemporary historical popular fiction, and, in doing so, expressing an anxiety about origins which mirrors Victorian concerns. It would seem, then, that, like the Victorians, contemporary culture is engaged in a process of creating a particular kind of legacy, and one which seeks to maintain the hierarchical structures with which the nineteenth century was so concerned. Yet in spite of this, a cursory glance at neo-Victorian fiction evidences the widespread, and continuing influence of the Victorian sensation novel. Like Collins’s Percival Glyde, neo-Victorian fiction cannot escape its lowly origins—its relationship to something far less ‘respectable’ than the highbrow Victorian literature of Eliot, James et al. The sensation novel may have evolved, but it remains with us, asserting its mutated identity throughout contemporary neo-Victorian writing and disrupting the perceived cultural and intellectual legacies of the Victorian age.

References Arias, Rosario. 2014. Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 111–122. London and New York: Routledge. Beer, Gillian. 2009. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brontё, Charlotte. 2001. Jane Eyre. 1847; New York: Norton. Carroll, Samantha J. 2010. Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-­ Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction. Neo-Victorian Studies 3 (2): 172–205.

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Collins, Wilkie. 2006. The Woman in White. 1860. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Cox, Michael. 2008. The Glass of Time. London: John Murray. Davies, Helen. 2012. Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilmartin, Sophie. 1998. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutleben, Christian. 2001. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haggard, H. Rider. 1888. Mr Meeson’s Will. London: Spencer Blackett. Hardy, Thomas. 2003. Preface to the Fifth Edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin, 463. London: Penguin. Harwood, John. 2013. The Asylum, 2014. London: Vintage. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hinsliff, Gaby. 2006. Bring Back Victorian Values. The Guardian, December 10. Holmwood, Leigh. 2009. Michael Parkinson: My Family Was Too Dull for Who Do You Think You Are?. The Guardian, July 21. James, Henry. 2004. Preface to The Tragic Muse (1908). In The Portable Henry James, ed. John Auchard, 476–477. London: Penguin. Kirchknopf, Andrea. 2013. Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the 19th Century. Jefferson: McFarland. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2014. Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein: Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 21–37. New York: Routledge. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutelben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———, eds. 2012a. Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2012b. The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations. In Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, ed. Nadine Boehm-­ Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 1–48. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press. Krueger, Christine L. 2002. Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Athens: Ohio University Press. Letissier, Georges. 2004. Dickens and Post-Victorian Fiction. In Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, ed. Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben, 111–128. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Llewellyn, Mark. 2008. What Is Neo-Victorian Studies? Neo-Victorian Studies 1 (1): 164–185.

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Marks, Kathy. 1997. Blair Issues Apology for Irish Potato Famine. The Independent, June 2. Mitchell, Kate. 2010. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moran, Maureen. 2006. Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum. Muller, Nadine. 2009/2010. Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-­ Wave Feminism and Neo-Victorian Fiction. Neo-Victorian Studies 1 (1): 109–136. Palliser, Charles. 1989a. The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam. London: Penguin. ———. 1989b. Author’s Afterword. In The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam, 1203–1221. London: Penguin. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Vol. 3. Chicago, CL: University of Chicago Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1976. Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. The Victorian Newsletter 49 (Spring): 1–5. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1997. Preface to Jacques Derrida. In Of Grammatology, xxvii–xcxii. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Sutherland, John. 1995. Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, and Readers. New York: St. Martin’s. Sweet, Matthew. 2001. Inventing the Victorians: What We Think We Know About Them and Why We’re Wrong. London: Faber and Faber. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1889. Wilkie Collins. Fortnightly Review cclxxi: 589–599. Taylor, Andrew. 2013. Crime Fiction—Review. The Spectator, June 8. https:// www.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/crime-fiction-review/. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: ‘Substantial Ghosts’— Sensational Continuities and Legacies

In 1891, Austin Fryers1 published a parody entitled A New Lady Audley. Described by Archibald Balling Shepperson in his 1936 study of the burlesque novel as a ‘parody-burlesque of Lady Audley’s Secret’,2 its publication some thirty years after Braddon’s novel first appeared speaks to sensation fiction’s success in the nineteenth century. It also represents a potential starting point for the neo-sensation novel and its appearance at a time when the sensation novel was still in vogue points to the blurred boundaries between sensation and neo-sensation and to the paradoxical possibility that neo-Victorianism emerges in the Victorian period itself. Though it coincided with Braddon’s later career, as well as with late-­ Victorian sensation fiction by writers including Rider Haggard and May Crommelin, it is not itself a sensation novel, but rather a parodic imitation of the form,3 which serves to highlight the genre’s reliance on improbable plotting. By virtue of its mockery of the sensation novel, it is also distinct from later neo-sensation fiction, which, whilst sometimes acknowledging the shortcomings of the earlier genre (as in Peters’s gentle parodying of Victorian literature in her Amelia Peabody series), nonetheless seeks to  Fryers was the pseudonym of William Edward Clery (1861–1931).  Archibald Balling Shepperson, The Novel in Motley: A History of the Burlesque Novel in English (Cambridge, 1936), p. 271. 3  Sensation satires were not uncommon: Watts Phillip’s The Woman in Mauve, discussed in Chap. 1, represents an earlier example. 1 2

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engage the reader of popular fiction in a similar manner to the sensation novel. Yet in spite of these distinctions, Fryer’s work is suggestive of some of the trends that emerge in the afterlives of the sensation novel. In the opening ‘Introductory Chapter’,4 he quickly dispatches most of the characters from Braddon’s original novel: Sir Michael dies of a broken heart; Alicia, married to Sir Harry Towers, dies in childbirth; Robert, having inherited his uncle’s title and estates, is killed in ‘an accident in the hunting-field’ (75); his widow, Clara, goes to join her brother, George Talboys, on a cattle ranch in Texas. For good measure, he also does away with the next two heirs to Audley Court (dying of old age and drowning during a cruise on the Mediterranean respectively), bringing us to the central protagonists of his story, Sir Thomas Audley and his wife, Sibyl, the new Lady Audley of the title. All that remains, then, of Braddon’s original novel is the house and grounds of Audley Court, and these are subject to significant improvements: [Sir Thomas] had the clock seen to, so that now it has two hands, and does its work in a respectable and decent manner; the clock-tower too and the arch have had a few pailsful of mortar and half a dozen bricks or so judiciously distributed in the cracks and flaws. […] [H]e has re-established the usefulness of the well in the lime-walk […] Not that he feared it to be dangerous, for it was traditional that, though it was very deep the bottom was like an acrobat’s net, and a person might fall into it without receiving much injury. (106–113)

Despite these alterations, events strongly echo those of Braddon’s original novel, with a few significant alterations. Sir Thomas is married to Lady Sibyl, formerly an actress and dancer at the Imperiality Theatre—perhaps a nod to Braddon’s own experiences as an actor, or to the production of Lady Audley’s Secret at the Imperial Theatre a few years prior to the publication of Fryer’s work.5 Having fallen in love with another actress, Sir Thomas discovers his ‘wife’ is a bigamist, her real name being Cora Harraden (nee Burnett), wife of a ‘strolling fiddler’ (418). Determined to 4  Austin Fryers, A New Lady Audley (1891; Black Heath Editions [Kindle], 2014), loc.53. Subsequent locations given in parenthesis. 5  Her name and profession also recall Sibyl Vane in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask (1866), which contains striking parallels with Braddon’s novel, also includes a former actress in the role of sensation (anti-)heroine.

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protect her position, Sibyl pushes her husband down the well, but the act is witnessed by Sir Thomas’s illegitimate secret half-brother, Gilbert Macnamarri, who bears a striking resemblance to him. He visits Lady Audley, appearing like ‘a substantial ghost’ (599), and subsequently takes Sir Thomas’s place at Audley Court as husband to Sybil. Sir Thomas’s nephew, Ridley Audley, grows suspicious, and, with the help of a detective from Scotland Yard, Andrew Rambelow, uncovers the crime, despite Sibyl’s threats to have him declared mad and sent to an asylum. Sir Thomas Audley, having been hoisted out of the well in the bucket by local ‘clodhopper’ (711) Mr. Snooks, returns and claims his rightful place. Sibyl is returned to her first husband and Sir Thomas pays them two hundred pounds a year. Significantly, Fryer’s work anticipates later critical interpretations of Braddon’s novel, with regard to the original Lady Audley’s alleged madness. The new Lady Audley’ is in possession of a document entitled ‘FULL CONFESSION OF LUCY, “LADY AUDLEY,” GEORGE TALBOYS’ WIFE, TOGETHER WITH FULL PARTICULARS OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE ACT SHE COMMITTED IN HER MADNESS’. Looking on Lucy’s portrait, she declares: ‘no, my lady, you were not mad. You were a clever woman, who hated poverty as I do, and did your best to retain the luxury which alone makes life worth living’ (188). Subsequently, the narrative refers to Lucy as ‘the supposed mad-­ woman’ (1337). Sibyl’s motivations are the same—to protect her privileged position and avoid a return to a life of poverty. She is also critical of Robert Audley’s actions: ‘what good did he do by proving her to be a sinner? He only wrecked his uncle’s happiness’ (192). Like her predecessor, Sibyl has adopted a new identity and subsequently married a rich suitor to escape the poverty of her past, and a neglectful husband, and her actions, the narrative seems to imply, are entirely justified. The story, though, is not intended as a serious critique of Braddon’s novel. It is a parodic send up and much of it is played for laughs: the portrait of the previous Lady Audley is described as a ‘prig-Raphaelite composition of fiend and flame’ (180); Ridley Audley, who lives at ‘Fib Treat Court’ (354), has his suspicions aroused due to a wager on a tennis match (he believes Lady Audley has killed her husband in order to win the bet); his ‘evidence’ includes the account of a maid who confirms the water from the well tastes ‘brackish’ (990), which he attributes to the fact that his uncle ate ‘pâte de richomme the preceding evening’ (1007); and to Ridley’s suggestion that her husband may be at the bottom of the well, Lady

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Audley replies, ‘If he is, he has certainly kicked the bucket’ (1036). Despite the emphasis on satire, Fryers’s work does provide an apt metaphor for the legacy of the sensation novel: the original characters are no longer there, leaving only the ‘magnificent ancestral home’ (1456) and grounds which have been subject to significant improvements, but the plot contains strong echoes of the earlier narrative. Whilst the Victorian sensation novel’s structure and foundations are evident in its diverse legacies, the original characters are replaced with new, alternative figures, who nevertheless bear some resemblance to their predecessors. The locale remains familiar: the improvements to the ‘house’ suggest the transformations of the genre from popular to ‘highbrow’ literary fiction in some of its later incarnations, but the plots—in both popular and literary fiction—continue to echo those of Braddon and her contemporaries. The house itself is significant: the various subgenres to which the sensation novel has given rise and those tropes which feature recurrently in both sensation and neo-sensation fiction are persistently associated with the home and specifically with the ancestral home. This is frequently the site of the mysterious and criminal events at the heart of these narratives, the location of ‘buried secrets’, and thus of the investigations which lead to the narrative’s resolutions. It signifies the troubled pasts which haunt seemingly respectable families, and, if not literally haunted, it nonetheless symbolises past secrets which influence the present, and are often associated with the historical (and archaeological) tropes which populate these works. It is frequently the site of narrative trauma, and often embroiled in disputes about inheritance—indeed it often forms part of that inheritance and is thus central to the inheritance plots of these narratives. Heilmann and Llewellyn note that in neo-Victorian writing concerned with ‘notions of inheritance and ancestral destiny’, it is ‘[f]requently […] the domestic location of the family home that serves as an important link to the generational past of the protagonists’.6 Further, the (ancestral) home represents a material link with the Victorian past—in both the neo-sensation novel and in the contemporary landscape, populated by nineteenth-century buildings and houses. ‘A house is a living thing’, Miss Stacy tells Caroline in Holt’s Shivering Sands: ‘Houses are alive. Think what they’ve seen’ (251). Her comments reinforce the centrality of the home in the neo-­ sensation novel. In many respects then, the ancestral home stands as the

6

 Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 28.

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symbol which unites the diverse legacies of the sensation novel, as well as for contemporary culture’s relationship with the Victorian past. Glennis Byron, discussing contemporary Gothic fiction, notes that the house may serve as ‘an easily recognisable and visually coded gothic trope’, an ‘architectural import’ from an earlier time.7 The neo-sensation ancestral home serves a similar function, reaffirming the genre’s association with the Gothic, as well as its Victorian origins in the sensation novel. Audley Court, Limmeridge House, and East Lynne are transformed into Greenshaw’s Folly, the Ashley estate, and Lovat Stacy, and similarities between the later versions and their nineteenth-century predecessors reinforce the relationship between the genres. Caroline in Holt’s Shivering Sands is ‘thrilled yet repelled’ by the ‘machicolated towers with their crenellations’ of Lovat Stacy, which ‘seemed to give a warning to those who would carelessly enter through the gate below’ (31). The description blends the Gothic and the sensational, but also symbolises the dangers for those intent on uncovering the buried secrets of the past. The ‘overwhelming atmosphere of the past’ gives rise to a feeling that she is ‘being lured from this present century into an earlier age’ (32), just as the historical novel lures its readers back into the past. However, this journey back may not reveal anything about that past: indeed, it may only serve to obscure it, just as the ‘leaded panes’ at Lovat Stacy ‘shut out a good deal of the light’, casting ‘dark shadows in the room’ (41). The hidden secrets of the past, like the dark corners of the ancestral home, may not be illuminated. In many of these homes, the portraits of the former occupants look down from the walls: the strange portrait of Lucy Audley hangs on the wall of Audley Court in Fryers’s novel, as the new Lady Audley enacts a similar tale; the portrait of Ambrose Ashley, with his startling resemblance to his nephew, Philip, startles his widow Rachel when she visits the family home; the image of the handsome Beau Stacy, killed by his brother, graces the walls of Lovat Stacy. These portraits, like the houses they inhabit, reflect the doubling that is central to the sensation novel and its afterlives, as well as to the genres themselves: the contemporary neo-Victorian novel serving as a (distorting) mirror for its Victorian forebears. Fryer’s Audley Court is also associated with those key motifs and subgenres of sensation and neo-sensation fiction explored in this book: with 7  Glennis Byron, ‘Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace’ in Justin Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, eds., The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 81.

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Gothic symbolism, crime and detection, a youthful heroine, traumatic events (though here recounted humorously), with history and its pervasive influence on the present, and with inheritance. At the end of A New Lady Audley, Sir Thomas and his nephew reflect on the significance of Audley Court: ‘It is a grand old place, Ridley, after all […] We will never let it go out of the family. It must remain Audley Court while England remains worthy [of] the patronage of an Audley.’ ‘It is a pity,’ responded Ridley, ‘that its fame should have been smirched by the evil deeds of some of its mistresses.’ ‘[N]ot at all. It would not be half so well known if it weren’t for that. What harm did it do George Talboys or myself to take a header down the well? And look what it did for him—and the Court! Got them talked of all over the English-speaking world.’ (1465)

The house again seems to stand in here for the sensation genre and its afterlives via its original (ancestral) roots, its association with transgressive women, and its popularity. This popularity is firmly associated with sensation—with crime and in particular with criminal women. The sensation novel’s afterlives are marked by a combination of the respectable (‘literary’) and the popular, much like the ancestral home here is associated both with respectability (an ancient family name) and with sensation. Towards the end of A New Lady Audley, the narrative describes Sir Thomas and Ridley searching the house for Lady Audley and her imposter husband: They […] started to explore the house in the usual erratic fashion, necessarily pursued by reason of its structure, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase, leading to a door, which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the farthest. (1475)

The passage reproduces directly part of the opening description of Audley Court in Braddon’s novel: A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place—a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its

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turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the farthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder, Time[.] (44)

We find a significantly similar description of Lovat Stacy in Holt’s later novel: ‘The house was enormous; there were so many corridors and pairs of stairs which looked so much alike; therefore it was quite understandable that I should take the wrong turning’ (50). These descriptions, too, are suggestive of the complex legacy of the Victorian sensation novel. The parallels between them are suggestive of the genre’s gradual move away from its origins and its transformation into multiple different forms, some of which have limited sympathy with others. Those works which appear to have little in common with Victorian popular fiction, including neo-­ Victorian literary fiction, are nonetheless indebted to it: closer to its plots and tropes than they may initially appear. Embedded in the neo-Victorian genre are the complex echoes of the sensation fiction of Collins, Braddon, and their contemporaries. Just as the Victorian literary landscape now includes the popular fiction for many years excluded from the canon, neo-­ Victorianism must also acknowledge the role of popular fiction and culture, as well as the chronological continuum that exists between Victorian and neo-Victorian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. The neo-sensational is both a subgenre and a dominant influence within neo-Victorianism. Sensation fiction’s legacy is diverse, erratic even, complicating critical attempts to map it accurately. Time has rendered the sensation novel’s legacy complex and diffuse: it is the architect of neo-­ sensationalism as it is of Audley Court. Nonetheless, the echoes of the Victorian sensation novel are evident throughout the literary and cultural landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, its foundations and origins evident in a multitude of different forms: the sensation novel’s ‘substantial ghosts’ continue to haunt us.

References Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2003. Lady Audley’s Secret. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Byron, Glennis. 2012. Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace. In The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, 71–83. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Fryers, Austin. 2014. A New Lady Audley. 1891; Black Heath Editions (Kindle). Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holt, Victoria. 2013. Shivering Sands. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Shepperson, Archibald Bolling. 1936. The Novel in Motley: A History of the Burlesque Novel in English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Index1

A Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie, 47 Actresses, 119, 119n41, 128, 129, 220, 220n5 Adventure fiction, 112, 168, 179 Albert, Susan Wittig, see Paige, Robin Alcott, Louisa May, 112, 220n5 Alexander, Tasha, 3, 76, 87–89, 91, 93, 95–99, 172, 174, 199 And Only to Deceive, 76, 95, 97, 199 Lady Emily series, 95, 172, 174 Allan, Janice, 111n19 All the Year Round, 22 Amazon, 92 American fiction, 109 Andres, Sophia, 61 Angel of the hearth, 32 Anning, Mary, 165, 174, 176, 181 Archaeology, 4, 166–169, 172, 173n23, 178–183, 188, 191 The Argosy, 113

Arias, Rosario, 10, 11, 44, 128, 169, 170, 195 Art, 5, 8, 18n40, 30n91, 49, 58–70, 96, 115, 128, 129, 194 Artists, 16n32, 58–64, 67–69, 129 Asylums, 13, 15, 22, 29, 30n91, 61, 82, 89n38, 130, 131, 134n76, 142–144, 150, 151, 201, 209, 221 Austen, Jane, 196 Pride and Prejudice, 96 Authenticity, 88, 92, 97, 117, 133 B Bachman, Maria K., 41 Bardly, Rory, 29n90 Beauman, Sally, 47 Beer, Gillian, 198, 202 Beller, Anne-Marie, 168n8 Benjamin, Melanie, 64n38 Alice I Have Been, 64n38

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 J. Cox, Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4

239

240 

INDEX

Berger, John, 60n28 Bigamy, 8, 18n41, 24, 27, 55 Bildungsroman, 19, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 209 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 17n39, 42 Blair, Tony, 207 Bloom, Clive, 177n32 Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, 15, 171 Bollen, Katrien, 18n44 Booker Prize, 29, 30 Booth, Michael R., 25 Borgia, Danielle N., 112n26 Bormann, Daniel, 6 Bowser, Rachel A., 7n11 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 2, 12, 13, 20, 23, 42, 42n2, 43, 47–58, 61, 73, 74, 78–80, 82, 89, 92, 95, 97, 98, 104, 114, 115, 119n41, 119n42, 121, 122, 125, 143, 162, 176, 177, 197, 200n12, 212, 219–222, 220n5, 224, 225 Aurora Floyd, 42, 73, 82, 115, 125, 134, 200n12 Birds of Prey, 197 The Black Band, 121n50 Charlotte’s Inheritance, 197 The Doctor’s Wife, 74, 89, 121, 122 Eleanor’s Victory, 81, 82, 84, 143, 144 The Fatal Three, 197 Henry Dunbar, 42, 73, 79, 82, 84 His Darling Sin, 79 John Marchmont’s Legacy, 197 Joshua Haggard, 119n42 Lady Audley’s Secret, 2n1, 12, 13, 18, 18n41, 22, 23, 27, 42n2, 43, 46–58, 54n19, 61, 62, 73, 74, 78, 85, 95, 132, 184, 196, 219, 220 A Lost Eden, 119n41

Run to Earth, 197 Rupert Godwin, 119n41 Thou Art the Man, 79 The Trail of the Serpent, 119n41 Bradshaw, Annie, 22 Wife and Slave, 22 Brandreth, Gyles, 86 Brantlinger, Patrick, 81 Brightwell, Emily, 3, 7, 76, 86–89, 91–93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 176 Mrs. Jeffries series, 91, 96, 97 Brindle, Kym, 45 Britten, Benjamin, 16n36 Brockes, Emma, 112n25 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 69n43 Brontë, Charlotte, 8, 12, 17n39, 21, 42, 47, 59n27, 145, 184, 196 Jane Eyre, 8, 12, 16n33, 17–19, 17n39, 18n40, 21, 23n68, 27, 42, 46, 47, 93, 110, 145, 151, 196 Brontë, Emily, 8, 16, 17n39, 21, 42, 47, 197 Wuthering Heights, 8, 16–18, 16n33, 21, 23n68, 27, 42, 46, 197 Brown, Ford Madox, 64n36 Take Your Son, Sir!, 64n36 Brown, Joanne, 116 Browning, Robert, 64n37 ‘Andrea Del Sarto,’ 64n37 ‘My Last Duchess,’ 64n37 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 89n38 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 167 Butler, Catherine, 125, 127, 133 Butts, Dennis, 119, 120 Byatt, A. S., 5, 7, 10, 11, 30, 74, 88, 166, 167, 199, 204 On Histories and Stories, 167 Possession, 166, 199 Byron, Glennis, 223

 INDEX 

C Canon, 6–8, 17, 74, 98, 106, 111, 113, 186, 195, 200, 213, 214, 225 neo-Victorian, 6–8, 74, 98, 105, 186, 195, 200, 213, 214, 225 Capitalism, 123, 195 Caracciolo, Peter, 21n59 Carey, Peter, 16n34, 166 Jack Maggs, 16n34 Oscar and Lucinda, 166 Carr, John Dickson, 85 The Case of the Constant Suicides, 85 Carroll, Samantha J., 203, 204, 206, 208n41, 210 Cart, Michael, 109 Caspary, Vera, 29n90, 85 Laura, 85 The Secret of Elizabeth, 85 Chen, Mia, 168, 169 Chesterton, G. K., 85 Father Brown series, 85 Chevalier, Tracy, 105, 165, 165n1, 166 Remarkable Creatures, 105, 165, 166 Children’s fiction, 111, 125 The Christian Remembrancer, 77, 114 Christie, Agatha, 2, 73, 74, 78, 85, 173n23 Death on the Nile, 173n23 ‘Greenshaw’s Folly, 73, 74, 85, 223 Miss Marple, 73, 78, 85 Murder in Mesopotamia, 173n23 They Came to Baghdad, 173n23 Churchill, Henry George, 22 Puttyput’s Protégé, 22 Class, 8, 17, 18, 54, 76, 89, 93, 108, 121, 133, 151, 198, 208, 209 Collins, Suzanne, 110 The Hunger Games trilogy, 110 Collins, Wilkie, 2, 3, 12–33, 43, 45, 47, 58–60, 62, 63, 65, 65n39,

241

66, 68, 69, 77, 79, 85, 86, 89, 89n38, 90, 92, 100, 104, 108, 108n12, 115, 119n41, 120–125, 126n64, 130n72, 131, 143, 145–162, 152n19, 155n27, 168, 173n25, 179, 179n35, 179n39, 184, 185, 196, 197, 201, 209, 210, 215, 225 Antonina, 173n25 Armadale, 119, 143, 197 ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway,’ 79 The Fallen Leaves, 130n72 Heart and Science, 29 Hide and Seek, 59, 60, 65n39 The Law and the Lady, 79, 131 The Legacy of Cain, 197 ‘Mad Monkton,’ 196, 201 Man and Wife, 149–152, 155, 160 Miss Gwilt, 23n66 The Moonstone, 2n1, 12, 13, 77, 78, 85–87, 100, 108, 108n12, 119, 122–126, 143, 168, 172, 184, 185; adaptations, 85 The New Magdalen, 23n66, 131, 143 No Name, 84, 115, 196, 197, 209 Poor Miss Finch, 59, 60, 108n12, 119n41 ‘A Terribly Strange Bed,’ 85 The Woman in White; adaptations, 28n88, 29, 78n15, 146, 153, 155, 161; BBC, 29; comics, 30; computer game, 14, 30; online reading project, 14; The Woman in White (play), 24, 26, 152 Colón, Christine, 85n29 Coming-of-age literature, 107 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 12, 77, 84–86, 119n43, 167 The Lost World, 167 Sherlock Holmes, 77, 84 The Sign of Four, 12, 85, 119n43

242 

INDEX

Cook, Dutton, 22 The Trials of the Tredgolds, 22 Costa Prize, 103 Costantini, Mariaconcetta, 11, 11n22 Cox, Constance, 25, 27, 41 The Woman in White, 27, 41 Cox, Don Richard, 42n1 Cox, Michael, 9, 10, 86, 196, 199–201 The Glass of Time, 86, 199–201 The Meaning of Night, 10, 86, 196, 199–201 Craton, Lillian, 79, 79n17 Cresswell, Helen, 105 The Moondial, 105 Crime, 11, 21, 24, 41, 42, 45, 49, 55, 63, 73, 76–78, 76n9, 81, 82, 84–87, 89–91, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 104, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 143, 144, 150, 169, 172, 185, 202, 212, 221, 224 Crimes at the Dark House, 27, 29, 31 Crommelin, May, 219 Crossover fiction, 107, 110 Croxall, Brian, 7n11 D Dalziel, Margaret, 2 Dante, 21 Divine Comedy, 21 Darwin, Charles, 198 On the Origin of Species, 104 Darwinism, 198 David, Deirdre, 17n39 Davies, Helen, 205 De Muriel, Oscar, 86n31 Death, 18n40, 19, 31, 42, 47, 48, 48n14, 50, 55–58, 57n21, 61n31, 63, 64, 68–70, 69n43, 79, 81–84, 90, 91, 95, 96, 103, 118, 119, 122, 122n53, 124n59, 130, 132, 141, 151, 156, 161,

179, 185, 188, 189, 193, 195–197, 206, 209, 211 Dennis, Abigail, 19n48 Desperate Romantics, 61n31 Detective fiction, 2, 7, 11, 74–86, 74n3, 88–90, 98–100, 104, 108, 122, 173n23 Golden Age, 75, 85 Detectives amateur, 73, 75, 78, 79, 83–87, 172 female, 73, 77, 79, 81–84, 86n32, 90, 91, 99, 177 widows, 90, 91, 93, 95 Devonshire, F., 22 Emily Foinder, 22 Diaries, 95, 119, 128, 128n66, 148, 154, 155, 157–159 Dickens, Charles, 2, 8, 16, 16n34, 18, 18n46, 20, 20n56, 21, 56, 59n27, 86, 120, 167, 197, 208–210 Bleak House, 167, 208 David Copperfield, 120, 208 Dombey and Son, 59n27 Great Expectations, 16, 18, 18n46, 19, 56, 120, 145, 197, 209 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 120 Oliver Twist, 120 Our Mutual Friend, 18n46 Dickens, Charles (son), 120n45, 133 Dictionary of London, 120n45, 133 Disability, 130, 131, 134 Doctor Who, 7 Dodgson, Charles, 64, 64n38, 65 Domestic abuse, 8 Domesticity, 77n12, 78, 84, 99 Donelson, Kenneth L., 108, 114 Doubles, 19, 33, 45–47, 52–58, 70, 119n41, 145 Doyle, Terence, 22 The Two Households, 22 Drabble, Margaret, 10 Du Maurier, Daphne, 2, 43, 46–58, 154, 184, 201

 INDEX 

My Cousin Rachel, 43, 46–58, 53n18, 57n21, 70, 154 Rebecca, 46, 47 Dystopian fiction, 107 E Eagland, Jane, 29, 45, 104, 130n71, 134 Wildthorn, 29–31, 30n91, 45, 104, 130n71, 134 Edwards, Amelia, 168 Barbara’s History, 168 Egyptology, 168, 174, 174n27, 179, 181 Eliot, George, 8, 16, 20, 21, 43, 197, 208, 209, 215 Felix Holt, 197, 209 The Lifted Veil, 43 Middlemarch, 113, 197, 208, 209 Eliot, T. S., 77 Empire, 94, 123, 125, 127, 134, 143, 146, 162, 174, 202 Emrys, A. B., 29n90, 85 Epistolary form, 18, 21 Erickson, Laurel, 31n97 Eugenics, 198 Evans, Albert, 22 Revealed at Last, 22 Evolutionary theory, 194, 198 Examiner, The, 24 F Faber, Michel, 11 The Crimson Petal and the White, 11 Fallen woman, 64n36, 130, 131, 142 Fan fiction, 29 Fantasy fiction, 104 Fantina, Richard, 22n62 Farmer, Steve, 123n56

243

Fathers, 42, 48, 48n14, 79–84, 90, 91, 103, 104, 115, 118, 119, 126, 130, 143, 154, 155, 155n26, 159–161, 166, 179, 185, 196, 197, 201, 211 Feldt, Laura, 111n22 Femininity, 48, 54, 57–59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 84, 90, 124, 125 Feminism, 28n88, 103, 180 Victorian, 103, 104 Feminist criticism, 17 Fin de siècle, 16 Fitzpatrick, Kylie, 85, 87 The Ninth Stone, 85, 87 Forman, Ross G., 108n12 Forrester, Andrew, 79 The Female Detective, 79 Foscolo, Ugo, 21 Last Letters of Jacobo Ortis, 21 Fowles, John, 5, 7, 88, 105, 166, 199, 204 The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 5, 105, 166, 199 Frame, Ronald, 16n34 Havisham, 16n34 Frank, Lawrence, 173n23 Frith, Nicola, 126n64 Fryer, Austin, 12, 219–223 A New Lady Audley, 12, 219, 223, 224 Fukunaga, Cary, 16n32 Jane Eyre, 16 Fywell, Tim, 31 The Woman in White, 31 G Garrett, Peter K., 46, 57 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 21 Gender, 8, 17, 59, 61, 77, 83, 93, 96, 112, 116n37, 133

244 

INDEX

Genre, 1–5, 3n3, 7–15, 17, 17n39, 18, 20–22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 41–46, 53, 56, 73–75, 77–80, 82, 83, 85, 88, 90–93, 96, 99, 100, 103n1, 104–116, 121, 122, 124, 128, 129, 132, 143, 145, 169, 172, 173, 176–180, 184, 187, 189, 195, 197–200, 210, 213, 215, 219, 222–225 Geology, 168, 169, 173n23, 174 Ghost story, 43 Gilbert, Pamela K., 121 Gilbert, Sandra M., 58, 61, 64 Gilmartin, Sophie, 197, 198 Gilmour, Robin, 18n46 Goldhill, Simon, 175 Goodreads, 104, 116, 116n37 Gothic, 4, 11, 12, 14, 17–19, 21, 32, 41–60, 59n25, 62, 62n34, 63, 67, 70, 70n46, 75–78, 80, 103, 104, 107, 108, 112, 117, 132, 154, 172, 176, 184, 200, 223, 224 Governess, 18n40, 18n41, 145 Gray, Effie, 62, 62n32, 65 Green, John, 110 The Fault in Our Stars, 110 Gruss, Susanne, 15, 171 Gubar, Susan, 58, 59n24, 61, 64 Gutleben, Christian, 43, 46, 95, 145, 165n1, 200, 205, 210, 211 H Hadley, Louisa, 5n5, 75, 77, 147, 158, 205 Haggard, H. Rider, 112, 168, 193, 195, 209, 219 King Solomon’s Mines, 168 Mr Meeson’s Will, 193, 209 Hand, Elizabeth, 61n31 Mortal Love, 61n31

Hanes, Susan R., 85n29 Harding, John, 16n36 Florence and Giles, 16n36 Hardinge, Frances, 103, 104, 166 The Lie Tree, 166 Hardy, Thomas, 160, 167, 197, 208, 211, 212 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 167 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 160, 197 Harris, Joanne, 2, 3, 6, 29, 43, 46, 58, 62, 62n33, 65, 68, 69 Sleep, Pale Sister, 3, 6, 29, 43, 46, 58 Harrison, Kimberley, 22n62 Harwood, John, 10, 29, 45, 61n31, 199–201 The Asylum, 10, 29, 45, 199–201 The Ghost Writer, 61n31, 200 Hazelwood, Colin Henry, 120n46 Spring-heel’d Jack, The Terror of London, 120n46 Heilmann, Ann, 6, 7, 9, 28, 89, 92, 97, 148, 158, 159, 200, 204, 209, 213, 222 Heroines, 1, 14, 25, 26, 30n91, 42, 42n2, 47–50, 52, 54–56, 58, 60–62, 62n33, 65, 67–69, 76, 79–84, 90, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 108, 109, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125, 129–134, 141–143, 151, 155n27, 161, 168, 176, 179, 179n38, 180, 182, 184, 187, 190, 193, 220n5, 224 Hibbert, Eleanor, see Holt, Victoria Hickey, Elizabeth, 61n31 The Wayward Muse, 61n31 Hinton, S. E., 109 The Outsiders, 109 Ho, Elizabeth, 127 Hochberg, Shifra, 21n60

 INDEX 

Holland, Tom, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 166 The BoneHunter, 166 Holt, Victoria, 53n17, 74n2, 166, 172, 174, 176, 177, 184–191, 222, 223, 225 Shivering Sands, 53n17, 74n2, 166, 172, 174, 184–191, 222, 223 Home, 11, 41, 42, 49, 53, 58, 76–78, 80, 81, 83–85, 89, 92–94, 96, 185, 196, 201, 222, 223 ancestral, 200, 222–224 Homoeroticism, 108n12 Homosexuality, 31 Hooper, Mary, 104, 106, 117–134 Fallen Grace, 104, 106, 117–134 Horowitz, Anthony, 86 The House of Silk, 86 Moriarty, 86 Hughes, Winifred, 3n3, 17n39 Humphreys, Helen, 205 Afterimage, 205 Hunt, William Holman, 67n42 The Lady of Shalott, 67n42 Hutcheon, Linda, 16, 24, 28, 30, 76, 171 I Identity, 1, 11, 19, 22, 25, 30n91, 33, 42, 49, 50, 52, 60, 63–66, 68–70, 73, 78, 79, 82, 87, 91, 104, 109, 110, 119, 130, 132, 133, 142, 143, 146, 153, 162, 167, 168, 171, 172, 184, 196–198, 200–203, 206, 207, 209, 211, 215, 221 sexual, 30 Illegitimacy, 24, 33, 52, 130, 152, 196, 197, 209 Imperialism, 127, 176, 205 Incest, 31, 146, 153, 162

245

India, 122, 123, 125, 126, 126n64 Indian Rebellion (1857), 119 terminology, 126n64 Inheritance, 4, 14, 33, 50, 57, 73, 79, 84, 119, 130–131, 180, 184, 191, 193–215, 222, 224 The Innocents, 16n36 Intertextuality, 24, 98 Irish famine, 207 J Jack the Ripper, 86, 99 Jackson, Lee, 87 A Metropolitan Murder, 87 James, Henry, 16, 16n36, 18, 20, 43, 88, 208, 212, 215 The Turn of the Screw, 16, 18, 43, 46, 145 Johnson, Heidi H., 82, 83 Jones, Gail, 205 Sixty Lights, 205 Jones, Lloyd, 16n34 Mister Pip, 16n34 Journalists, 86, 87 K Kaiser, Matthew, 7n11 Kasasian, M. R. C., 86n32 The Gower Street Detective series, 86n32 Kelly, Tim, 13, 27, 30, 155n23 Egad, The Woman in White, 13, 27, 29, 30, 155n23 King, Andrew, 121 King, Laurie R., 86 Mary Russell series, 86 King, Stephen, 112 Kirchknopf, Andrea, 28 Knight, Charles, 114 Knight, Stephen, 80

246 

INDEX

Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 7, 7n12, 8, 15, 28, 32, 43, 46, 144, 145, 188, 194, 200, 205, 209 Kostova, Elizabeth, 16n35 The Historian, 16n35 Krueger, Christine L., 205n30 Kungl, Carla T., 51 Kushnier, Jennifer S., 54n19 L La Touche, Rose, 62n33 LaCapra, Dominick, 147 ‘The Lady in White,’ 30, 30n91 Laird, Karen, 25 Lanham, Cheryl, 91 Laski, Marghanita, 12 The Victorian Chaise Longue, 12 Laub, Dori, 148 Law, 57, 78, 80, 84, 149, 197, 198, 206 marriage, 57, 80, 96 Leavis, Q. D., 2, 113 Letissier, Georges, 209 Lewis, Matthew, 41, 42 Lewis, Richard G., 30n92 Lezard, Nicholas, 112n24 Liddell, Alice, 64, 64n38 Literary fiction, 2, 3, 5, 8–11, 14, 17, 30, 70, 74, 106, 110, 114, 122, 129, 134, 171, 174, 177, 181, 182, 191, 200, 204, 222, 225 Literary marketplace, 8, 11, 20, 21, 92, 103, 106, 109–113, 115–117 Lively, Penelope, 103n1, 105 A Stitch in Time, 103n1, 105 Llewellyn, Mark, 6, 7, 9, 28, 75, 89, 92, 97, 117, 148, 158, 159, 200, 204, 209, 213, 222 London, 22, 23, 86, 120, 127, 132, 165, 202n21, 207 The London Review, 78

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 185n46 Lutyens, Mary, 62n32 M MacLachlan Gray, John, 87 The Fiend in Human, 87 Madness, 17, 18n41, 19, 21, 45, 55, 70, 93, 143, 157, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 212, 221 hereditary, 201 Male gaze, 49, 59–61, 65, 66 Mangham, Andrew, 27n83, 111n19, 123n56 Mansel, H. L., 114 Marriage, 18n40, 18n41, 19, 24–27, 42, 48–50, 52, 57, 61, 61n31, 62, 62n32, 62n33, 65, 67–69, 80, 81, 83, 91, 96, 108n12, 115, 124, 142, 143, 148, 149, 156, 157, 189, 197, 199, 202, 209 Marryat, Florence, 79, 82 Her Father’s Name, 79, 82 Marsh, Kelly A., 10 Masculinity, 58, 61, 79, 80 Maunder, Andrew, 18, 22n62 McCracken, Scott, 75, 87, 91, 94, 97, 100 Media, 15, 17, 76 Medievalism, Victorian cult of, 202 Mejan, Maurice, 21 Recueil des Causes Célèbres, 21 Melodrama, 11, 13, 14, 21, 25, 27, 29, 30, 74, 118n39 Menstruation, 123 Mertz, Barbara, see Peters, Elizabeth Mertz, Maia Pank, 111 Metatextuality, 3 #Metoo, 146, 155 Meyer, Stephanie, 104, 110–112 Twilight series, 104, 110, 111

 INDEX 

Millais, John Everett, 61n31, 62, 62n32, 67, 68 Mariana, 67 A Waterfall in Glenfinlas, 68 Miller, J. Hillis, 28 Mills, Catriona, 7n11 Mills and Boon, 30 Mitchell, Kate, 128, 205 Mitchell, Margaret E., 47, 57 Modernism, 5, 212 Moore, Grace, 10 Moore, Suzanne, 77, 77n12, 82, 83 Moran, Maureen, 203 Moretti, Franco, 74 Morey, Anne, 106n6 Mosse, Kate, 172 Sepulchre, 172 Motherhood, 69, 115 Mountain, Fiona, 61n31 Pale as the Dead, 61n31 Mudie’s circulating library, 93, 109 Muller, Nadine, 90, 91, 97, 199 Mulvey, Laura, 60n29 Musical theatre, 27, 30 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 29n90 Names, 1, 20, 22, 30n91, 49–52, 62, 63, 79, 81, 82, 84, 89, 121, 142, 153, 172, 174n27, 176, 176n30, 179n39, 185n46, 188, 196, 201, 209, 215, 220, 220n5, 224 Narrators, 18, 49, 50, 63, 78, 96n51, 122, 124, 159, 160, 162, 193, 210 Nelson, Claudia, 106n5 Neo-sensationalism, 11, 12, 14 Neo-Victorianism, 2–13, 3n3, 15, 30, 43, 70, 75, 98–100, 104, 105, 127, 144, 145, 162, 165n1, 169, 189, 191, 206, 210, 213, 215, 219, 225

247

criticism, 4, 8, 76, 106, 195, 203–206, 214 Newbery, Linda, 29, 31, 61n31, 104, 130n71, 145, 153, 155, 159–161 Set in Stone, 29–31, 30n91, 61n31, 104, 130n71, 145, 148, 153, 155, 155n26, 159, 161 Newgate novel, 11, 21, 76 A New Lady Audley, 219 New Woman, 179 Niffenegger, Audrey, 199, 199n10 Her Fearful Symmetry, 199 Nilsen, Alleen Pace, 108, 114 Northington, Jenn, 112n23 Nostalgia, 95, 99, 132, 189, 204 O O’Donovan, Hallie, 107n9, 125, 127, 133 Oliphant, Margaret, 17n39, 77, 113 Opium trade, 118 Orphans, 115, 129–131 The Others, 16n36 P Paige, Robin, 74n2, 172, 176, 176n30, 177 Death at Bishop’s Keep, 172, 177 Victorian Mystery series, 74n2, 177 Palaeontology, 103, 166n3, 167, 168, 172, 173n23, 174 Palliser, Charles, 2, 3, 9–11, 195, 199, 207–214, 208n41 The Quincunx, 3, 9, 10, 195, 199, 200, 207–214 Rustication, 11 Palmer, William J., 11, 86 The Detective and Mr Dickens, 86 Patriarchy, 54, 56–58, 67, 83, 153

248 

INDEX

Payn, James, 196 The Clyffards of Clyffe, 196 Penny dreadfuls, 74, 89, 120–122, 120n46, 126–128, 131, 177, 185 Pepper, Andrew, 86 Pyke mysteries, 86 Period drama, 17, 95, 98, 99 Peters, Elizabeth, 7, 168n8, 172–174, 174n27, 176–183, 176n30, 187, 188, 219 Amelia Peabody series, 172, 174, 174n27, 178, 219 The Crocodile on the Sandbank, 166, 178–183, 190 Curse of the Pharaohs, 179n39 Deeds of the Disturber, 179n39 The Last Camel Died at Noon, 179n39 Phillips, Watts, 23, 24 The Woman in Mauve: A Sensation Melodrama, 23 Photography, 103, 119, 128, 129 Pirie, David, 146, 148, 152, 153, 155, 155n26, 156, 159–162 The Woman in White, 28n88, 29, 145, 146, 153 Poe, Edgar Allan, 69, 69n43 Popular culture, 2, 3, 11, 28, 74, 93, 109, 117, 174, 189 Popular fiction, 2–4, 7–10, 17, 20, 30, 42, 43, 56, 74–76, 78, 80, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 103n1, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 120, 122, 129, 132, 171, 174–177, 182, 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 207, 213–215, 220, 225 Popular press, 21, 76, 87 Postmodernism, 5, 95, 204, 210–212 Postnatal depression, 51 Pound, Ezra, 5 Power, Maggie, 59n25, 61n31

Goblin Fruit, 59n25 Lily, 61n31 Porphyria’s Lover, 61n31 Pregnancy, 51, 211 Pre-Raphaelites, 61, 61n31, 62n32, 64, 64n36, 67, 69n43 Primogeniture, 196, 198 Pulham, Patricia, 44 Pullman, Philip, 85, 103n1, 104, 106, 106n5, 109, 111, 112, 118–134 The Amber Spyglass, 103n1 His Dark Materials trilogy, 104, 109, 111, 118 The Ruby in the Smoke, 85, 106, 117–134 Sally Lockhart series, 104, 106n5, 131, 133 Spring-Heeled Jack, 120n46 The Shadow in the North, 118n39, 129 The Tiger in the Well, 118n39 The Tin Princess, 118n39 Punch, 23 Pykett, Lyn, 3n3, 17n39, 21, 125 Q Queen Victoria, 13, 160 R Race, 54, 108n12, 125 Radcliffe, Ann, 41, 42, 80, 180, 181 The Romance of the Forest, 80 Rae, W. F., 121, 121n47 Railways, 115, 130–132, 142 Rainey, Sarah, 112n24 Rape, 31, 62, 146, 149, 149n14, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160 Raybourn, Deanna Lady Julia Grey series, 87, 91 Silent in the Grave, 96n51

 INDEX 

Reade, Charles, 173n25 The Cloister and the Hearth, 173n25 Reader response theory, 9 Readers women, 60, 94, 95, 124, 149, 153, 190 young adult (YA), 112 Realism, 11, 81 Rees, Tracy, 199 Amy Snow, 199 Rego, Paula, 16n32 Religion, 111n22 Rennison, Nick, 172, 174 Carver’s Quest, 172, 174 Repression, 51, 144, 158 Reynold, Susan, 106n5 Rhys, Jean, 5, 16n32 Wide Sargasso Sea, 5, 16n32 Ricouer, Paul, 169 Ripper Street (BBC), 85n30, 86 Ritchie, Guy, 86 Sherlock Holmes, 86 Road Hill House murder, 76 Roman empire, 174 Rophie, Kate, 64n38 Still She Haunts Me, 64n38 Rosenthal, Sherry Lynne, 95n49 Ross Nickerson, Catherine, 77n12 Rossetti, Christina, 64, 65 ‘In an Artist’s Studio,’ 64 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 61n31, 64, 67 Ecce Ancilla Domini, 67n41 The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 67 ‘My Sister’s Sleep,’ 64 Rowling, J. K., 104, 107, 110, 110n15, 111 Harry Potter series, 104, 107, 109, 110 Rubery, Matthew, 21n58 Ruskin, John, 61n31, 62, 62n32, 62n33, 65, 68

249

S St Clair, Nancy, 116, 116n38 Salah, Christiana, 24, 25n74, 31 Sanders, Julie, 15, 28 Saturday Review, 20, 24 Savage, Elizabeth, 61n31 Willowwood, 61n31 Sayers, Dorothy L., 85, 85n29 The Nine Tailors, 85 Schaub, Melissa, 74n3 Science, 107 Science fiction, 107, 112 Secrets from the Asylum (ITV), 86, 202 Self-publishing, 115 Sensation fiction adaptations of, 3 radio, 1, 2 screen, 1, 3 stage, 1, 3 Seres, Fiona, 146, 148, 155, 161 The Woman in White (BBC 2018), 145, 148 Servants, 1, 53n18, 67, 80, 84, 86, 87, 93, 94, 130, 142, 209 Setterfield, Diane The Thirteenth Tale, 6, 23n68, 29, 31, 45, 61n31, 145, 148, 200 Sexual abuse, 4, 29–31, 132, 146– 150, 152–162, 152n19, 153n20 Sexuality, 30, 32, 58, 89, 123, 124, 130n71, 157n30, 184 female, 123, 124 Shakespeare, William, 24, 69 Shelley, Mary, 21 Frankenstein, 21 Shepperson, Archibald Balling, 219, 219n2 Sherlock (BBC), 86 Shiller, Dana, 5, 6n7 Showalter, Elaine, 212n52 Shuttleworth, Sally, 16, 16n38, 19, 178, 178n34

250 

INDEX

Siddall, Elizabeth, 69n43 Silver fork novel, 21 Simmons, Dan, 10, 86 Drood, 10, 86 Soap opera, 14, 144 The Spectator, 108, 201 Spiritualism, 62 Steampunk, 7 Steere, Elizabeth, 168n8, 174n27, 177, 179n39, 181n40 Stetz, Margaret, 106n5 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 16, 47, 112 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 16 Stoker, Bram, 16, 19 Dracula, 16, 19 Stoker, Dacre, 16n35 Dracula: The Un-Dead, 16n35 Stoneman, Patsy, 16n33 Strachey, Lytton, 5n5 Suicide, 69n44, 81, 143, 144, 159, 162 Summerscale, Kate, 76n9, 85 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, 77n9, 85 Supernatural, 12, 18, 18n43, 41, 42, 45, 47, 62n34, 104, 105, 180, 184, 199n10 Surridge, Lisa, 149, 149n16 Sutherland, John, 214n55 Sweet, Matthew, 203, 203n23 Swift, Graham, 5, 10, 166 Ever After, 166 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 20 T Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, 172, 173 Taylor, Andrew, 201n17 Taylor, D. J., 87–89 Kept, 87 Tennyson, Alfred, 64, 65 ‘The Beggar Maid,’ 64

The Times, 133 Thompson, Brian, 74n2, 87–90 Bella Wallis mysteries, 86 The Widow’s Secret, 87, 88 Trace, 2, 7, 29, 75, 85, 169, 170, 174, 193–195, 202, 203 Derridean, 194 Trauma, 4, 43, 141–162, 189, 202, 207, 222 sexual, 14, 31, 32, 141–162 Trodd, Anthea, 80, 84 Trupe, Alice, 109n13 Turner, J. M. W., 157, 158 Twain, Mark, 112 Twins, 53, 119, 119n41, 153 U The Unfortunate Marriage, 29 V Vernes, Jules, 167 A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 167 Vickroy, Laurie, 144, 146, 150 Violence, 30, 31, 56, 57, 57n21, 88, 150 sexual, 153, 156 Vlasopolos, Anca, 123 W Walker, Peter, 112n25 Wallace, Diana, 184n43 Walpole, Horace, 41, 42 War, 48n14, 144, 146, 160 Ware, J., 22, 24–26, 28 The Woman in White: A Drama in Three Acts, 22 Waterhouse, John William, 67n42 ‘I am half sick of shadows’ said the Lady of Shalott,’ 67n42

 INDEX 

Waters, Sarah, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 19, 19n48, 22n63, 45, 74, 88, 134n76, 145, 152, 199, 214 Fingersmith, 3, 6, 10, 29–31, 30n91, 45, 145, 152, 153n20, 199; screen adaptation, 3 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 27, 30, 31 The Woman in White, 30–31 Westminster Review, 88 Whitechapel (ITV), 86 Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC), 202, 203n22 Widows, 48, 49, 55–57, 87, 90, 91, 95–97, 184, 220, 223 Wilson, A. N., 16n36 A Jealous Ghost, 16n36 Wilson, James, 10, 29, 31, 145, 148, 153, 157–161 The Dark Clue, 10, 29–31, 30n91, 145, 148, 153, 157, 160, 161 Wire, The, 7 Wollaston, Sam, 155n28

251

Wood, Mrs Henry, 2, 12, 59n27, 119n42, 141, 142, 177, 184, 196 East Lynne, 12, 22, 59n27, 78, 79, 97, 115, 119n41, 132, 141, 142, 196, 200n12 Pomeroy Abbey, 184 St Martin’s Eve, 196 Trevlyn Hold, 119n42, 184 Woolf, Virginia, 59n24, 113 ‘Professions for Woman,’ 59n24 Y Yonge, Charlotte, 168 The Trial, 168 Young Adult (YA) fiction, 4, 103–134 Z Zieger, Susan, 124, 126n64 Zimmerman, Virginia, 169–171, 175, 181