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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Eva Badowska
Eva Badowska*
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Extract

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

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 157 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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