Sensation became the rage, and sensations were demanded every hour…. [S]peedily a phalanx of lady-novelists sprang up… armed with the ‘Newgate Calendar,’ the Annals of the Divorce Court, the gossip of the smoking-room, the argot of the race-course … [I]n the pages of sensation novels, especially in those which are penned by the gentler sex, vice runs riot, and crime reigns supreme … [It] is curious that Society should not only permit such a monstrous libel on its own character, but should also complacently reward its libellers.

This is the age of the lady novelists, and lady novelists naturally give first place to the heroine[s] … [who are] pictured as high-strung women, full of passion, purpose, and movement – very liable to error. Now the most interesting side of a woman's character is her relation to the other sex, and the errors of women that are most interesting spring out of this relation.

[N]ovels in which woman plays a …much more exciting part … [now] ride in triumph. If, as French sociologists are never tired of telling us, woman in a special manner reflects her surroundings, it is only natural that the clever ladies who supply our circulating libraries should reflect in their writings the change in the spirit and taste of the age, and go to Bow Street and the Divorce Court for their inspirations.

No man would have dared to write and publish such books … no man could have written such delineations of female passion …No! They are women, who by their writings have been doing the work of the enemy of souls, glossing over vice, making profligacy attractive, detailing with licentious minuteness the workings of unbridled passions, encouraging vanity, extravagance, wilfulness, selfishness …Women have done this, – have thus abused their power and prostituted their gifts; – who might have been bright and shining lights in their generation.