THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

THE ‘IMPROPER’
FEMININE
The Women’s Sensation Novel and
the New Woman Writing

Lyn Pykett

London and New York

 First published 1992
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

© 1992 Lyn Pykett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Pykett, Lyn
The improper feminine: the women’s sensation novel and
the new woman writing.
I. Title
823.809354

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Available on request

ISBN 0-203-35920-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37176-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-04928-8 (Print Edition)
For Ben, Rachel and Jessica
 Contents

Introductory note ix

Part I The ‘Improper’ Feminine

1 Gender and writing, writing and gender 3

2 The subject of Woman 11

3 The subject of Woman and the subject of
women’s fiction 19

4 Fiction and the feminine: a gendered critical

discourse 22

5 Fiction, the feminine and the sensation novel 30

6 Representation and the feminine: engendering
fiction in the 1890s 36

Part II The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties:

The Limits of the Proper Feminine

7 Historicising genre (1): the cultural moment of

the woman’s sensation novel 47
8 Surveillance and control: women, the family and
the law 55

9 Spectating the Social Evil: fallen and other women 62

10 Reviewing the subject of women: the sensation

novel and the ‘Girl of the Period’ 67

vii
 CONTENTS

11 Historicising genre (2): sensation fiction, women’s

genres and popular narrative forms 73

12 Mary Elizabeth Braddon: the secret histories of

women 83
13 Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the family, and
the spectacle of women’s suffering 114

Part III Breaking the Bounds:

The Improper Feminine and the Fiction
of the New Woman

14 The New Woman 137

15 The New Woman writing and some marriage
questions 143

16 Writing difference differently 154

17 Feeling, motherhood and True Womanhood 158

18 Woman’s ‘affectability’ and the literature of
hysteria 164

19 Writing women: writing woman 177

20 New Woman: new writing 192

Conclusion: reading out women’s writing 198

Notes 210
Works referred to 215
Index 225

viii
 Introductory note

The women’s sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman
writing of the 1890s were among the chief literary sensations of
their day. They were widely read, heatedly discussed in the
newspaper and periodical press, imitated, parodied and, in some
cases, adapted for the stage. In short, they were part of the
general cultural currency of the second half of the nineteenth
century. Despite (or perhaps because of) this fact, the novels and
stories at the centre of this study are, on the whole, works which
had disappeared from view, or had been relegated to the status of
minor historical curiosities, until their rediscovery in the wake of
the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. In re-examining these
texts it is not my intention to insist that they should be
recognised as neglected, forgotten, or suppressed masterpieces of
English literature. I am not interested in adding them to the
existing canon, nor in constructing an alternative female canon.
However, I hope that this study will show that the female
sensationalists of the 1860s and the New Woman writers of the
1890s occupy an important place in the cultural history of the
nineteenth century, and played an important part in the
development of fiction. In the process I hope to explore some of
the ways in which these women writers (and perhaps women’s
writing generally) are written out of history, even as they are
being written in history.
It is certainly my aim to reinsert the women’s sensation novel
and the New Woman writing into literary history: first by
locating the women’s writing of the 1860s and 1890s in its
particular cultural moment, by offering readings of individual
novels in relation to the specific circumstances of their
production, and secondly, by bringing these two moments
together for comparative analysis. One result of this process will

ix
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

be to reinstate these texts in literary history; that is to say, to

make them visible. As many feminist literary historians have
demonstrated, this kind of scrutiny changes the shape of literary
history by subtly altering our sense of literary periodisation, and
of dominant genres and modes. It also changes our perception of
the canonical writers, both male and female.1
This double focus (and refocusing) will suggest some
important interrelationships in the literary and wider culture of
the mid-Victorian and fin de siècle periods. It will also facilitate
a reassessment of some of the continuities and contrasts in
women’s writing, without having recourse to the idea of a female
tradition deriving from a specific female subculture, or to
ahistorical and essentialist notions of a female imagination or a
feminine writing.
Although I focus exclusively on fiction written by women, and
which is, on the whole, primarily about women, my concern is
not simply with women, but with broader questions of gender
definition. With this in mind I attempt to situate this women’s
writing in contemporary discourses on gender, and in (what I
shall argue is) a gendered discourse on fiction. This latter was an
important constituent or determinant of the production and
mediation of the work of the female sensationalists, the New
Woman writing and, indeed, the nineteenth-century novel in
general.
Elaine Showalter (1991) has recently redirected our attention
to George Gissing’s description of the fin de siècle period as one
of ‘sexual anarchy’ (3). My concern in this book is with a sexual
anxiety, or, more specifically, with an anxiety about gender,
which pervades the writing of much of the Victorian period. The
women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction both
embody and explore, as well as acting as a focus for, this gender
anxiety. They are part of, and they address, a broadly based
nineteenth-century social crisis which was, in important respects,
articulated as a crisis of definition of gender.
Some of the material in chapters 4–6 appears in a different
form in an essay I wrote in 1987–8. Such are the delays to which
multi-authored volumes are subject that publication of this
essay—‘Representing the real: the English debates about
naturalism, 1884–1900’, in Brian Nelson (ed.) Naturalism in the
European Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism—will probably
coincide with the publication of the present volume.

x
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Unfortunately, since I did not see Ann Ardis’s New Women,

New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism until my own book
was at a late proof stage, I was unable to make use of its
perceptive findings. Ardis’s discussion of the New Woman fiction
can be thoroughly recommended.

xi
 Part I
The ‘Improper’
Feminine
 1
Gender and writing, writing and
gender

A man’s book is a book. A woman’s book

is a woman’s book.
(Christiane Rochefort 1981:183)

The canonical map of literary history represents the novel as a

primitive territory colonised and civilised by brave male
explorers. This masculinised version of the history of fiction is
particularly dominant in the case of the two decades which are
the focus of this study: the 1860s and the 1890s. George Eliot,
whose final novel was published in 1876, is virtually the only
woman writing in the 1860s to have achieved canonical status,
and it has often seemed that she secured her place in the canon
by being accepted as an honorary man—a process encouraged by
her adoption of the lofty, mandarin tone of a masculine or
gender-neutral form of address.1 The traditional history of the
later Victorian novel is entirely dominated by male writers: the
central figure of Thomas Hardy is surrounded by the attendant
spirits of the three lesser Georges—Meredith, Gissing and
Moore.
As many feminist literary historians have pointed out,2 the
construction of this canon has involved the filtering out of a
great deal of writing, including virtually all of the fiction
produced by women. Clearly women writers were extremely
active in the production of fiction throughout the nineteenth
century, and they certainly played a very important part in two
particularly fiercely debated developments: the sensation novel of
the 1860s and the fiction variously described as the ‘Fiction of
Sex’, the ‘New Fiction’, or the ‘New Woman Fiction’ of the

3
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

1890s. The women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction
were two of the most prominent examples of a perceived
invasion of fiction by the feminine which was a major talking-
point in the press throughout the Victorian period. The shocking,
unconventional heroines of the women sensation writers, such as
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Rhoda Broughton and
‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), and the daring or neurotic
fictional New Women and their female creators, who included
Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, Ménie Muriel Dowie, Netta Syrrett
and George Egerton, were among the most widely discussed and
hotly contested aspects of this ‘irruption of the feminine’
(Boumelha 1982:79) into fiction and the culture at large
This study aims to explore the nature of this irruption of the
feminine, and its contemporary cultural significance, as well as to
suggest something of its continuing interest and importance for
both present-day feminists and students of nineteenth-century
literature and culture. Although the cultural phenomenon
denoted by the phrase ‘irruption of the feminine’ is not
exclusively the domain of female writers,3 my own concern will
be with women’s writing, and with the discursive and material
conditions in which it was produced and mediated.
It is, I hope, no longer necessary to justify the project of
focusing exclusively on women’s writing, or of resurrecting the
forgotten texts of ‘bourgeois’ women novelists. As Juliet Mitchell
(1984) argues, ‘We have to know where women are, why women
have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the
story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities
and impossibilities provided by that’ (289). My particular
justification for focusing exclusively on the women writers of the
1860s and the 1890s, rather than examining them in relation to
their male contemporaries, is that this latter task has already
been ably performed by others.4 One of the problems of the
existing studies, however, is that some of them tend to represent
women’s writing as ancillary to, or merely prefigurative of, the
dominant and achieved forms of male writing.
My own focus on the production, consumption and critical
mediation of the female sensation novel and the (women’s) New
Woman writing will enable me to raise important questions
about the specificity of women’s writing, about women’s writing
and difference, and about women’s writing as difference. My
primary concern will be to explore an historically specific sense

4
 GENDER AND WRITING, WRITING AND GENDER

of difference by examining the ways in which these two forms of

nineteenth-century women’s writing thematise, analyse and
articulate difference. I shall be looking at the women’s sensation
novel and the New Woman writing as (differing) forms of
écriture féminine, but I shall want to avoid the universalism and
essentialism that have sometimes been attached to this concept.
The women’s writing of the 1860s and 1890s, like all writing by
women, is marked by the writers’ specific experiences as women,
and by the ways in which their biological femaleness is
structured and mediated by socio-cultural concepts of femininity.
To this extent these women writers will be seen to reinscribe their
culture’s stories about femininity. However, they also
participated in a rewriting of this script of the feminine, as, in
various ways and to varying degrees, they self-consciously
explored or implicitly exposed the contradictions of prevailing
versions of femininity, or developed new styles and modes
through which to articulate their own specific sense of the
feminine.

At first sight nothing could appear more dissimilar than the

popular sensation novel of the 1860s, with its bigamous or
adulterous heroines and complicated plots of crime and intrigue,
and the ‘modern women’s books of the introspective type’
(Stutfield 1897:104), those ‘portentous anthems’ (Showalter
1978a:181) on the wrongs of women and the evils of men and
marriage which appeared in the 1880s and 1890s. Many
twentieth-century readers have readily identified the progressive
social views and proto-feminism of some of the New Woman
writers. Few (if any) of the female sensationalists could be
regarded as either feminist or progressive. However, there are a
number of reasons why it is interesting to consider these two
apparently disparate kinds of fiction together. One of the most
obvious is that, although they are generically different, and
appear to offer radically different views of women’s predicament,
nevertheless both the women’s sensation novel and the New
Woman fiction consist mainly of works which fit W.T.Stead’s
(1894) description of the ‘novel of the modern woman’; they are
novels ‘by a woman about women from the standpoint of
Woman’ (64). Both types of fiction are grounded in women
writers’ attempts to find a form, or forms, in which to represent
and articulate women’s experience, and women’s aspirations and

5
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

anxieties, as well as anxieties about women. They are, therefore,

particularly fertile ground for feminist investigation.
The women sensationalists and the New Woman writers both
worked with forms which have usually been regarded as
predominantly feminine, even when they have been used by male
writers. The sensationalists brought together, in varying ways and
proportions, the dominant female forms of the early nineteenth
century: female gothic, melodrama and domestic realism. The
New Woman writers reworked and recombined melodrama,
gothic, sensationalism and the domestic, as well as developing new
modes of ‘feminine’ writing, such as introspective reverie, dream
sequences and, in some cases, a distinctive, idiosyncratic and
highly wrought lyricism.
Both groups of writers focused minutely on individual
women’s lives, demonstrating or exploring the contradictions of
the dominant ideology of the feminine, by charting the conflict
between ‘actual’ female experience and the domestic, private,
angelic feminine ideal. Both focused on marriage, rather than on
the courtship which formed the main narrative trajectory of most
Victorian fiction. Both constructed plots and characters which
registered or interrogated the contradictions of contemporary
marriage and the domestic ideal. In short, both of these genres
were produced by, and were interventions in the changing debate
on, the Woman Question. Both actively contested, or implicitly
(but nonetheless shockingly) challenged the dominant definitions
of ‘woman’ and her prescribed social and familial roles, and both
generated critical controversies which became a focus for
broader socio-cultural anxieties, particularly for contemporary
anxieties about gender.
The women’s sensation novel in the 1860s and the New
Woman writing of the 1890s also shared the distinction of being
among the main sensations of their time. A number of individual
novels from each group enjoyed the brief but intense notoriety of
a succès de scandale. Both kinds of fiction were also
sensationally successful with readers. Ellen Wood’s East Lynne
was one of the bestsellers of its year (1861), and had sold over
500,000 copies by the end of the century. Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret went through nine editions in
three months when it was issued in volume form (in 1862, after
first appearing as a magazine serial), and Aurora Floyd was even
more successful. Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, for many

6
 GENDER AND WRITING, WRITING AND GENDER

the prototypical New Woman novel, sold 30,000 copies in its

first year (1893), and George Egerton’s Keynotes, which came
out in the same year, went into its seventh edition by 1896.
Of course, high sales alone are not necessarily an index of the
cultural significance of either individual novels or particular
categories of fiction. However, these novels by and about women
not only sold well, they were also widely discussed, analysed and,
not infrequently, derided. The sensation novel and the New
Woman fiction were both immediately constituted as distinct
sub-genres, and each occasioned a kind of moral panic among its
first reviewers. Indeed, the sensationalised response to both kinds
of fiction is yet another example of the way in which women and
women’s writing are (for good or ill) cast in the role of the exotic
other, or wild zone of a culture.
Both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction
were produced by, and productive of, controversy. They were
interventions in a broader cultural debate, and also (although to
different degrees and in different ways) in a cultural and political
struggle. The sensation novels of the 1860s were, at least
implicitly and indirectly, produced by, and to some extent
reproduced, the anxieties and tensions generated by
contemporary ideological contestation of the nature of woman,
and of women’s social and familial roles. The New Woman
novels, on the other hand, were much more directly linked to
contemporary controversies surrounding the Woman Question,
and to the various discourses within which they were produced
and mediated. Many of the New Woman novelists were also
prominent contributors to the debates on ‘woman’ in the
newspaper and periodical press, and the New Woman fiction was
sometimes reviewed alongside sociological and other polemical
works, as if it were part of a seamless discourse on the Woman
Question.5
The sensation novelists and New Woman writers not only
caused a sensation by generating critical controversy, they also
generated controversy by being sensational. Reviewers of both
groups of writers were dismayed by their tendency to dwell on
physical sensation, particularly in their representation of women
and women’s sexual feelings. Alarmed reviewers repeatedly
discussed these novels in terms of the physical sensations they
produced (or were deemed likely to produce) in their readers.
The Christian Remembrancer (1863), for example, described the

7
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

sensation novel as an ‘appeal to the nerves’, which worked by

‘drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention
through the lower and more animal instincts’. Such fiction, it
affirmed, was likely to produce both moral and social disorder
by ‘willingly and designedly draw[ing] a picture of life
which…make[s] reality insipid and the routine of ordinary
existence intolerable to the imagination’ (210). Youthful readers
were thought to be in particular danger from the ‘utter
unrestraint in which the heroines of this [fiction] are allowed to
expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate
characters’, and to question the customary social checks on
feeling (212).
Harmful effects on the young also troubled one of the first
readers of George Egerton’s Keynotes.

[T]ake the effect on a young fellow in his student

period…of a particularly warm description of
rounded limbs and the rest. It puts him in a state that
he either goes off and has a woman or it is bad for his
health (and possibly worse for his morals) if he
doesn’t.
(T.P.Gill, quoted in de Vere White 1958:23)

Their controversial subject-matter was not the only cause of the

sensation these novels created among reviewers and readers.
Reviewers of all persuasions were exercised by the way in which
these women writers (mis)used, deviated from, or challenged
traditional conceptions of novelistic practice, and of art (or Art).
The women’s sensation novel was usually regarded as a low
form, tainted by its association with a variety of familiar popular
forms; it was an ephemeral, formulaic, mass-produced
commodity, ‘redolent of the manufactory and the shop’ (Mansel
1863:483). The New Woman writers, on the other hand, were
taken to task for their failure, or refusal, to conform to
traditional fictional paradigms, and to observe the formal (and
other) proprieties. William Barry’s (1894) review of Sarah
Grand’s The Heavenly Twins is symptomatic, attacking Grand
for filling pages with ‘shrieking’, for inappropriately combining
love affairs and ideas, and writing in a manner which is ‘self-
conscious, or even pedantic’ (295).

8
 GENDER AND WRITING, WRITING AND GENDER

In short, the New Woman novel, like the sensation novel

before it, represented a threat to Art. Both types of writing were
regarded as the agents and symptoms of a degenerative and
improper feminisation of fiction and, indeed, of an insidious
(ef)feminisation of the culture at large. Thus Alfred Austin,
writing in Temple Bar in 1869, castigates the feminine spirit of
the times, noting that ‘especially in the domain of Art… [men]
have for some time been quite as subject to women…as is
desirable…[and] there can be no question that, in the region of
Art, their [women’s] influence has been unmitigatedly
mischievous’ (457). In the 1860s (according to Austin), ‘we have
as novelists and poets only women or men with womanly vices’
(465). Similarly, when W.L.Courtney (1904) turned his attention
to complaints about the aesthetic decline of turn-of-the-century
fiction he attributed them to the fact that ‘more and more in our
modern age novels are written by women for women’ (xii). This
fear of the feminisation, or emasculation, of art and the broader
culture is a dominant feature of the gendered critical discourse by
means of which both sensation fiction and the New Woman
writing were judged and mediated, and which I discuss in section
4 below.
The sensationalists and the New Woman writers alike violated
(or, just as importantly, were deemed to have violated) the
unwritten laws governing both women novelists and the
representation of women in fiction. The chief of these rules was
succinctly expressed in W.Fraser Ray’s (1865) essay on sensation
fiction: ‘From a lady novelist we naturally expect to have
portraits of women which shall not be wholly untrue to nature’
(189). On the contrary, the female sensationalists and the New
Woman writers either implicitly questioned or directly challenged
the ‘naturalness’ of the prescribed role of the woman writer, and
of the idealised woman who was the critics’ norm.
One of the most sensational aspects of these novels, much
discussed in both the 1860s and the 1890s, was the apparently
and variously transgressive nature of their heroines. Sensation
heroines were (or were perceived to be) criminals, madwomen
and domestic fiends, while the heroines of the New Woman
fiction were invariably women who—either consciously and
wittingly, or through force of circumstance—trangressed,
rebelled against, or were deformed by constricting social

9
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

pressures. The beautiful (sometimes), self-assertive, quasi-

adulterous heroine of the sensation novel became, in the New
Woman fiction, the destroying and/or self-destructive seeker after
truth, personal fulfilment and a measure of social and sexual
equality with men. The central female characters of each genre
thus disrupted both prevailing fictional and social stereotyping.
Similarly, the typical sensation or New Woman plot (which
usually turns on a woman’s sexuality, or women’s role within
marriage and the family) tended to foreground the female
predicament in ways which challenged and problematised
definitions of the feminine or of ‘woman’.
Both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction
registered and reacted to the unfixing of gender categories which
accompanied the challenges of reformers and feminists (and the
counter-challenges to them) from the 1840s onwards. However,
the writers I shall examine were not simply responding to a
process of destabilisation, but were participating in that process.
They were (in different ways, and to differing degrees) engaged
in a general struggle about the definition of woman, and also
about the nature, power and function of the feminine within the
culture. It was this complex engagement with, and negotiation
of, the dominant definitions of the feminine and the discourse on
woman, which caused the women’s sensation novel and the New
Woman fiction to be so vigorously debated in their own day. It
will certainly be my case that the cultural significance of these
novels and stories in their own time, and their continuing interest
to twentieth-century readers, lie in the ways in which they
reproduce, rework and negotiate6—or afford their readers an
opportunity to negotiate—the contemporary discourses on
‘woman’ to which I turn next.

10
 2
The subject of Woman

Women…are double. They are allied with

what is regular, according to the rules, since
they are wives and mothers, and allied as
well with those natural disturbances, their
regular periods, which are the epitome of
paradox, order and disorder.
(Cixous and Clément 1987:8)

In an age when everything seems pretty

well discovered, when one cannot preserve
even a shred of mystery to cloak the
bareness of one’s own life, when the very
surface of the globe is all mapped out, and
the mysterious griffins of untraversed
deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
amazing relief to know that an unsolved,
nay…an insoluble mystery is standing on
one’s very hearthrug.
(Saturday Review, January 25, 1868:109)

The essential and eternal mystery, the sole still point of a turning
world referred to in the second extract above is, of course,
‘woman’. In this sardonic celebration of woman’s essential
sameness in and of difference, her permanence in change, the
insouciant Saturday Reviewer of 1868 sought to erase three
decades of conflicting and changing definitions of ‘woman’, three
decades of vigorous debate about woman’s nature and woman’s
role, in which the Saturday Review itself had played an
increasingly polemical part from its inception in 1855.7

11
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

These debates concerned women’s legal status and rights,

particularly within marriage; women’s role within the family;
and their wider social role—their participation in the world of
work and public affairs, and their place in a gradually developing
democracy. The debates on the Woman Question (or the Woman
Problem) were instigated and orchestrated by the demands made
by, or on behalf of, women for the widening of their sphere, and
by resistance to those demands. All shades of opinion supported
their case by appeals to a particular definition of ‘woman’ or
‘womanliness’. This definition was extremely fiercely contested
in the decades upon which this study focuses, and in succeeding
sections I shall look at the women’s sensation novel and the New
Woman fiction in relation to two distinct moments of
articulation of this contest.
Broadly speaking the contest was waged on the site of the
dominant definition of the ‘proper feminine’—the ideal of the
domestic ideology, according to which woman was defined
primarily in terms of her reproductive and domestic functions
within the developing bourgeois family. The feminine norm was
that ‘relative creature’ (Basch 1974), the middle-class wife and
mother. In this dual capacity woman was charged with the
responsibility of acting as the keeper of the conscience, and
guardian of the spiritual and moral purity of the race.
The passionless domestic ideal, the ‘Angel in the House’ (as
the title of Coventry Patmore’s poem has it), was the creator and
guardian of the newly moralised and privatised domestic haven,
the middle-class home, that sanctuary from what Sarah Ellis
(1845) described as ‘that fierce conflict of worldly interests, by
which men are so deeply occupied as to be in a manner
compelled to stifle their best feelings’ (22–3).8 The development
of the middle-class home and family in the nineteenth century
involved a new kind of division of labour: the moral and
reproductive labour of the wife and mother within the private
domestic sphere, and the competitive, economic, productive
labour of the husband in the public sphere of industry, commerce
and politics.
This ideology of the separate spheres enshrined a theory of
sexual difference based on the complementariness of, rather than
competitiveness between, man and woman. Woman was to wield
her influence in the domestic sphere, while man exercised his
power in the hazardous, hostile, public domain. However, since

12
 THE SUBJECT OF WOMAN

the chief duty of woman (and hence women) was to sacrifice

herself to the physical and emotional needs of others and, above
all, to submit to her husband, woman’s power was somewhat
problematic, if not entirely illusory. In fact, as many feminist
historians have pointed out, there was always a gap between the
domestic ideology and social practice. Both men and women
were involved in both spheres, although their access to (and
involvement in) them varied according to gender. It was also
subject to constant negotiation and redefinition throughout the
century and in a variety of discursive contexts.9
A plethora of conduct books in the early Victorian period,10
and magazines and periodicals throughout the century, were
deployed to reinforce the dominant definition of domestic
woman, to delimit the domestic sphere, and to inculcate the
fundamental truth that ‘the man naturally governs: the woman
as naturally obeys’ (Walker 1840:129, my italics). This ‘natural’
state of affairs was also continually in the process of construction
and reproduction in legal, medical and scientific discourses, as
well as in the discourse of the new social science and
anthropology. Each of these areas developed definitions of
woman which arose from, and authorised the claims to power of,
the bourgeois male.
In particular the rapidly developing nineteenth-century
sciences constructed theories of sexual difference which justified
and perpetuated existing sexual and social relations and their
inequalities. Spencerian evolutionists, for example, argued that in
order to ensure the maximum efficiency of her reproductive
function, woman’s development was arrested at an earlier
evolutionary stage than that of man. Later in the century Patrick
Geddes and J.Arthur Thompson (1889) also emphasised
woman’s lowly place in the evolutionary scheme, arguing that
since the male transmits the innovative traits of the species, and
the female the hereditary, the woman retains traces of its more
primitive aspects. Similar evolutionary arguments were also used
to account for woman’s supposedly inferior brain size, a
physiological feature which also allied her to the ‘primitive’
peoples investigated by Victorian anthropologists.11
Medical science, which as Foucault has argued (1979:104)
was one of the chief instruments for the definition and regulation
of women and sexuality in the nineteenth century, represented
woman as a creature totally in thrall to biology and her body.

13
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

Woman’s nature and her social role were seen as the inevitable
consequences of her reproductive function: the womb and the
ovaries controlled the delicate organism that was woman. As
Henry Maudsley (1874), one of the pioneers of British
psychiatry, put it: ‘the male organisation is one, and the female
organisation another…[Woman] will retain her special sphere of
development and activity determined by the performance of
those [reproductive] functions’ (466). This particular theory of
sexual difference was used, by Maudsley and others, as an
argument against girls and young women being given the same
education as their brothers. The rigour of such an education was
deemed to be incompatible with the rigours of the menstrual
cycle, and would use up the energy which should properly be
conserved for reproduction. Women, Maudsley contended,
‘cannot choose but to be women; cannot rebel successfully
against the tyranny of their organisation’. Thus, women’s
campaigns for education were seen by their opponents not
merely as social rebellion, but rather as a revolt against nature.
Sex, Maudsley argued, ‘is fundamental, lies deeper than culture,
[and] cannot be ignored or defied with impunity’ (1874:467).
Many nineteenth-century commentators took the view that
any attempt to ignore the ‘truth’ of woman’s indissoluble link
with nature would result in ‘a monstrosity—something which
having ceased to be woman is not yet man’ (Maudsley
1874:477). A woman who resisted the dominant definitions was
held to be ‘unwomanly’, ill, or, increasingly as the century wore
on, unsexed—the member of an intermediate sex.12 As Ludmilla
Jordanova (1980) has pointed out, in a period of rapid and
disconcerting social change ‘debates about sex roles…hinged
precisely on the ways in which sexual boundaries might become
blurred’ (44). Anxieties about this blurring of gender boundaries
were clearly an important component of the representations of
woman and women in the women’s fiction of the 1860s and
1890s. They were also a crucial part of the critical response to
those representations.
In scientific and medical discourses woman was represented
by means of the familiar mind-body dichotomy of western
thought: woman’s mind in this case being determined by the
biologically maternal functions of her body. By insisting on the
primacy of maternity, Victorian theorists constructed woman as
a body and defined her in terms of a sexual function. At the same

14
 THE SUBJECT OF WOMAN

time, paradoxically, woman was also persistently represented as

non-sexual, or asexual—disembodied. One of the most
influential versions of the non-sexual or passionless woman was
probably William Acton’s in The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs (first published in 1857, but reissued in
numerous editions throughout the century). Acton’s
representation of woman is worth quoting at length, since it
proved remarkably pervasive and persistent. This is the version
of woman within which, and against which, both the women
sensationalists and the New Woman writers worked. It is this
construction of woman which they variously reproduced,
challenged, or appropriated for their own purposes.

[T]he majority of women (happily for society) are not

very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.
What men are habitually, women are only
exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce
courts show, that there are some few women who
have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those
of men, and shock public feeling by their
consequences. I admit…the existence of sexual
excitement terminating even in nymphomania…but
with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that
sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases
in abeyance, and that it requires positive and
considerable excitement to be roused at all. Many
persons, and particularly young men, form their ideas
of women’s sensuous feeling from what they notice
early in life among loose, or at least low and vulgar
women.
(Acton 1857:133)

Of course, the gentleman protests too much. His over-insistence

on the absence of sexual feeling in woman inscribes a fear of
female sexuality, just as his repeated affirmation of woman’s
disembodiment has the effect, ultimately, of representing woman
as nothing but body.
Acton constructs ‘proper’, normal femininity as passionless
and passive. A ‘modest’ woman, ‘as a general rule…seldom
desires any sexual gratification for herself…[and] submits to her
husband’s embraces…principally to gratify him…[and] for the

15
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

desire of maternity’ (134). Active and autonomous sexual feeling,

on the other hand, denotes masculinity, or a deviant, ‘improper’
femininity. Women are either non-sexual, or they are omni-
sexual, criminals, madwomen, or prostitutes.
Woman was thus inscribed in a contradictory discourse, which
was organised around the concept of the ‘proper’ or respectable
feminine. The proper feminine is a system of difference which
marks off woman as essentially different from man, and whose
meaning depends on a series of excluded terms. These excluded
terms, the proper feminine’s suppressed other, together comprised
what I shall call the ‘improper’ feminine. The system of the
proper feminine may be represented by the following set of
polarities (the list is by no means exhaustive): the domestic ideal,
or angel in the house; the madonna; the keeper of the domestic
temple; asexuality; passionlessness; innocence; self-abnegation;
commitment to duty; self-sacrifice; the lack of a legal identity;
dependence; slave; victim. In the economy of the improper
feminine, woman is figured as a demon or wild animal; a whore;
a subversive threat to the family; threateningly sexual; pervaded
by feeling; knowing; self-assertive; desiring and actively pleasure-
seeking; pursuing self-fulfilment and self-identity; independent;
enslaver; and victimiser or predator.
Acton’s representation of respectable femininity as sexual
passivity, chastity, purity, innocence and, above all, sexual
ignorance, drew together a number of important strands in the
Victorian construction of woman. The image of woman which
emerges from Functions and Disorders was reproduced in a
variety of cultural forms: in the conduct books (most famously in
Sarah Ellis’s epic series on the Mothers, Daughters and Wives of
England); in sketches of modern female types, and essays on
morals and manners in the magazines and journals; in the
heroines of domestic fiction; in the fragile, sacrificial and nun-
like images of many paintings of the 1850s and 1860s,13 and in
the poetic angels in the house, such as Owen Meredith describes
in his verse novel Lucile (1860), whose mission is ‘to watch, and
to wait,/to renew, to redeem, and to regenerate/…to soothe, and
to solace, to help and to heal’ (quoted in Djikstra 1986:15).
Some aspects of this Actonian woman proved as persistent as
they were pervasive. The idea of female sexual passivity survived
in the writings of some of the proponents of the new science of
sexology at the end of the century. Havelock Ellis, for example,

16
 THE SUBJECT OF WOMAN

took the view that while a youth spontaneously developed into a

man, the maiden ‘must be kissed into a woman’ (quoted in Weeks
1981:69). However, medical, or socio-medical, discourse also
offered a counter-representation of woman, which defined
feminine purity in terms of sexual activity and knowledge, rather
than sexual inertia and ignorance.
George Drysdale in The Elements of Social Science (1860)
(first published in 1854 as Physical, Sexual, and Natural
Religion) took issue with the mass of ‘erroneous feeling attaching
to the subject of sexual desire in woman’, arguing that ‘in
woman, exactly as in man, strong sexual appetites are a very
great virtue; as they are the signs of a vigorous frame, healthy
sexual organs, and a naturally developed sexual disposition’
(1860:170). In Drysdale’s account, healthy sexual exercise was
seen as the potential source of a general improvement in the
physical and emotional well-being of women, and also as a cure
for specific female disorders, from chlorosis to hysteria. Drysdale
effectively reversed most of the prevailing views on the
conditions necessary for women’s reproductive and emotional
health by recommending, inter alia: vigorous physical exercise, a
profound alteration in ‘female education, and the cramping
views as to female decorum’ and, above all, ‘solid and real
knowledge…of the human body and the human mind’ (172–5).
In other words, Drysdale mobilised the categories of the
improper feminine in order to provide a new definition of
woman, but by doing so he remained within the terms of the
discourse which his own construction of woman seemed designed
to challenge.
Drysdale’s version of the man and woman question also
entailed quite a different view of marriage from that which
underpinned the bourgeois family. Marriage, the desired goal and
biological destiny of Actonian woman, and of the heroine of
domestic fiction, is in Drysdale’s version ‘one of the chief
instruments in the degradation of women’ (355). Drysdale’s
critique of marriage and the challenges it offers to the dominant
discourse on woman encapsulate many of the issues which were
explored by the women sensationalists and, with even greater
directness, by the New Woman writers. Drysdale’s critique was
based on a view of marriage as the perpetuator of the ‘old
inveterate error’—the doctrine of the separate spheres, which he
held to be ‘utterly incompatible with the freedom of dignified

17
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

development’ of woman. Marriage is also the bedrock of the

double standard of sexual morality: ‘the emblem…of all those
harsh and unjust views, which have given to woman so much
fewer privileges in love than man, and have punished so much
more severely a breach of the moral code in her case’ (355).
Marriage is a form of economic and sexual enslavement for
women, which ‘delivers women bound into the hands of
man…and tempts him to abuse his gift of superior strength’.
Perhaps most damning of all, and most important for the
representation of marriage in the novels which I shall discuss in
later chapters, marriage is, in numerous cases, ‘legalised
prostitution’ (355).

18
 3
The subject of Woman and the
subject of women’s fiction

As will be clear even from my schematised and over-simplified

account of two particular examples of medical discourse,
nineteenth-century discourses on woman were deeply
contradictory, and they became increasingly unstable during the
period spanned by this study. These contradictions and
instabilities constitute the ideological matrix within which and
by which the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman
writing were produced. Both types of fiction were involved in a
complex negotiation of the categories of the proper and improper
feminine, and with the (apparently) opposing versions of
femininity which I have associated with the names of Acton and
Drysdale.
The sensation heroine, for example, cannot easily be
accommodated either to the category of normal, proper
femininity, nor to that of deviant, improper femininity.
Sometimes, as in the case of Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, or Ellen
Wood’s Isabel Carlyle, she might appear to be a combination of
both versions of femininity, which are put into play by the
complex machinery of the sensation plot. On other occasions an
apparently, or actually, ‘improper’ heroine may be juxtaposed
with the epitome of proper femininity in such a way as to
redefine both categories. Lady Audley and Clara Talboys, Aurora
Floyd and her cousin Lucy, Isabel Carlyle and Barbara Hare are
all used in this way. In each of these cases, as the plot unfolds,
the reader is continually required to rethink her conceptions of
femininity and proper feminine behaviour. Similarly some of the
New Woman writers continued to problematise and blur the
boundaries between these two versions of femininity, while
others tended to polarise them. George Egerton, for example,

19
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

appropriated and celebrated Drysdale’s version of femininity as

the type of the New Woman. Others, like Sarah Grand,
reappropriated Acton’s passionless woman, but put this
definition of femininity to radical new uses.
The moment of the sensation novel was also one of intense
public discussion about women and the law, about the state of
modern marriage, and about women’s role in the family. It also
saw an intensely sensational reporting of the Social Evil of
prostitution, and of divorce cases with their records of marital
failure and sexual transgression. These issues, and the ways in
which they were reported and represented in the press, provided
the sensation novel with its main preoccupations and plot
situations. Women’s demands for education, their changing role
within the family, and their rebellion against some of the
constraints of proper feminine behaviour also produced a great
deal of comment in the press, sometimes apoplectic, sometimes in
the form of satiric sketches of modern female types, such as Eliza
Lynn Linton’s ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868). The sensation
novel was both a response to and part of this discourse on
modern femininity.
By the 1890s the tone of the debate on the Woman Question
became more strident (on all sides), and its terms became more
sharply polarised. Not only were women’s familial, social and
political roles contested by the feminists and their opponents, the
very nature of femininity was at stake. Female sexuality (a
prominent concern of the sensation novel) came under fresh
scrutiny from a number of different perspectives. The social-
purity movement and the campaigns against the Contagious
Diseases Acts of the 1880s had brought the discussion of sexual
matters more fully into the public domain, and had mobilised the
idea of the passionless woman of the proper feminine (now
figured as being involved in a holy war against the lustful male)
on behalf of a new programme of social regeneration. On the
other hand, the developing science of sexology challenged the
proponents of female sexual innocence, and subjected female
sexuality to its own microscopic gaze.
Each of these perspectives led to a renewed critique of
marriage, and a reassessment of women’s maternal role. In the
1880s and 1890s a cacophony of voices spoke about, or claimed
to speak for, woman. The ‘unwomanly’ antics of the ‘Wild
Women’, the ‘Revolting Daughters’ and, ultimately, the New

20
 THE SUBJECT OF WOMAN

Woman filled the pages of the journals. The New Woman novel
was itself part of this cacophony, but it also put into play the
various discordant voices on the Woman Question, as a means of
exploring the multiple contradictions that characterised the late-
Victorian conceptualisation of the feminine.
The plot situations of the women’s sensation novel and the
New Woman novel, and the ways in which they represented
female characters, the realities of women’s lives, and relations
between women and between women and men, were all
produced by, and as a response to, the changing and contested
discourses on woman. These novels and stories also became part
of that discourse: their representation of women and of women’s
lot became part of the current meaning of ‘woman’. Repeatedly,
throughout the 1860s and 1890s commentators on the
contemporary scene used the sensation novel and the New
Woman novel as evidence or symptom of social movements.
Sensation heroines and fictional New Woman entered the general
discourse as representative types of modern femininity.
Later sections will begin to investigate how the women’s
sensation novel and the New Woman fiction (to varying degrees
and often in contradictory ways) contested the dominant
definitions of woman, mobilised counter-discourses, and
explored or put into play a number of anxieties about sexual
difference and gender boundaries. I shall be particularly
interested in the ways in which my chosen writers (with varying
degrees of self-consciousness) negotiate and, sometimes,
appropriate the regime of the proper feminine.

21
 4
Fiction and the feminine:
a gendered critical discourse

[In] the gender inscriptions in the mass

culture debate…woman is positioned as a
reader of inferior literature—subjective,
emotional and passive—while man…
emerges as a writer of genuine, authentic
literature—objective, ironic, and in control
of his aesthetic means.
(Huyssen 1986:46)

In the cacophony of nineteenth-century voices, both male and

female, which vied with each other to speak for or about woman
and women, the novel stands out as perhaps the most influential
and widely disseminated medium in which women spoke on their
own behalf. ‘The birth of the novel’, as Robert Buchanan noted
in 1862, ‘has given speech to many ladies who must otherwise
have been silent’ (135). However, what women could say in
fiction, and how their voices were likely to be heard, were
constrained by both the prevailing discourses on woman, and a
gendered discourse on fiction, which I shall explore in this
section. This gendered discourse was particularly important in
the production and mediation of the women’s sensation novel
and the New Woman fiction, both of which were regarded as
feminine or feminised forms, even when they were produced by
male writers.
From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, fiction had
increasingly been regarded as a feminised form, and this
association became even more important in shaping its
production and dissemination in the nineteenth century.

22
 FICTION AND THE FEMININE

Paradoxically it both fostered the growth of women’s writing,

and constituted a major problem for fiction in general and
women writers in particular, since it generated a series of
permissions and constraints which delimited the scope both of
the novel and of women’s writing. Notably, as Jane Spencer
(1986) has argued (in relation to the rise of the novel in the
eighteenth century), ‘this feminization of literature defined [it] as
a special category supposedly outside the political arena, with an
influence on the world as indirect as women’s was supposed to
be’ (xi). More contentiously, Nancy Armstrong (1987) has
represented the rise of the female and/or feminised novel as the
‘agent and product’ of a feminisation of culture, by means of
which women (and the domain of the feminine in general)
produced and reproduced bourgeois patriarchy. The novel, which
‘early on assumed the distinctive features of a specialized
language for women’, was responsible, in Armstrong’s view, for a
gendering of discourse which ‘concealed the politics of writing’
by transforming political differences into differences ‘rooted in
gender’ (28, 30).
My own concern here is less with the gendering of the
discourse of fiction, than with the development of a gendered
discourse on fiction, and with the role of that discourse in the
production and mediation of fiction—especially fiction by
women. My interest is in the various, and variously contested,
ways in which nineteenth-century critical discourse represented
fiction as a feminine or feminised form, and with the various and
changing meanings it assigned to the feminine. I do not see the
gendered discourse on fiction (as Armstrong sees the gendered
discourse of fiction) in terms of a simple binary opposition in
which ‘female writing—writing that was considered appropriate
for or could be written by women—in fact designated itself as
feminine, which meant that other writing, by implication, was
understood to be male’ (Armstrong 1987:28). On the contrary, I
shall suggest that the gendered discourse on fiction was part of a
broadly based nineteenth-century crisis of gender definition, and
that the unstable, shifting and multivalent nature of the gendered
terms of this critical discourse was bound up with a desire to fix
gender boundaries and categories at a time of profound anxiety
about the nature and fixity of those categories. I shall also
suggest that the gendered discourse on fiction was a site of
struggle between differently structured oppositions of

23
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

masculinity and femininity, and between contending versions of

the feminine. It should be seen (pace Armstrong) not as part of a
process of depoliticising fiction, but rather as part of a political
struggle about both the meaning of gender, and the
representational authority of fiction.
Many of the complexities and contradictions of the gendered
discourse on writing are evident in Alfred Austin’s unsigned essay
on Swinburne published in Temple Bar in 1869. Austin raises the
spectre (increasingly familiar in the nineteenth century) of a
feminine invasion of the ‘domain of Art’. The golden age of the
‘manly and masculine art’ (463) of Scott has (in this account)
been overtaken by ‘the feminine temper of the times’ (465),
whose representative figure is Trollope: ‘a feminine novelist,
writing for women in a womanly spirit and from a woman’s
point of view’ (464). Austin’s analysis of contemporary writing is
structured around gendered oppositions: an expansive, masculine
aesthetic is opposed to a limited and limiting feminine one, and
two contradictory versions of the realm of the feminine are
opposed to each other.
Austin’s essay provides a very clear and representative
example of the way in which the nineteenth-century discourse on
fiction organises the domain of art, like that of femininity itself,
around the concepts of the proper and the improper feminine.
The proper feminine (of which Trollope is the exemplar) is
domestic. Its locus is the nursery or the drawing room, its main
topic ‘the sentimental love of youths and maidens, of coy widows
and clumsy middle-aged men, beginning in flirtation and ending
in marriage…pretty, pious, half-comical domestic love—love
within the bounds of social law’ (Austin 1869:467). The
improper feminine, on the other hand, denotes the domestic
ideal’s dangerous other. It is ‘the feminine element at work when
it has ceased to be domestic; when it has quitted the modest
precincts of home, and courted the garish lights of an intense and
warm publicity’ (469). The fictional terrain of the improper
feminine (which, to compound the impropriety, is occupied in the
main by women novelists) is ‘the love—had we better call it the
lust?—which begins with seduction and ends in
desertion…whose agreeable variations are bigamy, adultery, and,
in fact, illicit passion of every conceivable sort’ (467–8).
The ‘improper feminine’ does not simply denote what is
represented but, more importantly, describes a mode of

24
 FICTION AND THE FEMININE

representation. It not only treats of sexual promiscuity, but it is

also characterised by promiscuous forms of representation. ‘It is
the feminine element…unrestrainedly rioting in any and every
area of life in which an indiscriminating imagination chooses to
place it’ (469). Austin’s ‘proper feminine’ also denotes the
separate feminine sphere to which, from the eighteenth century
onwards, novels by or for women were usually assigned. The
dominant forms of this feminised fiction in the nineteenth
century were moral, didactic and domestic, and it habitually
focused on private experience. Women’s writing in its proper
feminine mode was associated with, indeed supposedly derived
from, woman’s affective nature and familial role. Women
writers were to provide a ‘happy and improving influence’ in all
those branches of literature which are ‘most nearly connected
with the welfare of mankind, and tend to dignify and exalt our
nature’. Such writing was deemed to be particularly suited to
the circumstances of domestic woman, since its ‘successful
exercise demands little or none of that moral courage which
more public avocations require’ (these quotations Parkes
1865:121).
Even when its subject-matter or form was romance, the
prevailing or preferred mode of the proper feminine was realistic.
On the whole, contemporary reviewers and theorists of fiction
considered realism (and especially domestic realism) to be
peculiarly appropriate for women writers, as it supposedly
reflected or acted as the vehicle for their limited experience, and
their particular limited powers. Robert Buchanan equated the
rise of the female novel with the rise of realism.

Realism has served at least one admirable purpose—

that of bringing women prominently before the public
as book writers. The lady-novelists are the most
truthful of all aesthetic photographers. Narrow as
their range necessarily is, they have been encouraged
to describe thoughts and emotions with which men
are of necessity unfamiliar… Disciplined in a school of
suffering, closely observant of detail, and painfully
dependent on the caprice of the male sex, they essay
to paint in works of art the everyday emotions of
commonplace or imaginative women, and the

25
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

domestic experience of sensible daughters, wives and

mothers.
(Buchanan 1862:134–5)

Feminine realism and, by extension, domestic realism in general

were thus defined in terms of woman’s nature and woman’s
social role. Given the prevailing views of woman, and also the
actualities of women’s lives, it is not surprising that feminine
realism was repeatedly defined as a lack. According to
R.H.Hutton (1858), for example, women were realists faute de
mieux, as a consequence of the ‘main deficiency of feminine
genius’ which ‘can observe…recombine…[and] delineate’ (474),
but can go no further. In short, the contemporary discourse on
realism characterised representation by women as the
representation of surfaces. Women writers were deemed capable
of submitting everyday events to minute scrutiny, but lacked the
power of ‘generalization’ and ‘reasoning’ (London Review
1860:137). Men ‘have more imagination and can generalize
character better than women but they often fail in detail’,
whereas ‘a passion for the detail is the distinguishing mark of
nearly every female novelist’ (Courtney 1904:x). Women’s
superior powers of observation were, however, crucially limited
by the fact that they ‘can describe, or rather transcribe with
success only those scenes and characters which come under their
observation’ (Fraser’s 1860:213).
Women’s writing and the fiction of the proper feminine were
thus contained within and constrained by a limiting aesthetic of
realism, which was also, in part, a limiting aesthetic of feeling.
Both the qualities and the limitations of feminine surface realism
were directly attributed to categories in which the essential and
the contingent were elided. The limited qualities of domestic
realism were attributed to (what were seen as) essential
properties of the feminine, such as woman’s ‘greater
affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional
experience’ (Lewes 1852:131). These limited qualities were also,
at the same time, the product of the contingent particularities of
women’s subordinate social role; for example, that ‘marvellous
faculty of sympathy and intuition’ which supposedly enabled
woman to ‘divine much which she cannot discover, and to
conceive much which she has never seen and heard’ is a faculty

26
 FICTION AND THE FEMININE

‘given to those who have felt profoundly and suffered long’ (Greg
1859:49).
The economy of the improper feminine was similarly
associated with feeling, in this case with the excessive or
‘effeminate’ feeling of a potentially uncontrollable feminine
emotionalism. Like the proper feminine, the improper feminine
was also defined in terms of an over-reliance on detail. One of its
main characteristics was said to be a sensuous surrendering to
detail, particularly in the representation of physical sensation
and sexual feeling. The gendered critical discourse thus
perpetuated two main ways of viewing women’s writing, or
feminine writing: it was seen either in terms of a limited
detailism—a world of surfaces and sympathy—or as a riot of
detail and promiscuous emotion.
The association of female writers and, by analogy, domestic
realism in general with surfaces, detail and emotion, rather than
with depth and significant pattern, persisted into the 1890s,
when realism had become more firmly established, more
scientific, and more masculinised. A Quarterly Review article on
the New Woman fiction in 1894 reiterated the idea that feminine
realism derives from woman’s affective nature and her
subordinate social position.

[Women] observe minute traits of conduct; they spy

unconsciously upon the men their masters, and learn
the signals which betoken storm and sunshine…when
a woman sits down to write a story, she is exercising
the same kind of faculties that enable her to overcome
mere strength by delicacy of interpretation and
natural tact.
(Barry 1894:305)

The resulting fictional form is said to be disagreeable and

unscientific. Female observation, it is argued, produces works of
instinct rather than ‘exact mensuration’, and the ‘aboriginal’ in
woman ‘accordingly will never be scientific; it will be passion
seizing the weapons of the male and brandishing them for stage
effect’ (296).
Naomi Schor (1987) has recently gone so far as to suggest that
there is a gendered aesthetic of the detail in European culture.
Schor traces the process by which woman, largely because of her

27
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

childbearing role, is first aligned with a devalorised nature (as

opposed to the masculine realm of culture); then with mimesis,
since ‘her close association with nature means that she cannot
but replicate it’ (17); and finally with the details of
representational art. Schor suggests that in western aesthetics
‘unvalorised’ feminine detailism is associated with both the
homely plainness of (for example) the Dutch school of painting
(the proper feminine) and, paradoxically, with the ornamental
style (another version of the improper feminine perhaps), which
is seen as profuse and lacking in ‘masculine’ clarity, rigour and
rational severity.
Schor argues that, particularly in nineteenth-century France,
there was a ‘remarkably coherent discourse on the detail’ in
which,

the totalizing ambitions of a realism that claims to

account for the entire domain of the visible are
deplored…the loss of difference between the
insignificant…is…lamented…[and] the invasion of the
arts by an anarchic mass of details is pronounced the
unmistakeable sign of cultural dissolution.
(Schor 1987:43)

Although pervasive, this discourse on the detail was, in England

at least, far from coherent. Its contradictions are evident in the
conflicting and contested values attached to particular gendered
terms. For example, in the debates about naturalism (which I
explore below) its opponents habitually associated the naturalist
project either with the limited feminine, or with a debased
masculinity; the latter was expressed either as effeminacy or as a
coarse and brutal virility (or sometimes as a combination of the
two). On the other hand, naturalists and their supporters, both
male and female, attempted to empty the detail of its limiting
feminine connotations, or alternatively to endow it with value by
incorporating it in a masculine discourse of judgement,
professionalism, labour, system and science.
Contradictions and incoherence notwithstanding, the
gendered discourse on the detail was clearly an important
component of the discourse on fiction in nineteenth-century
England. It is central to the mid-century debates on realism and
verisimilitude which coincided with the moment of the sensation

28
 FICTION AND THE FEMININE

novel, and it is also an important element in the later debates on

naturalism and the New Realism within which the New Woman
fiction was produced. The next two sections attempt a brief
analysis of the operations of this gendered discourse in the
mediation of the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman
fiction.

29
 5
Fiction, the feminine and the
sensation novel

In the moral panic that surrounded the debate about sensation

fiction, the gendered discourse on fiction intersected with a
materialist or, more properly, a frustrated idealist discourse.14
One of the chief objections to sensation fiction was that it was
(at least in the opinion of middle-class reviewers) a commodity,
produced (and deformed) by market forces, and directed at the
appetites of consumers. Its object is an intensely commercial
one’, wrote Robert Buchanan in 1862. ‘It appeals not to the
sympathies of the educated few, but those of the general public’
(136).
The form, style and content of sensation fiction were seen as
being directly shaped and determined by contemporary changes
in literary production and distribution. In particular, the spread
of periodicals, and their development of the ‘violent stimulant of
serial publication’ (Oliphant 1862:569) were widely condemned
as being responsible for the ‘perverted and vitiated taste’ for
extravagant and sensational plots (Fraser’s 1863:262). The most
detailed elaboration of this thesis came from Henry Mansel in a
Quarterly Review article which attributed an inevitable lack of
aesthetic integrity to a specific mode of literary production (the
periodical) which ‘from its very nature, must contain many
articles of an ephemeral interest, and of the character of goods
made to order’. One of the chief evils of the periodical was the
stimulus it allegedly provided for the production of tales of ‘the
marketable stamp, which, after appearing piecemeal in weekly or
monthly instalments, generally enter upon a second stage of their
insect-life in the form of a handsome reprint under the auspices
of the circulating library’ (Mansel 1863:484). Mansel had the
usual highbrow’s disdain for this latter institution, which he

30
 FICTION, THE FEMININE AND THE SENSATION NOVEL

described as a ‘hot-bed for forcing a crop of writers without

talent and readers without discrimination’, and (mixing his
metaphors) as a kind of department store for women shoppers:
‘[I]t is to literature what a magasin des modes is to dress, giving
us the latest fashion and little more’ (ibid.). The growing practice
of ‘railway reading’ was also seen as a significant element in the
shaping of the literary market-place. Mansel was not alone in
identifying the sensation novel as the typical offering of the
railway bookstall, which enticed the ‘hurried passenger’ with
‘something hot and strong’, promising ‘temporary excitement to
relieve the dulness [sic] of the journey’ (Mansel 1863:485).15 In
short the style, form, subject-matter and, above all, the quality of
sensation fiction are over-determined by the ephemerality built
into its production and distribution.
This emphasis on mechanistic, commercial production, and
passive, appetitive consumption, marked the sensation novel as a
feminine form, irrespective of the gender of the particular
sensation author. Mass-produced for mass-consumption, based
on repeated and hence predictable formulae, sensation fiction
was by definition ‘feminine’, according to the terms of a
gendered critical discourse in which the masculine (positive) term
was reserved for work that offered itself as the unique expression
of individual genius. For example, both sensation fiction and
Spasmodic poetry16 were concerned with ‘convulsive throes in the
soul’. However, in terms of the prevailing critical discourse,
Spasmodic poetry (a form associated exclusively with male
writers) is ‘art’ (or Art) because the poet ‘writes to satisfy the
unconquerable yearnings of his soul’. Sensation fiction, on the
other hand, is inferior art, or not art at all, because only ‘the
market-law of supply and demand’ presides over its birth, and it
is tainted by ‘a commercial atmosphere…redolent of the
manufactory and the shop’ (all quotations Mansel 1863:483).
The sensation debate is thus, in part, an example of that process
of stratification along gender lines which Andreas Huyssen
(1986) has noted as a feature of the categorisation of mass
culture: ‘The notion…gained ground during the nineteenth
century that mass culture is somehow associated with woman
while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men’
(47). The role of the feminine in demarcating the division
between high and low culture may be seen as a function of the
marginality of women and the feminine within patriarchy. Julia

31
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

Kristeva has argued that women’s marginal position in

patriarchal society places them at the borderline of the symbolic
order.17 Viewed thus, woman becomes the frontier between the
order of man and chaos. In this particular case woman and
women become the borderline between the order of high art, and
the chaos of the endlessly proliferating products of a mechanised
culture. Woman’s position at this cultural borderline, as at
others, is shifting and ambivalent. Neither inside nor outside the
frontiers of high culture, she is always in danger of receding into
the chaos that lies beyond its gates.
Although many of the main critical anxieties about sensation
fiction can be traced to the way in which the gendered discourse
on fiction marks it as implicitly feminine, most contemporary
reviewers found the prominence of actual women in its
production and consumption even more alarming than this
covert femininity of the form. Despite the success and greater
critical visibility of male sensation writers such as Wilkie Collins
and Charles Reade, sensation fiction was perceived mainly as a
feminine phenomenon. Many, perhaps most, of the reviewers’
objections to the genre, and their anxieties about it, derive from
their perception of it as a form written by women, about women
and, on the whole, for women. ‘This is the age of lady novelists’,
wrote E.S.Dallas in The Times (November 18, 1862:4), and the
lady novelists and especially the sensation novels they wrote gave
a new (and to many reviewers an undue) prominence to the role
and point of view of the female characters. In doing so they
transformed the fictional representation of women. ‘If the
heroines have the first place,’ as Dallas noted, ‘it will scarcely do
to represent them as passive and quite angelic, or as insipid—
which heroines usually are. They have to be high-strung women,
full of passion, purpose and movement’ (ibid.). Sensation fiction
was also in many cases clearly addressed to women.
M.E.Braddon’s and Ellen Wood’s narrators in particular often
use a woman-to-woman address, and assume or invoke a shared
feminine experience. Although this was a common feature of
women’s fiction it was a particular source of anxiety to reviewers
of the sensation novel because of the ‘fast’ nature of its main
characters and situations, and because of the particular type of
female experience which it represented.
The contemporary reviewers’ perception of sensation fiction
as a feminine or feminised form exposes many of the

32
 FICTION, THE FEMININE AND THE SENSATION NOVEL

contradictions of the gendered discourse on fiction. Indeed the

debate about the sensation novel reveals the fragmentation of
mid-Victorian conceptions of the feminine. One of the central
paradoxes of the sensation debate was its tendency to define the
sensation novel as a form which was both characteristically
feminine, and profoundly unfeminine, or even anti-feminine.
According to one set of the terms of the contemporary discourse
on fiction, sensation fiction was stereotypically feminine because
it was produced by women writers working within their ‘natural’
feminine limitations as minute, faithful observers of everyday
domestic settings in plots focusing on family life. Sensation
fiction thus belonged to the domain of the proper feminine, to
the feminised, detailistic ‘coat and waistcoat’ school of realism
(Lewes 1865:187). East Lynne, for example, although
condemned for its extravagant plotting and false morality, was
praised for its faithful recording of ‘the gossip and petty
squabbles of a country town’, which ‘are evidently sketched from
nature’ (Fraser’s 1863:253). However, despite their faithful
transcriptions of the surfaces of provincial life, sensation novels
were seen as deviating from the realist criteria of the proper
feminine because they disappointed the ‘natural’ expectation that
‘a lady novelist’ would produce ‘portraits of women which shall
not be wholly untrue to nature’ (Ray 1865:189). Here, once
more, we encounter a discourse on realism which prescribes both
how women may represent and how woman may be represented.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was censured for defying these
unwritten rules of representation in her portrayal of Lady
Audley. ‘In drawing her, the authoress may have intended to
portray a female Mephistopheles; but if so, she should have
known that a woman cannot fill such a part’ (Ray 1865:186).
Sensation fiction was seen not simply as a failure of realistic
representation, but also as an (injudicious) attempt to extend the
domain of fictional representation. It was part of ‘the tendency
of the present age towards investigation’ and towards ‘the
morbid analysation of mere sensation’ (Fraser’s 1860:210). This
attempted extension of the field of representation (like that of the
naturalists in the 1880s and 1890s) was seen as a
misrepresentation, because it presented the extraordinary as
typical. The sensation novel was also seen as a ‘reaction against
realism’ (Buchanan 1862:136) in its mixing of ‘the incredible’
and the documentary, its refusal to stay within the proper sphere

33
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

of acceptable character types in domestic settings, and its habit

of transporting ‘lurid people’ from ‘the universal gaze’ of ‘our
courts of law, and the communicative columns of the daily
papers’ to ‘our domestic hearths’ (Buchanan 1862:424, 422).
Sensation fiction was thus both dismissed as merely a feminine
form and also feared and censured as a non- or even anti-
feminine form—a form which was not only deviant, but also
threatening and dangerous. Both the subject-matter of sensation
fiction, and its dominant modes of representation, transgressed
socially acceptable norms of the proper feminine. Margaret
Oliphant (1867), for example, found it profoundly ironic that the
sudden increase in women novelists should have resulted in ‘a
display of what in woman is most unfeminine’ (259). For many
critics the sensation novel most obviously entered the
transgressive domain of the improper feminine in its treatment of
sexuality, particularly female sexuality. In this respect sensation
novels were doubly transgressive. They did not simply portray
women as sexual beings; they also dwelt on the details of
women’s sexual response in a ‘very fleshly and unlovely record’
(ibid.).

[The sensation heroine] waits now for flesh and

muscles, for strong arms that seize her, and warm
breath that thrills her…and a host of other physical
attractions… The peculiarity of it in England is that it
is oftenest made from the woman’s side—that this
intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness
of physical sensation, is represented as the natural
sentiment of English girls.
(Oliphant 1867:259)

This is more than just the predictable moralising objection to the

fact of the representation of sexuality. It is also an objection to
the nature of that representation, to the proliferation of sensuous
detail and the detailed representation of physical sensation. In
the critical response to sensation fiction, the gendered discourse
on the detail referred to earlier (pp. 27–8) is deployed to focus on
the sensation novel’s detailed representation of the female body.
Many of these ‘fast novelists’ were alleged to be ‘deeply
enamoured of the female form’, which they present ‘as
seductively as the nature of their art will admit of (Austin

34
 FICTION, THE FEMININE AND THE SENSATION NOVEL

1870a:184). Braddon’s tendency to anatomise the female body

was a subject of particular discussion and ridicule—W.Fraser Ray
(1865) was just one of the critics who had great fun cataloguing
the number and nature of the references to the hair of her
heroines. In short, contemporary reviewers repeatedly identified
sensation fiction as a form of writing the body, and hence as a
deviation from the proper feminine. The sensation novel was also
assigned to the domain of the improper feminine because of the
way it read the body, or produced a reading in the body, by its
‘appeal to the nerves rather than to the heart’ (Christian
Remembrancer 1863:210), to the animal passions and instincts
rather than to the reason:

This lower level, this drop from the empire of reason

and self-control, is to be traced throughout this class
of literature, which is a constant appeal to the animal
part of our nature, and avows a preference for its
manifestation, as though power and intensity come
through it.
(ibid.:212)

35
 6
Representation and the feminine
engendering fiction in the 1890s

Naturalism and the New Realism, two of the main areas of

fictional innovation in the late nineteenth century, were in some
ways attempts to masculinise the novel.18 From George Henry
Lewes’s ironic complaints about ‘the melancholy fact…that the
group of female authors is becoming every year more
multitudinous and more successful’ (1850:189), and George
Eliot’s satiric diatribe against ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’
(1856), to George Moore’s animadversions on the power of the
circulating libraries (1885), and Edmund Gosse’s on the ‘tyranny
of the novel’ (1892), writers and critics (male and female)
complained about the dominance of women as producers and
consumers of fiction, and of feminine concerns in the novel.
Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin have recently gone so far as to
represent the history of fiction in the nineteenth century as a
battle of the sexes in which feminine forms and female writers
were progressively ‘edged out’ by masculine forms and norms
(Tuchman 1989). Although their account has a certain dramatic
appeal, it is, I think, a radical over-simplification. The
nineteenth-century battle of the books was not simply a battle of
the sexes, although it increasingly became part of the sex war. It
was rather a battle that was waged on the terrain of gender; it
was part of a contest about the meaning of gender, and about
how and by whom gender is to be defined.
The controversies within which the New Woman fiction was
produced cannot be separated from the controversies
surrounding the new naturalism and the Fiction of Sex. The New
Fiction debate was also part of a broader panic about
degeneration which was, to a great extent, articulated as a set of
responses to literary texts. These debates in the 1880s and 1890s

36
 ENGENDERING FICTION IN THE 1890s

were the site of a contest about representation in which questions

of aesthetic representation—who or what might be represented
in fiction, in what manner, by whom and for whom—were deeply
enmeshed with debates about political representation, about
gender and the representation of gender, and also with pervasive
anxieties about cultural and political authority and control.
The debates were conducted in terms of a changing discourse
on representation and the feminine, and were part of a more
general contest in which the question of women’s right to self-
representation played an increasingly important part. For
example, in the 1880s the male writer’s success as a realist might
be gauged by his ‘unequalled knowledge of the mysterious
workings of woman’s mind and heart…and truth to nature’
(Norman 1883:834–5). Alternatively, the naturalist’s decadence
was linked to his ‘almost unholy knowledge of the nature of
woman’, which made the reader feel ‘intrusive and unmanly’
(Lang 1887:537). As female writers increasingly questioned the
authority by which any male writer might claim to know and
represent the truth of woman, the authority of female experience
was invoked against the authority of ‘masculine’ modes of
representation. In ‘A dialogue on novels’, for example, Vernon
Lee claimed a privileged authority for actual female experience
over the claims of French naturalism to know and represent the
real meaning of a particular ‘immoral’ woman: ‘I have known
such a woman,’ her young English-woman asserts, ‘known the
full meaning of such a woman…I understood that woman’s real
meaning’ (Lee 1885:401). The representation of a woman’s real
meaning became particularly contentious in the production and
reception of the New Woman fiction in the 1890s.
The late nineteenth-century controversies about realism,
naturalism, the representation of woman and the representation
of sexuality were also, in part (as was the debate about sensation
fiction), debates about the organisation of the book trade, and
about censorship. All of these issues raised important questions
about cultural authority; indeed they arose from a crisis of
cultural authority. Several causes célèbres of the 1880s—the
responses of the press to Zolaism; its treatment of the trials of
Henry Vizetelly, the publisher of English translations of Zola; the
debate on censorship initiated by George Moore in the Pall Mall
Gazette in 1884, and in his Literature at Nurse (1885)—turned
on the question of the franchise of fiction: to whom and on

37
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

behalf of whom might it speak? What subjects might it address?

Who might determine and control its dissemination?
These debates were shaped by attitudes to emerging political
groups, notably women and the newly literate masses. George
Moore, a champion of naturalism and opponent of censorship,
explicitly defined his project for reforming fiction in terms of
extending its franchise beyond its usual constituency of ‘young
girls and widows of sedentary habits’ (Moore 1976 [1884]:28).
As D.H.Lawrence was later to do, Moore equated the extension
of the range of representation in fiction with the extension of the
franchise. He declared that the realisation of his desire for a
more inclusive fiction representing the ‘nervous passionate life’
of the nineteenth century ‘would be as far reaching in its effects,
as the biggest franchise bill ever planned’ (Moore 1976
[1885]:22).19
The debate about the New Fiction’s extension of the franchise
of fiction was also a debate about changing social relations and
shifts of cultural authority, and this debate was, in turn, bound
up with continuing anxieties about the rising power of the
market-place and of a mass readership. Proponents of the new
writing claimed the cultural authority of an artistic integrity
which they saw as being threatened by the repressive philistinism
of commercialism, and by the material conditions of the
production and distribution of fiction. Opponents deplored the
fact that, despite condemnation by critical authorities, some of
the new writing sold in large quantities. In both cases the market
and readers were seen as usurping the authority of artists and/or
existing critical institutions.
Issues of gender and class figured prominently in this contest
over cultural authority. George Moore, for example, objected to
the fact that a ‘mere tradesman’ dared ‘question the sacred right
of the artist to obey the impulses of his temperament’ (Moore
1976 [1885]:7), and protested that ‘those who would press
forward towards the light of truth’ (16) were impeded by an
alliance of philistine commercialism and a particular version of
the feminine. A feminised commercialism, and the authority of
‘the taste of two ladies in the country’ (whose objection to a
scene in Moore’s A Modern Lover led to its withdrawal from
Mudie’s list) were said to produce a feminised literature: ‘a kind
of advanced school book, a sort of guide to marriage and the
drawing room’ (Moore 1976 [1884]:32).

38
 ENGENDERING FICTION IN THE 1890s

Instead of being allowed to fight with and amid, the

thoughts and aspirations of men, literature is now
rocked to an ignoble rest in the motherly arms of the
librarian…that from which he turns the breast dies
like a vagrant’s child.
(Moore 1976 [1885]:18)

While the advocates of the New Fiction protested against the

limitations placed upon fiction by its consumption (and, in the
case of women writers, its production) within the domestic space,
its opponents claimed the authority to prevent the invasion of the
domestic space (specifically those domestic spaces housing
women, children and the lower orders) by ‘pernicious literature’.
The role of fiction’s predominantly female audience in the
delimitation of the representable was foregrounded in the
‘Candour in English fiction’ discussion in the New Review
(1890), in which Walter Besant defended the views of ‘philistine’,
‘Average Opinion’ and the ‘cultured class of British Women’
against ‘your literature of free and adulterous love’ (7), and (on
the other side) Eliza Lynn Linton and Thomas Hardy argued that
‘fiction should not be shackled by conventions concerning
budding womanhood’ (Hardy 1890:20). Reversing the purity
campaigners’ fears about the feminisation that might result from
wanton representation, Linton argued that it was ‘the repressive
power of the British matron’ that would produce an
‘emasculation’ of the fiction of a ‘strong-headed and masculine
nation’ (Linton 1890:10).
Ultimately Linton and Hardy argued for a kind of
proportional representation: superior minority fiction for
sophisticated mature readers. Both writers, in effect, restated the
case for separate spheres of fiction based on sexual difference: on
the one hand, the domestic, feminine sphere of novels suitable for
women and young persons; on the other, the wider, public sphere
of ‘masculine literature’. Besant’s theories of fiction and his view
of the limits of the representable also derived from theories of
sexual difference. His contribution to the ‘Candour’ discussion
figured the world as a gendered book, in which masculine life is
simultaneously fuller but less open to representation than that of
the proper feminine. ‘Certainly’, he wrote, ‘there is a chapter in
the lives of many men which they would not publish…[but] as
for women—those above a certain level—there is never any

39
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

closed chapter at all in their lives’ (Besant 1890:11). In the 1880s

and 1890s, in the social purity campaigns, in medical discourse
and in fiction—above all in the New Woman writing—the closed
chapters of male life and the supposedly missing chapters of
female life were increasingly rendered representable, and opened
to view.
By the mid-1890s the gendered terms of the discourse on
fictional representation became increasingly unstable and
contested. Arthur Waugh’s 1894 essay ‘Reticence in literature’
argued that the style and the substance of the New Fiction of the
1890s were the result of a fusion of two developments of realism.
These he represented in terms of a narrative of the convergence
of debased gender stereotypes: the effeminate and the coarse and
brutal masculine; the sensual and the ‘chirugical’; ‘the language
of the courtesan’ and the language of the ‘bargee’ (217). This
analysis contested the naturalists’ attempts to appropriate
realism for a ‘masculine’ science. In Waugh’s account realism is
simultaneously masculine (applying the microscope in the study)
and effeminate.

Art…claims every subject for her own… Most true.

But there is all the difference in the world between
drawing life as we find it, sternly and relentlessly
surveying it all the while from outside with the calm,
unflinching gaze of criticism, and, on the other hand,
yielding ourselves to the warmth and colour of its
excesses, losing our judgement…becoming in a word,
effeminate.
(Waugh 1894:210, my italics)

Despite the fact that many writers of the New Fiction employed
non-naturalistic modes and eschewed the naturalist stance of
scientific objectivity, discussions of the ‘modern woman novel’
recapitulated and recirculated many of the terms of the discourse
on naturalism. Attacks on the ‘super-subtlety’, ‘microscopic self-
examination’, and ‘worship of ugliness’ of the New Woman
fiction reproduced the discourse of the earlier attacks on
naturalism. However, as Penny Boumelha (1982) has pointed
out, some of the terms of this discourse changed their value in the
1890s, as ‘the vocabulary of realism, itself seen comparatively
recently as outrageous, was rapidly pressed into service to accuse

40
 ENGENDERING FICTION IN THE 1890s

these new writers of disproportion in their emphasis on the

sexual’ (68). J.A.Noble’s (1895) condemnation of Sarah Grand’s
The Heavenly Twins for its ‘flagrant violation of the obvious
proportion of life’ typifies this process. Noble argued that ‘the
new fiction of sexuality presents…a series of pictures painted
from reflections in convex mirrors, the colossal nose which
dominates the face being represented by one colossal appetite
which dominates life’ (492–3). Critics like Noble did not simply
appropriate the vocabulary of realism, they also appropriated
key elements of the anti-realist discourse of the 1880s: for
example, its condemnation of realism’s failure to select, and of its
morbid, tasteless inclusiveness of range; and also the idea that to
include everything is to distort, to bring everything within the
field of representation is to misrepresent.
The representation and misrepresentation of women were
central to the controversy on the New Woman fiction.
Champions of the ‘novel of the Modern Woman’, like W.T.Stead,
linked women’s fictional self-representation directly to
progressive social change. Others, such as Hugh Stutfield (who
conducted a one-man crusade against the New Woman and all
her works), contested and undercut women’s claims to fictional
self-representation. For Stutfield, as for many of its critics, the
New Woman writing was an articulation of the obsessional
interiority and self-scrutiny of late nineteenth-century woman in
general, and of feminism in particular. In the New Fiction,
woman ‘turn[s] herself inside out’; she does not simply bare her
soul but dissects it, ‘analysing and probing into the innermost
crannies of her nature…for ever examining her mental self in the
looking-glass’ (Stutfield 1897:105). Like many commentators
Stutfield makes it clear that this is a distorting mirror.
If the New Woman writing was a distortion of reality, the
woman writer was a distortion of nature. Within the terms of a
discourse which defined her as a mere copyist or detailist, a
woman could only become an artist by throwing off ‘the habit of
her sex’ (Waugh 1894:210). Thus by aspiring to be an artist,
rather than merely a woman writer, a woman automatically
unsexed herself.

The man lives by ideas; the woman by sensations; and

while the man remains an artist so long as he holds
true to his own view of life, the woman becomes one

41
 THE ‘IMPROPER’ FEMININE

as soon as she throws off the habit of her sex, and

learns to rely upon her judgement, and not her senses.
It is only when we regard life with the untrammelled
view of the impartial spectator…that we approximate
to the artistic temperament. It is unmanly, it is
effeminate, it is inartistic to gloat over pleasure, to
revel in immoderation.
(ibid.)

The gendered discourse on fiction thus attempts to contain

women’s writing within a limiting aesthetic of feeling: women’s
writing is a literature of the nerves, it is hysterical, Intuitive
rather than intellectual’, and it owes ‘nothing whatever to the
reason or the research of man’ (Stutfield 1897:110). This linking
of the feminine in writing with intuition and feeling
simultaneously limits women’s writing and renders it threatening.
There is a constant fear that feminine feeling will erupt and
invade the masculine domain of judicious impartiality. Thus the
main danger posed by the French writer—that longstanding
bogeyman of degeneracy—was his possession of a ‘kind of
feminine intuition…which brings with it the dangers of all
excited feeling’ (Barry 1892:482).
Like French (or French-influenced) naturalism, the New
Woman novel was seen as the literary expression of destabilising
democratic tendencies, or even of revolutionary excess. It was
part of a general invasion of the culture by the feminine, a
symptom and cause of degeneration, disease and effeminacy, and
a threat to the nation’s safety. Continental influence was blamed
for the ‘predilection for the foul and repulsive’ in the
pathological novel, and for generating that hysteria which,
‘whether in politics or art, has the same inevitable effect of
sapping manliness and making people flabby’. As in the earlier
debates on naturalism, British manliness was offered as the
antidote to feminine and continental decadence: ‘[I]n this
country, at any rate, amid much flabbiness and effeminacy there
is plenty of good sense and manliness left’ (all quotations
Stutfield 1895:843).
Nowhere are the contradictions of the gendered discourse on
fiction more evident than in its figuring of women as both cause
and cure of the New Fiction. On the one hand, women were
characterised as neurotic, hysterical, morbidly introspective,

42
 ENGENDERING FICTION IN THE 1890s

slaves of the sensuous and sensual, and the producers (or, in some
less direct way, originators) of a pathological fiction which
threatened to undermine healthy, rational, male civil society.
Women were the chief culprits in spreading the modern spirit of
revolt through their ‘booming of books’ which are ‘close to life’.
On the other hand, since ‘in all matters relating to decency and
good taste men gladly acknowledge the supremacy of women’
(Stutfield 1895:844), women were called upon to exercise their
moral superiority and form an alliance with the philistines to
discourage the production and circulation of such books.
The gendered discourse I have been outlining yearns
nostalgically for the stability of ‘the old ideals of discipline and
duty, of manliness and self-reliance in men, and womanliness in
woman’ (Stutfield 1895:845), but is riven with anxieties about
the very possibility of a stable discourse on gender. This desire to
affix particular stable values to each gender category, and the
accompanying anxiety about the possibilities of stability, are not
only characteristic of the discourse on fiction in the last two
decades of the nineteenth century, they are also prominent
features of much of the fiction of the 1890s, especially of the
New Woman novel.

43
 Part II
The Sentimental and
Sensational Sixties: The
Limits of the Proper
Feminine
 7
Historicising genre (1):
the cultural moment of the
woman’s sensation novel

Genre is a socio-historical as well as a formal

entity. Transformations in genre must be
considered in relation to social changes.
(Todorov 1984:80)

The sensation novel was perhaps the chief sensation of the

‘sensational sixties’. Contemporary reviewers of the mid-
Victorian literary scene described it as an entirely new form of
fiction, which burst dramatically upon an unsuspecting but eager
public, dislodging the domestic novel—the stereotypical fictional
form of the proper feminine—from its position of dominance.
‘Two or three years ago’, lamented the Edinburgh Review in
1864, ‘nobody would have known what was meant by a
sensation novel. Yet now the term…[is] adopted as the regular
commercial name for a particular product of industry for which
there is just now a brisk demand’ (quoted in Tillotson 1969:xi).
Later investigators of the sensation phenomenon (such as
Kathleen Tillotson, P.D.Edwards and Winifred Hughes) have
echoed this rather sensationalised version of literary history, in
which the sensation novel is figured as a disruption of the
comparative calm of a middle-class fiction market dominated by
domestic tales with a moralising bent. The distinctive features of
this new novelistic mode were its passionate, devious, dangerous
and not infrequently deranged heroines, and its complicated,
mysterious plots—involving crime, bigamy, adultery, arson and
arsenic. Perhaps most shocking of all was the fact that these ‘fast’
novels of passion and crime were all set in the context of the
otherwise mundane domestic life of a contemporary middle-class

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

or aristocratic English household, and that they were both read

and written largely by women.
Although women, as producers, consumers or subjects, were
at the centre of the sensation debates, comparatively few
contemporary commentators addressed the interesting question
of why women should have played such a key role in the rise of
the sensation novel. Margaret Oliphant was one who did,
arguing that female sensation fiction was, among other things,
the woman writer’s protest against the double standard on the
issue of sexual purity. However, she was chiefly interested in
condemning rather than analysing this fact, and took the view
that women’s reading and writing of sensation fiction were a
betrayal of both their essential womanhood and their
womanliness.

It is a shame to women so to write; and it is a shame

to the women who read and accept as a true
representation of themselves and their ways the
equivocal talk and fleshly inclinations herein
attributed to them. Their patronage of such books is
in reality an adoption and acceptance of them. It may
be done in carelessness. It may be done in that mere
desire for something startling which the monotony of
ordinary life is apt to produce; but it is debasing to
everybody concerned.
(Oliphant 1867:274–5)

The Victorians’ comparative silence on the nature of the

attractions of the genre for both women writers and readers has
been filled by a great deal of discussion and analysis by later
feminist critics. In one of the earliest feminist rereadings of the
women’s sensation novel, Elaine Showalter (1978a) responded to
Oliphant’s condemnation of women’s complicity in its
production with the rejoinder that ‘the flood of popular books by
women sensationalists in the 1860s and 1870s shows that
readers recognised themselves in the outspoken heroines’ (175,
my italics). Showalter’s rereading, although suggestive, presents a
number of problems, at least two of which are to be found in the
sentence just quoted. The first is the question of the reader’s self-
recognition, a point to which I will return later. The second is her
characterisation of the sensation heroine as ‘outspoken’, a move

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 HISTORICISING GENRE (1)

which seems to collapse the differences between individual

sensation novels and sensation heroines. In fact most of the
major sensation heroines are not particularly outspoken—indeed
they are significantly silent and unable to articulate their feelings
and desires at crucial points in the narrative. Moreover, several
of them are more striking for what they do than what they say.
In general terms Showalter’s influential reassessment saw the
women’s sensation novel as fulfilling a wide range of needs for
both women writers and readers: it supplied readers with some of
the excitement missing from their middle-class lives; it gave
writers more or less off-the-peg formulae for the satiric
subversion of literary conventions and social codes; it drew upon
and reinforced a community of values shared by women writers
and readers; and, perhaps most importantly, it articulated
suppressed female emotions and expressed women’s covert anger
at the limitations of their social and domestic circumstances. Add
to this the sensation novel’s development of a ‘new kind of
heroine…who could put her hostility toward men into violent
action’ (160)—by pushing them down wells or setting fire to
them, for example—and thus function as a kind of fantasy
avenger of the wrongs of women, and one begins to wonder why
Showalter places the women sensation novelists at the end of the
second or ‘feminine phase’ of women’s writing, rather than as
part of the ‘feminist phase’ towards which her march of the
female literary mind progresses. The reason for this placing lies
in what Showalter sees as a failure of nerve and a failure of
literary form. The women sensation novelists, she argues (180),
ultimately compromised their radical and subversive impulses;
they were trapped by their own conventionality (the fear of
appearing ‘morbid, unnatural, and unfeminine’) and ensnared by
literary conventions and generic constraints:

Typically, the first volume of a woman’s sensation

novel is a gripping and sardonic analysis of a woman
in conflict with male authority. By the second volume
guilt has set in. In the third volume we see the heroine
punished, repentant, and drained of all energy…the
very tradition of the domestic novel opposed the
heroine’s development.
(Showalter 1978a:180)

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

Showalter’s reading derives from a somewhat inflexible concept

of genre, and also reveals the problems of concentrating too
much on endings at the expense of the more complex middles of
novels. 1 It also demonstrates the limitations of reading the
women’s writing of the past simply in the light of our own
political concerns, especially if this involves scanning the texts
for ‘messages’ whose sexual politics can simply be read off and
graded as ‘radical’, ‘subversive’ or ‘conservative’ by our own
standards of progressiveness. Showalter’s early, feminist-inspired
desire to see women and women writers transcend the historical
conditions of their oppression left her insufficiently interested in,
or alert to, the ways in which the women’s sensation novels
rework and negotiate, as well as simply reproduce, the
contradictions of those conditions.
Equally problematic would be a feminist reappropriation of
women’s sensation fiction which would simply celebrate its focus
on female emotions and sensations as a form of emotionally rich
womanspeak articulating female power and feeling (female
power as feeling?), or as a form of écriture féminine which
inscribes both the female body and a feminine subjectivity. This
would be to risk reinscribing essentialist notions of the feminine,
and to replicate the gendered critical discourse of the nineteenth
century through which sensation fiction was mediated—the only
difference being that in such a celebration the improper feminine
becomes the positive and valued, rather than the negative and
marginalised term.
A feminist analysis of sensation fiction should also be a
properly historical analysis of the sensation novel as a popular
cultural form. Such an analysis needs to take account of the
processes by which the products of the fiction market are sifted
and stratified into high and low forms. It will also involve an
understanding of genre as a flexible and historically developing
set of codes rather than as a fixed formula or category, as ‘a
socio-symbolic message’ (Jameson 1981:141) and a social
practice as well as a literary category. We shall also need to work
towards an historicised awareness and understanding of the
cultural meaning of feeling in sensation fiction. We need to see it
not simply as either the transgressive or subversive field of the
improper feminine, or the contained, conservative domain of the
proper feminine. Instead we should explore the sensation novel
as a site in which the contradictions, anxieties and opposing

50
 HISTORICISING GENRE (1)

ideologies of Victorian culture converge and are put into play,

and as a medium which registered and negotiated (or failed to
negotiate) a wide range of profound cultural anxieties about
gender stereotypes, sexuality, class, the family and marriage.
With this aim of historicising genre I will look briefly at the
cultural moment of the women’s sensation novel.
The enormous popularity of sensation fiction with the reading
public was in almost directly inverse proportion to the apoplectic
response it induced in the numerous reviewers who were at pains
to comprehend the phenomenon and diagnose its significance.
From the time of its first appearance the sensation novel became
a focus of controversy on a number of important issues in
contemporary fiction and culture. The middle-class periodicals
designated it a collective ‘delusion’ of the reading public (Mansel
1863:514), an endemic comparable with the ‘Dancing Mania and
Lycanthropy of the Middle Ages’ (Westminster Review
1866:269). Many reviewers treated sensationalism, as they did
realism and later naturalism, as evidence of a cultural disease of
which it was both a symptom and cause. ‘Works of this class’,
argued Henry Mansel in an early vituperative attack on the
genre, belong:

to the morbid phenomenon of literature—indications

of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part
both the effect and the cause; called into existence to
supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and
contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to
stimulate the want which they supply.
(Mansel 1863:482–3)

Whether it was figured as a form of disease or decline, or as a

palliative for cultural ill-health,2 the sensation novel was seen as
the characteristic fictional form of a modern, high-speed,
industrialised culture. Margaret Oliphant, who wrote a number
of influential reviews on the sensation phenomenon, argued that
the ‘depth of effect and shock of incident’ of sensation fiction
was expressive of the spirit of the modern age which ‘has turned
out to be one of events’ (1862:565). The sensation novel,
‘however extravagant and unnatural’ was ‘a sign of the times—
the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an
impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental

51
 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

change in the working of society’ (Christian Remembrancer

1863:210). To moral conservatives the sensation novel was a
deeply transgressive form, subversive of an incontrovertible
social and moral order. On the other hand, the free-thinking
Westminster Review welcomed its ‘rebellion’ against the ‘prudish
conventionalities of our present English style’ as a ‘much needed
practical protest, more or less direct and bold, against the tacit
arrangement by which fiction in our day is expected to ignore all
the perplexities, dangers and sufferings springing from the
relations between man and woman’ (McCarthy 1864:46).
As well as being a focus for moral debate, the sensation
controversy also became the focus for a ‘range of distinct, though
interrelated tensions about wider and longer-term transformations
that were taking place in middle-range and middle-class
publishing and literary culture’ (Taylor 1988:5). The cultural
moment of sensation fiction coincided with a period in which the
literary market was both expanding and becoming more
stratified. In particular there was an exponential increase in the
production of fiction and the number of novelists, as Margaret
Oliphant noted in a comment which contrived to equate the
growth in novel production with democratisation, massification
and feminisation:

At no age, as far as we are aware, has there existed

anything resembling the extraordinary flood of novels
which is now pouring over this land. There were days
when an author was a natural curiosity…stared at
because of the rarity of the phenomenon…[but]
nowadays…most people have been in print one way
or another…stains of ink linger on the prettiest fingers
and to write novels is the normal condition of a large
section of society.
(Oliphant 1863:168)

As reading and, to a lesser extent, writing became more

widespread and more widely diffused throughout the classes, the
boundaries between high culture and low culture—high art, low
art, and no art—were constantly being redrawn and redefined.
Many commentators saw this process of redefinition as a
pernicious invasion of middle-class culture by lower-class forms.
Others regarded the sensation novel’s role in the expansion of the

52
 HISTORICISING GENRE (1)

market for fiction as an important means of cultural renovation.

Wilkie Collins (1858), for example, welcomed sensation fiction’s
appropriation of ephemeral lower-class forms as a means of
creating a new audience for the novel. Even Margaret Oliphant,
no admirer of the genre, saw it as a refreshing challenge to the
hegemony of the ‘domestic histories’ of the 1840s and 1850s,
which, ‘however virtuous and charming’, had been failing to
provide that primary narrative pleasure that kept readers reading.
Before the advent of sensation fiction, she noted, ‘the well-known
stories of readers sitting up all night over a novel had begun to
grow faint in the public recollection’ (1862:565).
Although the debate about sensation fiction was, in part, a
debate about the drawing of boundaries, the sensation novel
itself was concerned in all sorts of ways with the unfixing and
transgression of boundaries. Formally it is a ‘mixed mode’
(Hughes 1980:16), demotic in origin and democratic in its
appeal. Its roots lie in popular forms such as the stage
melodrama, street literature and penny dreadfuls.3 The narrator
of M.E.Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife notes the mongrel nature
and demotic origins of a genre that had been in existence for
much longer than its name.

That bitter term of reproach, ‘sensation,’ had not yet

been invented for the terror of romancers in the fifty-
second year of this present century; but the thing
existed nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote
sensation novels as unconsciously as Monsieur
Jourdain talked prose… [These] highly-spiced fictions
enjoyed an immense popularity amongst the classes
who like their literature as they like their tobacco—
very strong…a public that bought its literature in the
same manner as its pudding—in penny slices.
(DW I:10–11)

Clearly much of the energy and excitement of the sensation novel

derives from its appropriation of the conventions and
preoccupations of lower-class genres which had developed
independently of middle-class forms, and outside of the
constraints and controls of middle-class moral management. This
phenomenon was noted by a Fraser’s reviewer, who remarked
that:

53
 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

The growing independence of the young people of the

present day, and the very slight supervision exercised
by parents or guardians over what they read…render
such books as we allude to even more dangerous than
they would have been twenty years ago.
(Fraser’s 1860:210)

The development of the sensation novel was also complexly

interlinked with the development of sensational newspaper
journalism, particularly with the vogue for lurid reporting of
divorce cases following the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, and of
trials concerning domestic murder and domestic crime in general.
Sensational narratives of actual murders were the staple daily
reading diet of Victorians of all social classes, and the plots of
many sensation novels were directly indebted to specific details
and situations from actual cases as reported in particular
newspapers.4
The vogue for both sensational crime reporting and sensation
fiction was part of a wider preoccupation within Victorian
culture, with the nexus of social, legal, financial, emotional and
sexual relationships involved in changing and conflicting views
of marriage and the domestic ideal. In the fields of journalism
and of fiction the question of woman was central to the
representation of this nexus. The sensationalised divorce cases,
the sensation novel and the wider sensation debate all turned on
the question of woman, and all put woman in question. They
were part of a mid-century explosion of discourse on woman—
an explosion that, to borrow Jacqueline Rose’s phrase, ‘made a
spectacle’ of woman, a spectacle which was repeated ‘across a
range of discourses’ (Rose 1986:112), in which women and the
subject of woman were examined, scrutinised and looked at. The
next section will look briefly at some of the ways of staging that
spectacle which were of particular importance in the production
of the sensation novel.

54
 8
Surveillance and control: women,
the family and the law

The sensation novel’s intense focus on marriage and domestic

relations, on bigamy and adultery (or quasi-bigamy and
adultery), and its extensive use of plots depending on missing
wills and legal intricacies, may be seen as a fictional mediation of
the heightened awareness, from the 1830s onwards—but
particularly in the 1850s and 1860s—of the anomalies in
women’s legal status, especially within marriage. As Justin
McCarthy (1864) noted in his review of ‘Novels with a purpose’,
‘The institution of marriage might almost seem to be…just now
upon its trial’ (40). The mid-Victorian contest over women’s legal
status and identity, and the changing discourse in which it was
conducted were important components of sensation fiction in
general and the women’s sensation novel in particular.
The mid-century campaigns for reforms in women’s legal
position and for reform of the marriage and divorce laws were an
extension, in slightly (but significantly) different terms, of the
campaigns initiated by Caroline Norton and others in the late
1830s. Those earlier campaigns, and the opposition to them,
were supported by appeals to particular definitions of ‘woman’
and ‘womanliness’, which were constructed within a broadly
stable if contradictory discourse. Lady Caroline Norton’s
campaign for maternal custody (which resulted in the Infant and
Child Custody Bill of 1839),5 and the opposition to it, were both
based on the dominant view of woman as a naturally dependent,
self-sacrificial, nurturing, maternal creature. The contradictions
involved in this version of woman with her supposed power in
the domestic sphere were clearly demonstrated in the arguments
used by Norton’s opponents. Within the prevailing domestic
ideology woman was figured as the queen of the drawing room

55
 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

or parlour, the priestess of the domestic temple and the nurturer

and moral guide of the coming generation. However, within the
social and legal framework of the patriarchal family she had only
duties, and not rights. As John Kemble, a leading opponent of the
bill, affirmed in the British and Foreign Quarterly Review:

The great fundamental law of society [is] the law of

paternity…
This sole and absolute power over the children, to
the exclusion of everyone else, is a fundamental right
vested in the man, as man and father, from the
beginning.
(Kemble 1838:358)

Any questioning of this ‘oldest and most sacred right belonging

to a man’ (ibid.) was held to be a threat to the very foundation
of the family, and hence of society. Should a woman go further
than mere questioning, and ‘desert her husband’s house, the
sphere of her duties, and…the only proper home of his children’
(280), she was deemed automatically to forfeit the care of her
children. As will become clear in my later discussion, especially
of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, women’s legal subjugation within
marriage and particularly their lack of legal rights over their
children, generated the narrative and emotional tensions of many
sensation novels.
Within the patriarchal family, of which she was supposedly
the cornerstone, woman was defined in terms of the discourse of
the proper feminine, as meekly submissive, the very model of and
for decorum and propriety. However, as Kemble’s Quarterly
article demonstrates, the proper feminine was itself always
defined in terms of its contradictory other, the improper
feminine, which surfaces in his vision of women as ‘so many wild
beasts’, whose lusts and licentiousness run riot ‘when you have
unbarred [their] cages’ (381). In other words, the improper
feminine could only be contained within the patriarchal family,
an institution which it also constantly threatened to dissolve or
destroy. This discourse of containment and threat, which was
used to reinforce masculine control of both women and the
family, also became an important component of the discourse of
the sensation novel.

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 SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL

The discourse of containment was neatly deconstructed by

Harriet Taylor in a Westminster Review article of 1851, which
sought to show how the moral mission and spiritual superiority
generally attributed to (proper, middle-class) women, and which
gave them ‘a position apart’ as a sort of ‘sentimental priesthood’,
also worked to exclude them from the common public sphere.
Taylor unmasked the tyranny which conventionally masqueraded
as protection, by demonstrating whose interests were best served
by positioning women as delicate, dependent creatures.

The real question is, whether it is right and expedient

that one half of the human race should pass through
life in a state of forced subordination to the other half.
If the best state of human society is that of being
divided into two parts, one consisting of persons with
a will and substantive existence, the other of humble
companions to these persons…for the purpose of
bringing up his children, and making his home
pleasant to him; if this is the place assigned to women
it is but kindness to educate them for this; to make
them believe that the greatest good fortune which can
befall them is to be chosen by some man for this
purpose; and that every other career which the world
deems happy or honourable, is closed to them by the
law, not of social institutions, but of nature and
destiny.
(Taylor 1851:300–1)

Since its beginnings, the novel has, of course, played a very

important part in persuading women (and men) of this special
female destiny. It is a message which is variously inscribed or
undercut (sometimes both at once) in sensation novels.
The issue of woman’s status as a legal subject returned to the
centre of cultural debate with the publication in 1854 of a widely
circulated pamphlet by Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), A
Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws
Concerning Women, Together with a Few Observations Thereon.
This pamphlet focused on the severely circumscribed nature of
the legal position of single and married women alike. As far as
married women were concerned, their condition had not changed
from that described by William Blackstone in his Commentaries

57
 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

on the Laws of England (1765–9); that is to say, married women

had no separate legal existence.

A man and wife are one person in law: the wife loses
all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is
entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly
responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection
or cover, and her condition is called coverture.
(Leigh Smith 1854:4)

In other words, as this reformulation of Blackstone makes clear,

a married woman could not be a subject, but only an object who
was subject to the absolute authority and control of her husband.
The husband owned his wife’s personal property, her earnings,
her children, and even her body (she was in his custody, and he
could enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus). These
particularities of women’s legal subjection within marriage and
the family generated both the plot situations and much of the
emotional force of sensation novels.
If in strictly legal terms (as far as women were concerned)
marriage was a subject state, it was also a state of subjection
from which it was extremely difficult for women to extricate
themselves. At the time of Leigh Smith’s pamphlet there were two
kinds of divorce: ‘Divorce a mensa et thoro’ and ‘Divorce a
vinculo matrimonii’. The first was a separation which could be
pronounced by the Ecclesiastical Courts on the grounds of
adultery, ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ or ‘Unnatural Practices’. The
second was ‘an entire dissolution of the bonds of matrimony’
which could be effected only by Act of Parliament on the grounds
of ‘adultery in the wife, and in some cases of aggravated adultery
on the part of the husband’ (Leigh Smith 1854:10). This legal
institutionalisation of the sexual double standard embodied in
the divorce laws was debated with fresh vigour during the late
1850s and 1860s, the period immediately preceding and
coinciding with the high point of the production of sensation
fiction, and is clearly an important element in the sensation
novel’s representation of marriage and of relations between the
sexes.
Leigh Smith’s pamphlet, the petition circulated by ‘the country’s
first real feminist committee’ (Holcombe 1980:9), and the
parliamentary debates on the resulting Married Women’s Property

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 SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL

Bill of 1857 all provoked fierce controversy in the press.

Opposition to the bill was conducted in a discourse in which the
stability of the family, and hence of society, was predicated upon
the traditional definition of the married woman as both subjected
and invisible, that is to say legally non-existent. Any attempts to
change this definition of woman, according to Sir Richard Bethell,
the Attorney General, ‘must involve a material change in the social
and political institutions of a nation’, by placing woman ‘in a
strong minded and independent position’ which ‘the most amiable
women’ did not desire (3 Hansard, CXLV, 1857:276).
One such ‘amiable’ woman was Margaret Oliphant, prolific
essayist, novelist and (on most issues) defender of the status quo
(although she became somewhat more reform-minded over the
Married Woman’s Property Act in the 1860s). Oliphant’s (1856)
response to Leigh Smith’s ‘very serious and well-meaning
pamphlet’ (381) simultaneously engaged with and demonstrated
the ideological operations of language. Oliphant took issue with
the ‘unchancy’ nature of words and terms, and sought to redefine
those used by Leigh Smith by opposing the literary to the legal,
and appealing to nature and common sense to supply the
inadequacies of both kinds of language.

It is hard to enter upon this subject [women’s legal

status] without falling into the automative hardness of
legal phraseology, or the sweet jargon of poetic
nonsense, on one side or the other. ‘The wife loses her
rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely
absorbed in that of her husband,’ says this Brief
Summary in Plain Language of the formal law. ‘His
house she enters,’ says the poet,
A guardian angel o’er his life presiding,
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing.
The one utterance is somewhat humiliating, and
the other unquestionably poetry, and both fail the
truth. Lawyer and poet alike survey the surface and
external aspect of the question—common experience
pronounces a fuller verdict.
(Oliphant 1856:381)

The ‘fuller verdict’ offered by ‘common experience’ involves the

reader’s recognition of what Oliphant offers as self-evident

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

truths. First, that ‘It is no fallacy of the law to say that [man and
wife]…are one person; it is a mere truism of nature’ (280), and
secondly, that as ‘every man and every woman knows, with the
most absolute certainty…a household divided against itself
cannot stand’ (381, my italics). Oliphant here requires the reader
to recognise marriage as an indissoluble unity of difference which
fuses discrete, but complementary, gendered roles or duties. In
short she reaffirms the ideology of the separate spheres. ‘The
man is at once the natural representative of his wife in one set of
duties’, that is to say, those of the public sphere. On the other
hand, ‘the wife is the natural representative of the husband in the
other’ (381, my italics), the domestic sphere.
As well as demonstrating the ideological operations of
language, Oliphant’s essay implicitly reveals the ideological work
done by literature. The lines of poetry which she opposes to
Leigh Smith’s legal language are not simply another way of
saying the same thing; in masking the ‘automative hardness of
legal phraseology’ they also say something different. The poetic
utterance transforms the material and legal power relations of
marriage by representing the legal subordination of women as a
form of moral and spiritual power.
In a more direct, if tongue-in-cheek, reference Oliphant’s essay
implicitly demonstrates that literature both masks inequality and
is also produced or served by it:

The injuries of women have long been a standing

subject of animadversion. Woman’s rights will never
grow into a popular agitation, yet women’s wrongs
are always picturesque and attractive. They are indeed
so good to make novels and poems about, so telling as
illustrations of patience and gentleness, that we fear
any real redress of grievances would do more harm to
the literary world than it would do good to the
feminine.
(Oliphant 1856:379, my italics)

The picturesqueness and attractiveness of women’s wrongs are

central to most sensation novels, particularly those by women.
Sensation fiction is both produced by and is about the injuries of
women. Among the things I shall want to investigate in more
detail in later sections are the various ways in which different

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 SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL

sensation novels produce, reproduce and resolve the injuries of

women, and how women and their injuries are rendered
‘picturesque’.
Female suffering was both perpetuated and made more
picturesque (in the sense of increasingly becoming the object of
public spectacle) by developments in the reform of the marriage
and divorce laws. The Married Women’s Property Bill of 1857
was unsuccessful, and campaigning on this issue continued
throughout the sensation decade. However, some limited reform
of the marriage laws was effected by the passing of the Divorce
Act of 1857 (the Matrimonial Causes Act), which improved the
property rights of married women and transferred all matters
concerning the dissolution of marriage from the Ecclesiastical
Courts to a new secular court—the Court of Divorce and
Matrimonial Causes—which had the power to grant both
judicial separations and divorces. The new legislation
perpetuated the existing institutionalisation of the double
standard on sexual conduct: a husband could divorce his wife
simply on the grounds of her adultery, but a wife was required to
prove adultery plus an additional misdemeanour, such as
desertion (for more than two years), bigamy, cruelty, rape, incest
or bestiality.
Although the inequitable nature of the 1857 Act made it of
limited usefulness to women, it was, in Margaret Oliphant’s
terms, extremely useful to and productive of literature. The
activities of the new Divorce Courts, and the reporting of
these in such publications as the Divorce News and Police
Reporter 6 produced a whole new sensational literature. The
developing genre of reportage of divorce cases not only
provided the sensation novelists with plot incidents, it also fed
a taste for marital scandal, and an interest in the complexities
of marital discord which provided a ready-made market for
sensation fiction. As one of Ouida’s fashionable young blades
remarks in Under Two Flags, ‘everybody goes through the DC
[Divorce Court] somehow or other… It’s like the Church, the
Commons and the Gallows, you know—one of the popular
institutions’ (40).

61
 9
Spectating the Social Evil: fallen
and other women

The year 1857 was not only that of the Matrimonial Causes Act,
it also marked one of a series of high points in the press agitation
about the ‘Social Evil’ of prostitution. The ‘private shame of
divorce’ and the ‘public shame of prostitution’ (Trudgill
1976:179) were thus brought together under the same spotlight.
The result was the production of a moral panic about both male
and female sexuality, the institution of marriage, and ‘immorality
as a pervasive social fact’ (ibid.). This moral panic was clearly an
important factor in the sensation novel’s representation of
sexuality (especially female sexuality), and a source of its
particular preoccupation with marriage and with various kinds
of extra-marital relationships.
There was, and still is, much discussion and disagreement
about the extent of prostitution, and the degree to which (sexual)
immorality was, and is, a pervasive social fact. There can be little
doubt, however, that both prostitution and immorality were
pervasive facts of discourse throughout the 1850s and 1860s,
and indeed throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, a
period in which, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, ‘morality makes
a spectacle of itself’:

Something has to be looked at which has not been

looked at before, vice must be rooted out, and the
woman must be inspected because…it is the woman
who [supposedly] is the immediate and visible cause
of social decay… The prostitute therefore becomes the
publicly sanctioned image against which society
measures its moral consciousness of self.
(Rose 1986:112)

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 SPECTATING THE SOCIAL EVIL

By 1860, as the Saturday Review noted, ‘the Social Evil question’

had become ‘too popular by half’ (October 6, 1860:417). In
offering his own analysis of how the discourse of the Social Evil
was constructed, this particular reviewer also exemplifies the
wider discursive framework within which prostitution was
constituted as a social fact and a social disease. The reviewer’s
own language assigns the prostitute to active membership of the
‘dangerous classes’, but the essay also points to an alternative
discourse in which the prostitute is passive—a victim of social
and economic circumstance or sexual temptation. The reviewer
deplores the prevalence of modern euphemism, which has
become as great a social evil as that which it is used to describe,
and insists on the ‘old fashioned language of the “streetwalker”’.

‘Unfortunates,’ and ‘fallen sisters,’ are the language of

the sentimental…[and even] patrician matrons and
aristocratic maidenhood allude to the subject with
more simpers than blushes. The fact is that we have
familiarized ourselves too much with the subject.
There is a subtle indelicacy and a refined coarseness in
a good deal of our sentimental sympathies with ‘the
fallen’ and there are evils—and social evils, too—
growing up around the subject, which are as bad as
what is technically known as the Social Evil itself.
(Saturday Review 1860:417)

The fundamental anxiety underlying this article is one which, in

various forms, pervaded middle-class culture throughout the
latter half of the nineteenth century. It is, in part, an anxiety
about shifts in the terminology relating to moral and behavioural
categories but, more importantly, it is an anxiety about the
instability of these categories themselves. Definitions of the
prostitute and attitudes towards prostitution were multiple,
fragmented and frequently contradictory. In the great press
debate of the late 1850s and the 1860s (in both middle-class
newspapers and the specialist medical press) prostitution and
proper or ‘respectable’ femininity were habitually defined against
each other. Respectable femininity was womanhood in its
normal, healthy and (many argued) asexual state of married
motherhood. The prostitute, on the other hand, was deviant
femininity, the negation of the womanly norm. Sexually

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depraved and mentally and physically diseased, the prostitute

was the bearer of contagion into the sanctuary of the middle-
class home.
However, as the Saturday Review article indicates, there was a
counter-discourse that defined the prostitute not against, but
within the terms of the respectable or proper feminine. Within
this discourse of the ‘fallen woman’, prostitutes were victims, not
predators; they were economically and morally vulnerable
women who fell prey to a rapacious society, and to male
economic and sexual power. This counter-discourse on the
prostitute both exposed the problems of women’s social and
economic dependence within the family and, at the same time,
reinforced it. Women’s dependence and vulnerability were seen
both as a cause of prostitution and a sign of the need to contain
women within the family. It was precisely this slippage between
the fallen woman as predator and the fallen woman as victim
which was such a disturbing feature (to contemporary reviewers)
of the sensation heroine.
Paradoxically, marriage and proper femininity were seen both
as being threatened by prostitution, and also as its cause. The
middle-class custom of delaying marriage until a husband could
support a household of normative bourgeois gentility, combined
with the ideology of proper feminine asexuality to produce that
‘fractured sexuality’ which gave rise to the ‘psychopathological
demand which prostitution satisfied’ (Nield 1973: Introduction).
Middle-class marriage customs, and in particular the ‘growing
and morbid luxury’ (Greg 1862:446) of genteel marriage, were
the subject of much press comment in the 1850s and 1860s. They
were persistently linked to what was perceived to be the growing
preference among middle-class men for keeping mistresses rather
than, or in addition to, marrying. Many commentators (male and
female) also linked this practice to the insipidity of the innocent
feminine ideal, noting that the inoffensive passivity encouraged
in middle-class women served to render the middle-class wife
considerably less attractive than a mistress. The women of the
demi-monde were seen not only as being more sexually attractive
than their respectable counterparts, but also as more lively and
interesting, and hence more suitable companions for educated
middle-class men. Among male commentators, the arrival of the
‘fast woman’ in the 1860s to challenge the dominance of the
respectable ideal of the proper feminine, and to blur the

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boundaries between respectable society and the demimonde,

served only to increase the attractions of the latter sphere. As
W.R.Greg noted:

Society—that is, the society of great cities and of

cultivated life—high life—has for some years been
growing at once more expensive and less remunerative…
All this time, while the monde has been deteriorating,
the demi-monde has been improving… The ladies there
are now often clever and amusing, usually more
beautiful, and not infrequently (in external demeanour
at least) as modest, as their rivals in more recognised
society.
(Greg 1862:453)

By mid-century and throughout the sensation decade the

contradictions in the dominant versions of marriage and
bourgeois femininity were becoming increasingly apparent. The
plots and central dilemmas of the sensation novel were generated
by these contradictions and by the anxieties they produced
amongst the middle classes. Marriage was represented as a
sanctuary from female sexuality, but also as threatened by it, and
especially by the Social Evil of prostitution, which marriage had
helped to create. The dominant discourses on marriage and
respectable femininity were further destabilised by a tendency to
see contemporary marriage as itself a form of prostitution. For
those who defined the feminine in terms of the absence of sexual
desire, marriage and prostitution involved a similar joyless and/
or shameful exchange of sex for money or financial security. In
his Westminster Review article of 1850 W.R. Greg saw the same
painful sacrifice in the first sexual act of both prostitute and
wife. He defines prostitution in economic terms, arguing that
most prostitutes take up their trade through economic necessity
rather than from lust or love of luxury. Indeed ‘the unfortunate
women who come upon the town’ through love of finery ‘are far
from being the chief or most numerous delinquents. For one
woman who thus, of deliberate choice sells herself to a lover, ten
sell themselves to a husband’ (458).
The sensation novel frequently echoed Greg’s terms in its
satirical treatment of the marriage market and in its focusing on
the situation of the purchased wife. In the women’s sensation

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novel the satirisation of contemporary marriage through

commercial metaphors (which is found in the work of earlier
writers such as Thackeray) is replaced by an emphasis on the
experiencing of marriage as a commercial transaction. Rhoda
Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower, for example, focuses
sharply on a wife’s view of marriage in these terms by dwelling
minutely on the sensations produced in her heroine by the
embrace of the husband to whom she has been married for
financial reasons.

His arm is round my waist, and he is brushing my eyes

and cheeks with his somewhat bristly moustache as
often as he wants to…for has he not bought me? For a
pair of first-class blue eyes warranted fast colour, for
ditto super-fine red lips…he has paid down a handsome
price on the nail… [T]hat accursed girdling arm is still
around me—my buyer’s arm—that arm which seems to
be burning into my flesh like a brand.
(CUF:325)

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 10
Reviewing the subject of women:
the sensation novel and the
‘Girl of the Period’

No-one who studies the present temper of

women can shut his eyes to the fact that
there is a decided diminution among them
in reverence for parents, trust in men, and
desire for children.
(Saturday Review, September 9, 1871:335)

The contest over the definition of woman, and the ideological

work of repairing the fractures within the dominant discourse of
the proper feminine, filled the pages of the newspaper and
periodical press throughout the sensation years. Women (or
‘woman’) became a public spectacle, the object of discourse and
the subject of numerous articles and essays. By the mid-1860s the
increasing stridency of the tone of some of these essays indicates
that there was indeed a crisis of definition, a panic over the
instability of established gender norms and categories.
The struggle over the meaning of woman was particularly
fierce in the pages of the Saturday Review, as will be clear from
the nature of various examples I have already given. I want to
look, finally, at a series of important articles, published in 1868,
which drew together and thus (so to speak) retrospectively
illuminate many of the concerns and anxieties about the
upheavals of the sensation decade. These essays (most of which
were written by Eliza Lynn Linton) made a concerted effort to
stabilise the discourse on gender, by reinstating a nostalgically
evoked domestic ideal of the womanly woman, and by ridiculing
and satirising any deviations from this norm. In doing so they

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

reveal a great deal about the nature of what was at stake in the
sensation novel.
The Saturday’s chief anxieties derived from a concern with the
disruption of difference. For example, ‘What is woman’s work?’
(February 15, 1868) represents a world turned upside down by
women, whose incursions into the public sphere of work have
disrupted tradition, continuity and the natural order, all of which
were posited on the gendered division of labour.

Professions are [now] undertaken and careers invaded

which were formerly held sacred to men, while things
are left undone which, for all the generations that the
world has lasted, have been naturally and instinctively
assigned to women to do…
…From the savage squaw gathering fuel…to the
lady giving up her keys to her housekeeper, house-
keeping has been one of the primary functions of
women. The man to provide, the woman to
dispense…and any system which ignores these
divisions of labour, and confounds these separate
functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong.
(Saturday Review 1868b:197, my italics)

This reviewer was exercised by the apparent paradox that the

disruption of difference in terms of the gendered division of
labour had served to reinforce difference in other respects. Most
notably it had had the effect of developing an unprecedentedly
‘wide division between the interests and sympathies of the sexes’
(ibid.). This sense of a growing division between men and
women, husbands and wives is central to the sensation novel’s
representation and investigation of modern marriage. One
symptom of this new division, and of a perceived crisis in modern
marriage, was the ‘unreasonable disrepute [into which] active
housekeeping—woman’s first natural duty—has fallen in
England’ (ibid.). The Saturday Review also attacked the
developing tendency for middle-class marriage to be based on
woman’s economic redundancy in her role as decorative object
and conspicuous consumer. Instead it reasserted the traditional
gendered division of labour, insisting that women should reapply
themselves to domestic labour and the moral and emotional
nurturing of the providing male who, in his turn, must endure the

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 REVIEWING THE SUBJECT OF WOMEN

monotony of City labours. The toiling, preoccupied husband,

and the idle, inefficient, or simply redundant wife are, of course,
often found in sensation fiction, where they play an important
part in the genre’s problematisation of the wifely role, and of
gender roles within marriage. Such pairings are at the heart of
the main narratives of Wood’s East Lynne and Braddon’s
Eleanor’s Victory. Elsewhere (in Lady Audley’s Secret, for
example) anxieties about the increased instability of middle-class
social and marital roles are displaced into narratives of the plight
of the socially mobile woman (or, more exceptionally, man) in
the aristocratic family.
The most widely known of the Saturday Review articles on
modern woman is Eliza Lynn Linton’s essay ‘The Girl of the
Period’, published on March 14, 1868, which was described by
Merle Bevington as ‘perhaps the most sensational middle article
the Saturday Review ever published’ (Bevington 1941:110). In
coining what came to be known as the ‘GOP’, Linton
retrospectively gave a name to a version of femininity that was a
major source of narrative disturbance in the sensation novels of
the early 1860s, and also provided a label for the ‘deviant’
woman of the 1870s and beyond. Linton’s satiric portrait of the
freakish GOP was constructed from a network of anxieties which
circulate through the 1860s debates about woman, and which
are prominent in the sensation novel: the belief or fear that
women are in herently duplicitous; that femininity implies and
involves acting; and that women are primitives, savages,
hysterics, or whores. In addition, Linton’s critique of the self-
concern of modern women also plays upon the fears of female
self-authorisation and of women’s resistance of male control and
regulation, which are an important undercurrent in the sensation
novel.
The GOP (like some sensation heroines) is virtually produced
to embody these fears. Her fashionable freakishness is likened to
the savage, to Madge Wildfire (the madwoman), and to the
demi-mondaine or prostitute. The GOP is a freak because her
‘uselessness at home, [and] dissatisfaction with the monotony of
ordinary life and horror of all useful work’ (Linton 1868a:340)
resist or negate the domestic virtues usually thought to be
embodied in woman. Her attitude to marriage also foregrounds
aspects of the domestic ideology which are usually suppressed.
The sexual politics of female economic dependence in marriage,

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and its similarity to prostitution (noted by W.R.Greg above), are

exposed by the GOP’s supposed view of marriage as ‘the legal
barter of herself for so much money, representing so much cash,
so much luxury and pleasure’ (Linton 1868a:340).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Linton’s rhetoric is the
way that the norm from which the GOP supposedly deviates can
only be recalled nostalgically, as a race memory which at some
future date, ‘when the national madness has passed’, may once
more have its day. Linton’s respectable, domestic norm is a
fiercely nationalistic vision of a fair young English girl, ‘the most
essentially womanly in the world’, a ‘creature generous, capable
and modest…franker than a French-woman, more to be trusted
than an Italian, as brave as an American but more refined, as
domestic as a German and more graceful’ (ibid.). This epitome of
England, home and beauty is innately pure, dignified and non-
competitive. In other words she knows and accepts her place. She
does not compete with men, but defers to them. In short she is
the very model of the Ruskinian ideal, who makes her husband’s
house ‘his home and place of rest, not a mere passage-place for
vanity and ostentation to go through; a tender mother, an
industrious housewife, a judicious mistress’ (ibid.). This ideal
forms a constant (sometimes satiric) point of reference for
defining the feminine in sensation fiction.
The qualities of this feminine ideal are further elaborated in
the womanly alternative to ‘La femme passée’, the title of
another of Linton’s contributions to what looks like a concerted
attempt on the part of the Saturday Review to (re)construct and
put into circulation a strong and stable version of the respectable
feminine.

All children and all young persons love [the ideal woman
of middle age], because she understands and loves them.
For she is essentially a mother—that is a woman who
can forget herself, who can give without asking to
receive… There is no servility, no exaggerated sacrifice in
this, it is simply a fulfilment of woman’s highest duty—
the expression of that grand maternal instinct which
need not necessarily include the fact of personal
maternity, but which must find utterance in some line of
unselfish action with all women worthy of the name.
(Linton 1868c:50, my italics)

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 REVIEWING THE SUBJECT OF WOMEN

Mid-century commentators on the subject of woman (like many

of their counterparts in the 1890s) were particularly exercised by
the alleged decline of the ‘grand maternal instinct’ in the Girls of
the Period.

It is rare to find a woman, boasting herself of advanced

culture, who confesses to an instinctive love for little
children, or who would condescend to any of that
healthy animal delight in their possession which has
always been one of the most beautiful and valuable
constituents of feminine nature.
(Saturday Review 1871:335)

In its articles on modern feminine types, the Saturday Review

attempted to re-establish fixed gender categories by means of a
sharply polarised binary definition of the feminine, which
opposed a normative feminine ideal to a non- or anti-feminine
deviation that reversed all the positives of the norm. This attempt
was, however, riven with contradictions—contradictions which
the sensation novel also revealed and put into play. Many of
these articles from the 1860s reveal both the desire to fix the
category of the feminine, and the fear that it cannot be fixed,
owing to woman’s chameleon nature. Linton’s satiric piece on
‘Feminine affectations’ represents femininity as a role to be
acted, emphasising women’s self-consciousness about their roles,
and exploring the numerous and contradictory roles constructed
for and by women. Linton appears to want both to fix and
categorise woman, and to make feminine multiplicity appear
deviant, and thus recallable to the norm of ‘the thoroughly
natural and unaffected woman…who is truthful to her core, and
who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would
dare to tell a lie’ (Linton 1868b: 777).
‘Feminine affectations’ does not simply ridicule commonly
recognised deviations from the feminine norm (such as the
Bluestocking, Poetess, or the ‘mannish woman’), it also seeks to
delimit and control the feminine by ridiculing women’s
autonomous development of their socially assigned gender roles.
Thus it mocks those women who attempt to extend the moral
dimension of the feminine ideal by assuming the ‘antiseptic’ role
of ‘spiritual beadledom’ (ibid.). It is equally scathing of the self-
consciously staged ‘intensive womanliness’ adopted by ‘certain

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

opposers of the prevalent fast type’, who ‘in every action of their
lives…see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel’ (776).
In fact this essay implicitly points to a real problem in women’s
self-perception in a culture which surrounds them with potent
but self-contradictory images—a problem which is viewed from a
variety of perspectives in the female sensation novel.

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 11
Historicising genre (2): sensation
fiction, women’s genres and
popular narrative forms

Twentieth-century critics have taught

generations of students to equate popularity
with debasement, emotionality with
ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery,
domesticity with triviality, and all of these,
implicitly, with womanly inferiority.
(Jane Tompkins 1985:123)

The evaluative system and its attendant process of cultural sifting

described by Jane Tompkins (above) have not only played a
crucial role in writing the women’s sensation novel out of literary
history, but were also important components of the
contemporary critical response to sensation fiction, and
constitutive elements of the genre itself. However, a variety of
recent historical and theoretical work on popular forms and
genres (particularly narrative forms by and for women) has
enabled us to rethink the equations Tompkins outlines, and to
reassess both the contemporary cultural meaning of sensation
fiction, and its subsequent changing significances.
Of particular importance in this respect has been what
Andrew Higson and Ginette Vincendeau (1986) have described
(with reference to contemporary film studies) as The feminist-
inspired desire to focus on texts traditionally popular with
female audiences (and derided by male critics)’ (3). This focus on
women’s genres has not only brought ‘low’ genres into critical
view, but has also led to a rethinking of the concept of genre
itself; instead of conceptualising it as ‘a structure (of binary

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 THE SENTIMENTAL AND SENSATIONAL SIXTIES

oppositions, of iconographies and themes)’, there has been a

move towards seeing it as ‘a processing of narrative point of
view, subject position and desire’ (Higson and Vincendeau
1986:3). Much of this work attempts to build into its analysis of
text and genre an account of the pleasures and desires of readers,
and the various reading or spectating positions offered to the
audience.
For example, Tania Modleski’s work on ‘mass market
fantasies for women’ in Loving with a Vengeance (1984) invites
us to rethink the relationships between the women’s genres of the
past, and to analyse them in terms of the complex and
contradictory pleasures they offer to both women writers and
readers. Using Modleski’s analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century fiction by or for women, one might argue that the
sensation novel, like gothic—the subversive fictional form of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—is ‘somewhat
continuous with’ domestic fiction. Sensation novels, like gothic
novels, ‘are “domestic” novels too, concerned with the (often
displaced) relationships among family members and with driving
home to women the importance of coping with enforced
confinement and the paranoid fear it generates’ (Modleski
1984:20). Like these earlier women’s genres, sensation fiction
engages in an intense focus on the domestic space of the marital
home—the desired goal of the domestic heroine—which becomes
in the sensation novel (as in gothic) the locus of passion,
deception, violence and crime. This is one of the key areas in
which sensation fiction represents and (variously) negotiates the
contradictions of the domestic ideology. The home, in Ruskinian
orthodoxy, ‘the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all
terror, doubt and division’ (Ruskin 1880 [1865]:92), becomes
instead the site of terror, doubt and division. However, in the
sensation novel, unlike gothic, it is a woman who tends to be the
origin or cause of the terror, doubt and division.
Like their domestic and gothic predecessors, sensation novels
are usually family romances whose narrative trajectory derives
from the dynamics of (sometimes concealed) family relationships.
This concern with the domestic scene and the dynamics of the
family is also one of sensation fiction’s many points of
connection with the popular melodrama, from which many of its
plot situations, character types and rhetorical devices were
borrowed. Indeed the women’s sensation novel seems to display

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most of the characteristics which Peter Brooks discerns in

melodrama: ‘The indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral
polarization and schematicization; extreme states of being,
situations, action; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and
final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark
plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety’ (Brooks 1976:11–12).
As Brooks argues in his important study of the melodramatic
imagination in European culture, melodrama is usually most
popular in periods of intense social or ideological crisis, in which
(depending on the particular historical circumstances and
ideological pressures) it functions either subversively, or as
escapist entertainment. Melodrama was certainly a pervasive
aspect of Victorian culture, appearing in a number of different
forms throughout the period. In all of its guises—as Martha
Vicinus (1981) has observed—nineteenth-century melodrama
invariably served as both a ‘cultural touchstone’ for those classes
or social groups which were confused by major social changes
and ambivalent about their own role in the new order, and as a
‘psychological touchstone’ for the poor, the powerless and ‘those
who felt themselves to be “helpless and unfriended”’ (128).
Clearly this aspect of melodrama had particular resonance for
women. Melodrama addressed the contradictions of women’s
lives and, through its habitual deployment of motifs of rebellion
and self-sacrifice, spoke to a ‘recurrent underlying emotional
tension’ (Vicinus: 1981:133) in those lives.
The sensation novel of the 1860s (especially the work of Mary
Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood) was perhaps the dominant
mid-Victorian form of domestic melodrama for women. The
similarities between the women’s sensation novel and other
melodramatic forms are, of course, well documented. Sensation
fiction’s close connection with stage melodrama is evident in its
extravagant plotting, its emotional intensity and linguistic
excess, and also in its characteristic displacement of anxieties
about social and political issues into intersubjective dramas
focused on the family.
However, the differences between the two forms are just as
important as the similarities, and in my own analysis of
particular sensation novels (in the next two sections) I shall
suggest that the women sensationalists put the emotional and
linguistic excess of melodrama to new uses. I shall also attempt
to show that in the women’s sensation novel the family was both

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the site and origin of an even more profound tension than was
the case in the stage melodrama. In the female sensation novel
the family was not simply a refuge from change (as Vicinus
argues in relation to stage melodrama), but also, more
emphatically, the site of change. It was not only an arena in
which an abstract moral ‘struggle between good and evil’
(Vicinus: 1981:131) was played out, it was itself both the cause
and site of a struggle in which those abstract moral categories
were destabilised.
In short, I suggest that the representation of the family in the
women’s sensation novel was more conflicted and ambiguous
than in the popular stage melodrama of the earlier nineteenth
century. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of the
sensation novel (and, no doubt, a primary source of narrative
interest for contemporary readers) is the way in which it
problematises the family, explores women’s contradictory roles
within it and articulates their complex and contradictory feelings
about it. In this respect, as in others, the women’s sensation novel
does not merely reproduce generic conventions and ideological
codes, but rather reworks and develops them.
The theoretical and historical work on nineteenth-century
melodrama by critics such as Brooks and Vicinus has combined
with psycho-political analyses of the operations of melodrama in
modern mass-culture forms (particularly film) to produce, in
effect, the recovery of a cultural field. It has also led to the
reassessment of a category which had previously been written
out of cultural history in that process of sifting by which the
components of a culture become stratified into a hierarchy of
value. In this case the process resulted in melodrama being
‘constituted as the anti-value for a critical field in which tragedy
and realism became the cornerstones of “high” cultural value,
needing protection from mass, “melodramatic” entertainment’
(Gledhill 1987:5). The recovery and reassessment of melodrama
have been crucial in establishing new ways of reading and
understanding a wide range of melodramatic forms, including
the sensation novel. As I suggested earlier, feminist analyses have
played a particularly important role in bringing this ‘“woman’s
area” into critical view’ (Gledhill 1987:2). They have also posed
far-reaching questions about gender, genre and culture, which
have led to a rethinking of the categories habitually used to
separate ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’, the ‘serious’ and the ‘trivial’.

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Recent feminist work on contemporary mass-market romance

has been particularly productive in generating fresh perspectives
on women’s genres such as the sensation novel. For example
Tania Modleski’s (1984) reading of contemporary ‘gothics’ and
Harlequin romance offers a suggestive analysis of the semiotics
of the popular romance text and the cultural meaning of genre,
which discovers ‘elements of protest and resistance underneath
highly “orthodox” plots’ (25). Such narratives, she argues, both
enact and contain strategies of resistance to women’s (usually)
subservient familial and social roles. Janice Radway’s work on
Harlequin romance and its readers (1987), Alison Light’s (1986)
exploration of the readerly pleasures of women’s popular
romances, and Bridget Fowler’s (1991) study of ‘the alienated
reader’ of romance have also (from quite different perspectives)
developed analyses which have questioned the orthodox view of
romance text as inherently conservative, and romance reading as
a process of merely passive and appetitive consumption.
Radway, for example, combines reader-response theory,
ethnographic analysis of actual readers and reading
communities, and feminist psychoanalysis to produce a view of
the romance-reading experience as deeply contradictory. She
maintains that female readers (at least temporarily) resist and
escape from the limiting conditions of their social and familial
roles, in the very act, paradoxically, of becoming immersed in
narratives which make an idealised version of those roles the
object of desire.
One consequence of Radway’s work (as of much of the recent
work on modern mass-market romance) has been to overturn the
view that popular romance forms depend on the reader’s simple
identification with the heroine, or, indeed, with any other single
figure in the text. On the contrary, both theoretical and empirical
work suggest that the romance text offers a range of positions
and identifications for the reader, and that the female romance
reader’s presumed surrender to the narrative pleasures of the
formulaic text does not necessarily involve her surrender to, or
acceptance of, its (usually) conservative ideology. Women
romance readers, as Radway (most strikingly) has shown, do not
merely passively consume their chosen texts but commonly read
against the grain, negotiating a variety of positions of
spectatorship, and appropriating the text and its messages to
their own perspectives and for their own purposes.

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Clearly we cannot hope to replicate Radway’s analysis of

actual reading practices in relation to nineteenth-century texts
and audiences. Nevertheless her analysis of the psychology of
romance reading and the structure of the romantic narrative can
be usefully appropriated. Instead of analysing actual readers and
reading practices, students of the sensation novel must focus on
the implied reader(s) constructed and addressed by the discourse
of sensation fiction, and on the specific historical and cultural
contexts of reading and writing. This will require careful analysis
of the tone and address of particular sensation novels, and of the
rhetorical strategies of individual writers, as well as (and in
conjunction with) an informed historical analysis of the
discursive contexts in which the sensation genre was produced.
Work on other modern mass-culture narrative forms for
women, such as soap opera, family melodrama and ‘the woman’s
film’ (and the theoretical positions which inform this work)7 is
also extremely useful for developing an analysis of the 1860s
sensation novel. Of particular importance here are the debates
about the gendered pleasures of narrative; the text’s positioning
of its female readers and feminine addressees, and the kind(s) of
femininity it constructs for them; the relationship between the
specific gendered identities constructed within and by the text;
the codes of gender which operate within its wider cultural
context; the various forms of spectatorship involved in textual
consumption—particularly the debates around what Christine
Gledhill (1988) describes as the ‘largely negative accounts of
female spectatorship, suggesting colonized, alienated or
masochistic positions of identification’ (66); and the ways in
which contradictions are foregrounded and spaces created for
oppositional readings.
Clearly the conditions of production of nineteenth-century
sensation fiction were very different from those within which
modern mass-market romances, soap opera and the woman’s
film have developed. It would therefore be unwise simply to
transfer analytic models from one medium to another, or from
one historical conjuncture to another. However, as I hope my
own analysis of the early (1860s) novels of Mary Elizabeth
Braddon and Ellen Wood will show, some aspects of this recent
work on theories of representation, and the cultural production
and consumption of modern mass-culture forms, can be usefully
applied to a popular women’s genre of the nineteenth century.

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Literary criticism has much to gain from an engagement with the

theoretical and methodological debates within film and media
studies.
For example, the broad theoretical framework developed by
Annette Kuhn’s work on television soap opera and film/television
melodrama offers a useful model for a flexible study of genre as
an historically specific social practice. Kuhn’s emphasis on the
importance (in analysing popular representations) of developing
a complex awareness of the relationship between specific forms
and codes, the cultural freight and currency of particular images,
and the way in which specific spectators in a specific historical
and cultural location might work and rework those images, is
particularly useful for the analysis of a formula genre such as the
sensation novel.
Kuhn’s reading of how the mass-culture text (in this case
television soap opera and the film melodrama) actively produces
a ‘feminine’ point of view in the socially constructed female
audience which it addresses is of particular relevance to an
analysis of the operations and effects of the woman-to-woman
address, and the shifting point of view of the women’s sensation
novel. Kuhn argues that the construction of gendered audience
and spectator in and by the woman’s text is a contradictory
process, involving an ‘interplay of masculine and feminine
subject positions’.

Culturally dominant codes inscribe the masculine,

while the feminine bespeaks a ‘return of the repressed’
in the form of codes which may well transgress
culturally dominant subject positions, though only at
the expense of proposing a position of subjection for
the spectator.
(Kuhn 1987:347–8)

By being positioned as the spectator (especially of a female

character) the female reader is offered a culturally masculine
‘position of mastery’. (I would argue that in sensation fiction this
mastery is also an effect of the specularity of the melodramatic
style, especially its tendency to fetishise the female body.) At the
same time (or by turns), the reader is placed ‘in a masochistic
position of…identifying with a female character’s renunciation’
(Kuhn 1987:347), submission, or subjection. It is this

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contradictory process (and the opportunities that it offers to

readers to negotiate contradictions) which opens a space for
oppositional readings and the subversion of the dominant
discourses.
In fact, it is by no means clear (even in East Lynne) that the
reader of the sensation novel is placed unequivocally in a
‘masochistic’ position of identification with the suffering heroine.
Indeed, in much sensation fiction the reader might be said to
‘spectate’, rather than to identify with female suffering.
Nevertheless the idea of a (potentially subversive or oppositional)
gap between a functionally masculine reading position (of
mastery) and the woman reader’s customary subservience remains
a useful one. Moreover, Kuhn’s account of how the woman’s text
articulates women’s anxieties about and resistances to their
situation, and simultaneously manages and contains them, offers a
pointer towards a way of thinking through the relationship
between the subversive and conservative elements of the women’s
sensation novel. This thinking-through requires a different kind of
critical attention from that which sensation fiction has usually
received. Instead of merely identifying themes and types, and
labelling the elements of a formula, we must engage in close
textual analysis which pays particular attention to the rhetorical
strategies and devices employed, and to the specific texture of the
writing.
One of the defining characteristics of the sensation novel, as of
the woman’s film, is ‘its construction of narratives motivated by
female desire and processes of spectator identification governed
by female point-of-view’ (Kuhn 1987:339). In earlier feminist
analyses of sensation fiction, such as Showalter’s (1978a and
1978b), female desire and spectator-identification were seen in
terms of the female reader’s repressed anger and presumed
identification with an active and, usually, transgressive heroine.
Using some of the perspectives on the spectator and the shifting
point of view to which I have referred, one might arrive at a
different interpretation of the sensation heroine; although she is
of central importance in the sensation novel, the heroine is not
necessarily or uniformly the central point of, and for, the reader’s
identification. Indeed, both Braddon and Wood employ a
complex manipulation of point of view, and offer their readers a
variety of perspectives and positions within the text which permit
a dispersal of narrative identifications: the female reader may, at

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various points, identify with or share the perspective of the

heroine, other female characters, or various of the male
characters.
The shifting point of view also produces a number of
(varyingly distanced) perspectives on the heroine, ranging from
active identification with the transgressive heroine, to a
potentially masochistic identification with her sufferings; from
sympathy with her plight, to outright condemnation of her
transgressions. The reader, by turns, recognises herself in the
heroine and views the action through her eyes; is made into a
spectator of the heroine, who becomes the fetishised object of her
gaze; is addressed by the narrator, or co-opted to a narrative
perspective which involves a moral judgement of the heroine. As
a consequence of these shifting perspectives the female reader has
the complex narrative pleasure (simultaneously or by turns) of
spectating and participating in an exciting deviance, and in the
moral judgement of that deviance, as well as spectating and
participating in the punitive social and emotional consequences
of transgression.
Unlike some earlier rereaders of Braddon and Wood (Winifred
Hughes, for example), I shall not attempt to account for the
popular success or the cultural meaning of their sensation novels
simply in terms of their differing degrees of transgression, or
sentimental conservatism. Instead I shall suggest that neither
novelist offers a single ideological perspective nor, indeed, a
coherent and unified range of perspectives, whether radical or
conservative. Rather, their novels contain a variety of
contradictory views on gender, sexuality, class, marriage and the
family. In this respect, they both embody and work through
(while remaining within) the ideological battles, contradictions
and confusions of the mid-Victorian period.
I shall also suggest that the sensation ‘heroine’ herself offers a
complex and contradictory range of significations, and is not
simply the iconic embodiment of transgressive femininity, or a
fantasy version of a feared or desired female power, as some
critics have argued. If the sensation heroine embodies anything, it
is an uncertainty about the definition of the feminine, or of
‘woman’. Woman, or a woman, whether as heroine or as
villainess (or, as is usual in sensation fiction, as a combination of
these two roles), is almost always at the centre of the sensation
novel. However, her role in the narrative structure and sexual

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and familial economy of the novel is fraught with contradictions.

In particular it involves ‘a conflict between the aesthetic
requirements of plot and the conventional social role assigned to
women’ (Hughes 1980:45). To put a woman at the active centre
of a sensation plot was to make her functionally trangressive,
because such an active and assertive role conflicted with accepted
views of the proper feminine. E.S.Dallas was quick to note the
way in which the sensation heroine destabilised established
gender categories: ‘When women are thus put forward to lead
the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position. To
get vigorous action they are described as rushing into crime, and
doing masculine deeds’ (Dallas 1866:297). However, the key
opposition in the sensation novel is not between the ‘masculine’
woman and the ‘feminine’ woman, but between conflicting
versions of femininity, in particular the proper and the improper
feminine. In the sensation plot the shifting and disputed category
of the feminine is itself almost always the origin of narrative; the
improper feminine functions as the narrative return of those
forces which are repressed in and by the social construction of
the proper feminine. As Braddon’s narrator observes in Aurora
Floyd: ‘[I]f she had been faultless she could not have been the
heroine of this story; for has not some wise man of old remarked,
that the perfect women are those who leave no histories behind
them…’ (AF:330).

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 12
Mary Elizabeth Braddon:
the secret histories of women

[Sensation novelists] wanted to persuade

people that in almost every one of the well-
ordered houses of their neighbours there
was a skeleton shut up in some cupboard;
that their comfortable and easy-looking
neighbour had in his breast a secret story
which he was always going about trying to
conceal.
(Ray 1865:203)

Had every creature a secret, part of

themselves, hidden deep in their breasts,
like that dark purpose which had grown
out of the misery of her father’s untimely
death—some buried memory, whose
influence was to overshadow all their lives?
(EV I:3)

This fearful question, asked by Eleanor Vane, heroine of

Eleanor’s Victory, lies at the heart of the sensation novel. It both
exposes and plays on the fear of respectable Victorian society
that social and familial normality had some dark secret at its
core. The secrets of the family and the secret histories of families
are the source of the typical sensation plot, which, as Henry
James noted, is concerned with ‘those most mysterious of
mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’ (1865:594).
Indeed, the power of sensationalism, as Elaine Showalter has
pointed out, derives ‘from its exposure of secrecy as the
fundamental enabling condition of middle-class life’

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(1978b:104). As both Showalter and Anthea Trodd (1989) have

demonstrated, the sensation novel’s characteristic preoccupation
with domestic crimes is the focus of a range of anxieties about
the nature and structure of the family, and the problematic
relationship of this private (feminine) sphere with the public
(masculine) domain.
In particular, the sensation novel habitually focuses on the
secrets and secret histories of women. All of Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s early novels are structured around women with a
concealed past: women who, for a variety of reasons, conceal
their present motivations and desires, and who have a hidden
mission which drives their lives. In most cases these feminine
concealments both result from, and foreground, a tension
between the proper and the improper feminine. The secret at the
heart of Braddon’s novels usually involves a former transgression
of the bounds of the proper feminine, or it involves a guilt by
association, which taints or threatens the heroine’s respectability.
The concealment most often results from a conflict between a
particular woman’s self-appointed mission and the accepted
codes of the proper feminine, or from the necessity for women to
act by stealth, and often through male agents, in a society which
casts them in a passive, dependent role. Except in the case of
Braddon’s two best-known novels, the secret involves a conflict
between the heroine’s mission to avenge a wronged father (or
father-substitute) and that code of the proper feminine which
defines woman as self-sacrificing, loving and forgiving. Revenge
thus serves as a generalised metaphor for a commanding secret
passion, a hidden desire which motivates a woman’s actions.
Often, several forms of secrecy converge to generate a
particular narrative. In Eleanor’s Victory, for example, Eleanor
Vane conceals and bears the guilty burden of her impoverished
past with a dissolute father who is addicted to gambling.
Although this ‘guilty’ past (and its convergence with the family
secrets of others) is the origin of the story, it is Eleanor’s own
deliberate concealments which sustain—and provide the
necessary complications for—the narrative trajectory. In the
earlier part of this novel Braddon rewrites The Old Curiosity
Shop, tempering Little Nell’s preternatural goodness, which is all
suffering and endurance, with a more realistic sense of the moral
and psychological consequences of the experience of observing
and being involved in the downward spiral of the obsessive

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gambler. The secret of Dickens’s heroine is an ultra-‘feminine’,

passive goodness which passes all understanding, and which
cannot survive in this fallen world. Eleanor’s secret, on the other
hand, is her ‘unwomanly’ desire for revenge and her active
pursuit of the man who has driven her father to suicide.
A similar set of secrets lies at the centre of the particularly
complex (even cumbersome) plot and sub-plots of Run To Earth,
whose heroine, Jenny Milsom, is literally rescued from the gutter
(where she has been earning a precarious living as a street-singer)
by Sir Oswald Eversleigh, who renames her and remakes her as
a genteel woman. Jenny/Honoria’s secret history is her ignoble
birth (she is the daughter of a desperado called Black Milsom),
her association with low-life criminals, and her dark knowledge
of hideous crimes. However, an even darker secret sustains the
second half of the novel; Honoria compromises her ‘womanly’
nature by apparently forsaking her infant daughter in order to
unravel the secret of (and avenge) her husband’s death.
The sins of the father also lie at the root of the concealments of
Margaret Wilmot/Wentworth in Henry Dunbar. Margaret not
only bears the taint of her father’s criminality and poverty, but is
also implicated in his guilt through her dutifully filial
concealment of his murder and impersonation of his former
employer. The plot of Henry Dunbar, like those of several of
Braddon’s novels, turns on women’s position as ‘relative
creatures’ (Basch 1974) and on the complexities and
contradictions resulting from their conflicting loyalties as
daughters, wives and mothers. This conflict is repeatedly
foregrounded in direct comments by the narrator. In Eleanor’s
Victory, for example, we are told that Eleanor’s life ‘had
fashioned itself to fit that unwomanly purpose [of avenging her
father]. She abnegated the privileges, and left unperformed the
duties of a wife’ (EV II:152); or again, ‘She had neglected her duty
as a wife, absorbed in her affection as a daughter; she had
sacrificed the living to the dead’ (EV III:173). Unsurprisingly, the
narrative trajectory of this novel, as of most of Braddon’s fictions,
is directed towards the proper feminisation of the heroine. The
‘victory’ of the title turns out ‘after all’ to be ‘a proper womanly
conquest, and not a stern, classical vengeance. The tender
woman’s heart triumphed over the girl’s rash vow’ (EV III:321).
Ultimately Eleanor declines to exact her long-desired retribution
from her father’s destroyer, and wholeheartedly embraces her

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wifely and womanly role. However, as in other women’s

sensation novels, without the heroine’s ‘unwomanly purpose’
there would have been no story.
Family secrets and the secret histories of women are most
spectacularly present in Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd.
It is significant that Braddon’s most successful novels should each
involve the secrets of a woman’s own transgressive past, rather
than her concealments of the guilty secrets of others. In fact,
Braddon’s most famous heroines are actually criminals; both are
bigamists, and one attempts, and the other is suspected of,
murder. Like a number of sensation heroines, Lady Audley and
Aurora Floyd are used both to exploit and explore the fear
expressed by another bestselling woman novelist, that all women
‘possess a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious possibility of
fiendish evil’ (Ouida 1895:324).
Aurora Floyd, Braddon’s second bestseller, is built around the
simplest and most commonplace of secrets: that of an impetuous
and misspent youth. According to the double standard of sexual
morality such a secret in a man’s life may be of little interest;
there is no story, unless it be in the return of the repressed
feminine, as in Bertha’s embodiment of Rochester’s past in Jane
Eyre. In the case of a woman, however, the secret of youthful
trangression is the origin of a proliferation of narratives. Aurora,
the motherless and hence improperly socialised and improperly
feminised heroine of the novel, has extended her masculinised
interest in horses and racing to her father’s groom, Conyers, with
whom she elopes. Rumours of her youthful misdemeanours
subsequently prevent her marriage to Talbot Bulstrode, a scion of
the Cornish aristocracy. The need to conceal this early
misjudgement is compounded (and plot complications
proliferate) when, erroneously believing Conyers to be dead,
Aurora subsequently marries John Mellish, only to discover that
her first husband is still alive, and indeed has come to work on
her second husband’s estate.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that all of Braddon’s heroines
(indeed the heroines of most sensation novels) share Aurora’s
lack of a mother. As the speaker of Florence Nightingale’s
fragment ‘Cassandra’ observes: ‘the secret of the charm of every
romance that ever was written…is that the heroine has generally
no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these
do not interfere with her entire independence’ (quoted in

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Strachey 1978:397). It is certainly a defining characteristic of the

sensation heroine that she has not been ‘educated to that end [of
the good wife] by a careful mother’ (AF:41). As in so many
nineteenth-century novels by women, the motherless heroine is
both more vulnerable and more assertive than was the norm for
the properly socialised woman. Socially sanctioned mothering, as
an extended horticultural metaphor in Aurora Floyd has it, is
required to ‘train and prune’ the ‘exuberant branches’ sometimes
found in women in their natural state, so that they may be
‘trimmed and clipped and fastened primly to the stone wall of
society with cruel nails’ (AF:42).
Aurora Floyd moves from hidden transgression to concealed
criminality more by accident than by design, as a result of her
inadvertent bigamy. Lady Audley’s secret criminality is,
apparently, a matter of cold calculation. Helen Talboys,
disguised as Lucy Graham, marries Sir Michael Audley knowing
that she is still legally married to George Talboys. When she
learns of Talboys’s imminent return from Australia she carefully
stage-manages the death by consumption of ‘Helen Talboys’, and
places an obituary announcement in The Times. Accidentally
discovered by her first husband, she pushes him down a well—
she assumes to his death—and subsequently attempts to dispose
of her second husband’s nephew, Robert Audley, whom she fears
will reveal her guilt.
These two women, each possessed of a secret past which
compromises the marriage on which they embark in the narrative
present, become the focus of a range of questions and tensions
about the nature of femininity, the domestic ideal, women’s role
in marriage, and the state of modern marriage, which were
central preoccupations in sensation fiction in general. I want to
look first at some of the ways in which Braddon’s two bestselling
novels represent femininity.

STAGING THE FEMININE: BRADDON’S

MELODRAMATIC STYLE
Most critics were and are agreed that the power of Aurora Floyd
and Lady Audley’s Secret lies in their transgressive heroines.
Indeed, both contemporary reviewers and later readers have
focused on the transgressive nature of these heroines rather than
on their criminality. This tends to reinforce the view that the

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bigamy novel was used either to develop the adultery plot in a

displaced form, or as a way of representing a sexually active
female character whilst keeping within that framework of law
and custom which was designed to regulate female sexuality. In
what ways are Braddon’s best-known heroines transgressive?
What does their transgressiveness signify? How does it function
within the narrative economy of the text?
The characterisations of Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley both
involve an elaborate play with fictional female stereotypes. Both
characters, in different ways, embody the contradictory discourse
on woman (discussed in I, 2 above) in which woman is figured as
either a demon or an angel. The two heroines embody and
exploit the fear (which pervaded middle-class culture) that
women are ‘wild beasts’ whose lusts and licentiousness run riot if
unconstrained by the patriarchal family.8
Aurora Floyd is represented from the outset as very obviously
transgressing the boundaries of the proper feminine. Her physical
appearance is itself a sign that she belongs to the category of the
dangerous, improper feminine. Moreover, like her creator,
Aurora (in James’s memorable phrase) ‘knows much that ladies
are not accustomed to know’ (1865:593). She is represented as a
prototypical ‘Girl of the Period’: her behaviour is generally fast,
she uses coarse language, and has a passion for (and unwomanly
knowledge of) horseracing. The verve with which this stereotype
is represented in Braddon’s novel has the paradoxical effect of
portraying the culture’s demon, the masculinised ‘unwomanly’
woman, as the desirable and desired feminine. However, Aurora’s
secret (as revealed in the rapidly unfolding narrative) is that
beneath this racy and, apparently, criminal exterior beats the
eternal heart of domestic, maternal woman. Aurora’s story is the
story of the gradual taming of the wild beast of the improper
feminine.
On the other hand (an irony not lost on her contemporary
readers), Braddon’s first femme fatale, the bigamous, murderous
and possibly insane Lady Audley, seems, at least on the surface,
to be contained within the boundaries of the proper and
respectable feminine. This feminine ideal is elaborated and, it
appears, celebrated in an early descriptive passage:

Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and

brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair

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face shone like a sunbeam. She would sit for a quarter

of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently
as pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if
she had been listening to the compliments of a marquis;
and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her
(for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence),
the old woman would burst out into senile raptures
with her grace… For you see Miss Lucy Graham was
blessed with that magic power of fascination by which
a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a
smile.
(LAS:5–6)

The direct narratorial address of this extract, with its familiar,

even banal, formulae for feminine charms, involves the reader in
shared assumptions about the nature of feminine fascination. A
typical example of Braddon’s descriptive technique, this passage
(which continues in the same vein for some length) engages in an
excess of description and an over-emphasis on Lucy’s
embodiment of the feminine ideal, with the effect of making her
the object of the reader’s gaze. Thus, at the level of textual or
narrative representation, Lucy Graham is staged as spectacle, just
as within the narrative the character is staging herself. This latter
kind of performance is central to Braddon’s novels, since, like
Lucy Graham, virtually all of her heroines have something to
hide, and are to that extent actresses.
Lady Audley shares with a number of Braddon heroines the
‘shame’ of an ignoble father and humble and impoverished
family circumstances. To this is added a more fundamental fear
about her parentage: the fear that she may have inherited her
mother’s madness. This taint, passed on from mother to daughter
like a mark of Eve, represents an association between madness
and the feminine which was pervasive in nineteenth-century
culture.9 In fact the question of Lady Audley’s madness (is she
mad, or is she simply clever and/or wicked?) becomes one of the
key secrets of the narrative. The repeatedly postponed
uncovering of the mystery of Lady Audley is one of the major
sources of narrative pleasure, as the main plot of this novel
persistently promises to get at the hidden truth of its heroine/
villain, and of woman.

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As far as the character of Lady Audley herself is concerned,

her fear of her secret destiny adds another dimension to the
determining conditions of a woman’s life. The habits of self-
surveillance developed by Helen Maldon/Lady Audley in
response to her fears of inheriting her mother’s madness are an
exaggerated form of that self-scrutiny enjoined upon every
woman by prevailing ideas of the proper feminine. Braddon’s
emphasis on her heroines’ concern to protect their secrets, like
her habitual minute focus on their sensations and feelings, is in
part a foregrounding of the process of self-surveillance endemic
in a culture in which the ‘supremacy of the woman’s moral
nature and her potential degeneracy were the twin poles of a
representation which had already transposed a panic about the
social body—its ordered regulation and reproduction—into
moral terms’ (Rose 1986:111).
In fact ‘Lucy Graham’ and ‘Lady Audley’ are both roles
played by Helen Maldon, who has repeatedly remade her identity
with each rise in the social scale from the impoverished daughter
of a disreputable half-pay naval officer; to the wife of George
Talboys, heir to a considerable fortune (from which he is
disinherited as a result of his father’s displeasure at his imprudent
marriage); to Lucy Graham, the quiet, respectable governess. In
her final incarnation as Lady Audley, ‘every trace of the old life
[is] melted away—every clue to identity melted and forgotten’, as
marriage to Sir Michael promises to put an end to
‘dependence…drudgery…[and] humiliations’ (LAS:12).
Braddon not only shows Lady Audley adopting a series of
different roles, but also focuses on the way her heroine plays a
number of different parts within one apparently stable role. That
of ‘Lady Audley’, the respectable gentlewoman, child-bride of a
wealthy baronet, is itself fraught with contradictions; it is a kind
of masquerade. By foregrounding Lady Audley’s impersonation
of proper femininity, the novel does more than simply focus
attention on the feminine duplicity in which the entire narrative
originates. It also explores and exploits fears that the respectable
ideal, or proper feminine, may simply be a form of acting, just
one role among other possible roles. Even more seriously, the
representation of Lady Audley, like that of some of Braddon’s
other heroines, raises the spectre that femininity is itself
duplicitous, and that it involves deception and dissembling.
Such fears are exploited in one of Braddon’s favourite

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narrative procedures—the construction of a narrative of

unmasking. This strategy is most frequently used in a process of
progressive revelation of the ‘real’ nature of a particular female
character. In Lady Audley’s Secret the unmasking narrative is
found in its most extreme form in Robert Audley’s attempt to
expose his uncle’s wife. One of the key points in this narrative of
the contest between Lady Audley and her husband’s nephew—
the viewing of Lady Audley’s portrait in Chapter 8—is worth
looking at in some detail, since it is a very good example of the
way in which Braddon’s narratives habitually stage the feminine
as spectacle. The strategy is one in which the excess of the
melodramatic style is extremely important (I shall return to both
of these points shortly).
In his eagerness to improve upon his ‘imperfect notion of her
face’ Robert Audley, accompanied by his friend George Talboys,
gains entry to Lady Audley’s private rooms, which contain her
unfinished portrait. The men’s method of entry (by a secret
passage) has clear sexual overtones, and the scene is presented as
a stealthy, illicit, masculine invasion of a feminine domain. The
reader is invited to share in the voyeuristic male gaze upon the
exotic and intimate feminine space of Lady Audley’s dressing
room. The mise-en-scène is extremely elaborate and detailed, and
emphasises sexual difference. On glimpsing his bearded face in
the mirror, Talboys ‘wondered to see how out of place he seemed
among all these womanly luxuries’ (LAS:69). The room, ‘almost
oppressive from odours’, is full of flowers, exquisite china, jewels
and gorgeous dresses carelessly abandoned (and suggesting a
feminine abandon); all are traces of the feminine presence of the
absent Lady Audley.
The scene builds to its climax as the male invaders proceed
from the boudoir, through the dressing room, to the ante-
chamber and approach Lady Audley’s portrait. Unlike the other
objects in her apartments the portrait is not just a sign or trace of
Lady Audley, it is representation as revelation. The objects in the
room are signs of the absent female body, but signs too of the
social masquerade which that body adopts. The discarded
clothes function both as erotic traces of femininity and as the
abandoned costumes of the actress. The portrait, on the other
hand, represents the body itself as sign. In viewing the portrait
the characters in the narrative acquaint themselves with Lady
Audley’s face, while the readers are granted access to the secrets

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of her being. In this scene readers are positioned as spectators of

the portrait which is both displayed to their gaze and ‘read’ for
them. Our gaze is fixed firmly on the Pre-Raphaelite detail, while
the narrator both satirises Pre-Raphaelitism and appropriates its
sensuous and sensual gaze.
The elaborate description and reading of the painting suggest
that, just as Audley and Talboys (and hence the reader) have
glimpsed something of Lady Audley’s inner, private self through
their penetration of the recesses of her private rooms, so too the
painter has penetrated the inner recesses of her identity and
revealed its awful truth (and, perhaps, a feared truth about the
nature of femininity): the inner reality that lies behind the mask
of respectable femininity.

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 before in it… [It] had
something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend.
(LAS:71)

The portrait scene prefigures the progressive narrative exposure

of Lady Audley’s secrets. In the narrative, as in the portrait, the
angel in the house is revealed as the demon in the house. Long
before the end of the novel the domestic idyll of Audley Court is
unmasked as a hollow sham, and through this unmasking the
economic and power relations of an aristocratic marriage (and
the passions it represses) are also exposed. Ultimately the
transgressive Lady Audley, too, is unmasked and ‘Buried Alive’
(to quote the title of the chapter which narrates this event) in a
maison de santé (a madhouse) in the appositely named Belgian
town of Villebrumeuse. Her incarceration and her subsequent
death after a prolonged maladie de langeur (which is reported in
a chapter ironically entitled ‘At Peace’) are the means by which
the trangressive heroine (and the improper feminine) is expelled
from the narrative.
However, the improper feminine remains as a repressed trace
in the text’s narration, in the linguistic excess of the
melodramatic style. The physical manifestation of the improper
feminine—Lady Audley’s body—which has persistently been
represented and read as spectacle, is finally represented simply by

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means of the Pre-Raphaelite painting that had promised to yield

up her secrets. In the final paragraphs of the novel the reader’s
attention is directed once more to this portrait, now hidden
behind a curtain from the prurient gaze of ‘the inquisitive
visitors…[who] admire my lady’s rooms, and ask many questions
about the pretty fairhaired woman, who died abroad’ (LAS:446).
The curtain which hangs before the portrait is at once a shroud
which hides the improper feminine from the society whose
equilibrium it has threatened, and also a veil which tantalisingly
conceals and maintains the improper feminine’s alluring mystery.
Thus, even after her death, Lady Audley remains as a disturbing
presence.
Lady Audley’s Secret deliberately blurs the issue of whether its
heroine’s acting—her process of self-construction—is the product
of her madness, or the result of cool calculation. In either case it
is explicitly associated with the process of self-fashioning
required by any respectable Victorian girl seeking to make her
way in the world. (This is equally true of the way in which
Aurora’s dissembling is represented in Aurora Floyd.) Lady
Audley’s self-proclaimedly heartless attitude to her situation is,
from one point of view, simply a more than usually honest
assessment of the nature of the choices open to the would-be
genteel woman:

I had learnt that which in some indefinite manner or

other every schoolgirl learns sooner or later—I
learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon
my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed
prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry
better than any of them.
(LAS:350, my italics)

The reader is also implicated in this common-sense view of

Lucy’s situation (and thus aligned with the views of a criminal
and/or madwoman) through those representative characters ‘the
simple Dawsons’ (Lucy’s employers), who encourage her
marriage to Sir Michael and who ‘would have thought it more
than madness in a penniless girl to reject such an offer’ (LAS:9).
The notion that normal, sane femininity is built upon prudential
calculations of this kind is endorsed by Dr Alwyn Mosgrave, the
medical expert called in by Robert Audley in his attempts to deal

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with the problem of Lady Audley. When in possession of only

part of Lady Audley’s story—the part relating to her bigamous
deception of Sir Michael—Mosgrave delivers a medical verdict
that is unequivocal:

She ran away from her home, because her home was
not a pleasant one, and she left it in the hope of
finding a better. There is no madness in that. She
committed the crime of bigamy, because by that crime
she obtained fortune and position. There is no
madness there. When she found herself in a desperate
position, she did not grow desperate. She employed
intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy
which required coolness and deliberation in its
execution. There is no madness in that.
(LAS:377)

Robert Audley’s definitions of the feminine are more

conventional and less capacious than Mosgrave’s. Audley seeks
to prove Lady Audley’s madness partly to save his friend and his
uncle’s family from scandal, but largely because his notions of
the feminine cannot reconcile sane femininity with the criminally
duplicitous behaviour of which he intuitively knows Lady Audley
to be guilty. The readers’ definitions of sane femininity are
destabilised by the way in which they are invited, by turns, to
share Mosgrave’s and Robert Audley’s view of the heroine. The
readers’ view of normal, sane femininity is similarly challenged
by their changing emotional investments in the character, which
are engineered by the narrator’s constantly shifting point of view.
When acquainted with the full extent of Lady Audley’s crimes,
the expert on insanity agrees to incarcerate her, not because she
is mad, but because she is ‘dangerous’.

There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never

appear; or which might appear only once or twice in
a life-time… The lady is not mad; but she has the
hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of
madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell
you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!
(LAS:379)

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Lady Audley is dangerous because she is not what she appears to

be, because she cannot be contained within the bounds of the
proper feminine. Mosgrave’s diagnosis seems to hold the key to
an understanding of the way in which Braddon uses madness in
her novels.
Braddon structures several novels (most notably Lady
Audley’s Secret and John Marchmont’s Legacy) around
characters who are, appear to be, or become mad or deranged. In
each of these novels madness is used as a way of figuring the
dangerous, improper feminine, which is both formed by and
resists the management and control of the middle-class family
and the self-regulation which is the internalisation of those
broader social forms of control. Lady Audley’s Secret and John
Marchmont’s Legacy both raise the question of whether female
insanity may simply be ‘the label society attaches to female
assertion, ambition, self-interest, and outrage’ (Showalter
1987:72). In addition John Marchmont’s Legacy asks whether
madness is, in fact, a symptom of bourgeois femininity.
Lady Audley is represented in terms of a contemporary
medical discourse in which women’s behaviour is related to the
vagaries of the female body: her strange career dates from the
birth of her son, and the onset of puerperal fever.10 The figure of
Lady Audley—the angel in the house turned domestic fiend—is
also produced within and by a socio-medical discourse in which
the image of female purity always contains within itself the
antithetical image of female vice. Such a figure represents and
explores fears that (actual, historical) women cannot be
contained within dominant definitions of ‘woman’, or of normal
femininity.
Olivia Arundel, the female villain in John Marchmont’s
Legacy, is in some ways an even more interesting representation
of the feminine and of madness, or indeed of the feminine as
madness, since her insanity seems to be actively produced by the
norms of respectable femininity. Like Lady Audley, Olivia is used
to raise the question of whether the proper feminine is a cover
for, or the cause of, madness (the improper feminine). Lady
Audley’s story ends with her incarceration in an asylum modelled
on the bourgeois household in order that the domestic ideology
and its definitions of femininity may be defended. Olivia’s story,
on the other hand, is the story of a woman’s incarceration within
and by that ideology and those definitions. On a number of

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occasions the narrator focuses directly on this aspect of Olivia’s

predicament.

Olivia Arundel had lived from infancy to womanhood

…performing and repeating the same duties from day
to day, with no other progress to mark the lapse of her
existence than the slow alternation of the seasons, and
the dark hollow circles which had lately deepened
beneath her grey eyes…
These outward tokens, beyond her own control,
alone betrayed the secret of this woman’s life. She
sickened under the dull burden which she had borne
so long, and carried out so patiently. The slow round
of dull duty was loathsome to her. The horrible,
narrow, unchanging existence, shut in by cruel walls,
which bounded her on every side, and kept her
prisoner to herself was odious to her. The powerful
intellect revolted against the fetters that bound and
galled it. The proud heart beat with murderous
violence against the bonds that kept it captive.
(JML I:135–6)

I have quoted this passage at such length because it is outwardly

a direct and open analysis of ‘the problem’ of the frustrations and
constraints of the domestic woman’s lot. However, closer scrutiny
(and the narratorial perspective is all about close scrutiny) reveals
Olivia’s situation not as a generalised female predicament but as
one which is peculiar to the woman of ‘powerful intellect’. This
aspect of the representation of Olivia reveals, once again, the
sensation novel’s preoccupation with the blurring and instability of
gender categories. The combination of passively endured suffering
and the latent aggression of the murderous violence of her captive
heart is precisely not what any normally gendered woman was
supposed to feel about the frustrations of a dull life. The secret of
Olivia’s predicament seems to be that she is like a man. She is a
‘mistake of nature’, who has ‘the brow of an intellectual and
determined man’ (JML I:125); she lacks the ‘tenderness which is
the common attribute of a woman’s nature. She ought to have
been a great man’ (JML III:54).11
The above passage also provides another interesting example
of the functions and effects of the melodramatic style. The

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omniscient narrator appears to be in complete control of the

character, whose inner secrets are fathomed and anatomised with
forensic care and detail. However, Olivia is also constituted as a
disturbance, and thus beyond anatomisation and control. As the
agent of disruption and confusion she is a disturbance in the
narrative, but she is also a disturbance at the level of narration.
The stance of narratorial control is disrupted by the
melodramatic excess, not only of Olivia’s actions, but also of the
way in which she is represented in and as language. The
narrator’s forensic representation is over-whelmed by the
melodramatic style, and the anatomising stance is abandoned at
the end of the long passage quoted earlier.

How shall I anatomise this woman, who, gifted with

no womanly tenderness of nature, unendowed with
that pitiful and unreasoning affection which makes
womanhood beautiful, yet tried, and tried
unceasingly, to do her duty, and to be good…?
(JML I:136, my italics)

Anatomising is replaced by display. As is so often the case in

Braddon’s fiction, the narrator announces the difficulty or
impossibility of articulating a particular example of the feminine,
only to embark on a surplus of articulation.

THE MELODRAMATIC STYLE AND THE SPECTACLE

OF WOMAN
This melodramatic excess is one of the hallmarks of Braddon’s
style, as it is of the sensation novel in general. It is an irruption
into narration of that feeling (particularly the erotic feeling)
which is repressed in the narrative. This excess—as Jane Feuer
(1984) argues of television melodrama—opens up a ‘textual
space, which may be read against the seemingly hegemonic
surface’ (8). It appears in its most highly wrought form in
setpiece scenes and dramatic tableaux which stage the heroine/
villainess as a spectacle; she may be presented as the object of a
public gaze within the text, or the scene may be staged directly
for the reader. In such scenes the female body becomes a sign (or
system of signs) which is imperfectly read, or misread, by the
characters within the text, but which is legible to the narrator,

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and hence to the reader—even if what is legible is finally the

sign’s elusiveness.
Again and again in Braddon’s novels female characters are
represented by means of an intense focus on their physical
appearance. For example, the mystery of Olivia’s failure to
conform to the feminine ideal is both ‘explained’ and inscribed in
this description of her hair (a passage which, incidentally, typifies
Braddon’s habitual fetishisation of women’s hair):

Those masses of hair had not that purple lustre, nor

yet that wandering glimmer of red gold, which gives
peculiar beauty to some raven tresses. Olivia’s hair
was long and luxuriant; but it was of that dead, inky
blackness, which is all shadow. It was dark,
fathomless, inscrutable, like herself.
(JML I:141)

Braddon’s women rise up from the page like the heavily

sensualised female subjects of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and are
offered as the object of the reader’s rapt gaze. This staging of a
particular version of the feminine for the gaze of the reader is
also prominent in Aurora Floyd. Aurora’s mother, who plays no
part in the narrative present of the novel (she died at Aurora’s
birth), is, nevertheless, a powerful narrative presence, and
provides a way of representing and viewing the feminine which
anticipates the presence of the heroine herself.

The banker’s wife was a tall young woman, of about

thirty, with a dark complexion, and great flashing
black eyes that lit up a face, which might otherwise
have been unnoticeable, into the splendour of absolute
beauty.
(AF:7, my italics)

Noticing this flashing incandescence is precisely what the text

requires readers to do, as the narrator invites them to gaze
admiringly at Eliza. As in the description of Olivia’s hair, the
passage works by addressing and invoking a particular cultural
awareness of the female body. The reader is co-opted into the
role of co-creator of the spectacle.

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Let the reader recall one of those faces, whose chief

loveliness lies in the glorious light of a pair of
magnificent eyes, and remember how far they
surpassed all others in their power of fascination. The
same amount of beauty frittered away upon a well-
shaped nose, rosy pouting lips, symmetrical forehead,
and delicate complexion, would make an ordinarily
lovely woman; but concentrated in one nucleus, in the
wondrous lustre of the eyes, it makes a divinity, a
Circe.
(AF:7, my italics)

The speaking presence of the body in the text was a much-

discussed aspect of sensation fiction. Their tendency to dwell on
the (female) body was generally regarded as one of the
improprieties of sensation novels; the intense physicality of their
representation of the heroine was the source of their perceived
transgression. Braddon’s deployment of a familiar repertoire of
physical traits and ways of describing the seductive feminine was
one of the formulaic aspects of her novels which were much
criticised by reviewers. Since these formulae are such a
prominent feature of her work, one can only assume that such
writing was also an important source of pleasure to readers, and
hence that it is worth examining more closely.
As I have suggested, the reader is repeatedly required to notice
Braddon’s central female characters. Aurora, for example, is first
brought to notice (although it is not the first time she appears in
the text) when she is the object of the fascinated gaze of Talbot
Bulstrode, to whom she appears as, ‘A divinity! imperiously
beautiful in white and scarlet, painfully dazzling to look upon,
intoxicatingly brilliant to behold’ (AF:29). The rest of this
passage simultaneously indulges in and satirises the practice of
spectating femininity, by representing Bulstrode’s fluctuating and
contradictory reponses to (and revisions of) his vision, before it is
punctured by the bathetic ‘reality’ of Aurora’s enquiry about the
result of a horse race.
Aurora is sometimes presented as the direct object of the
reader’s gaze, and sometimes mediated through a male gaze,
while at other times the reader spectates a more or less public
spectating of the character. Several of these perspectives are

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present in the following scene, which stages Aurora’s arrival at

Mellish Park upon her marriage to its owner:

They [the Yorkshire servants] could not choose but

admire Aurora’s eyes, which they unanimously declared
to be ‘regular shiners;’ and the flash of her white teeth,
glancing between the full crimson lips; and the bright
flush which lighted up her pale white skin; and the
purple lustre of her massive coronal of plaited hair. Her
beauty was of that luxuriant and splendid order which
has almost always most effect upon the masses, and the
fascination of her manner was almost akin to sorcery in
its power over simple people.
(AF:110)

This passage moves from physically displaying Aurora to the

reader through the eyes of the Yorkshire servants, to implicating
the reader directly in the process of spectatorship. The feminine
power of the character not only bewitches simple people (like the
servants) but also (by the end of the passage) intoxicates the
discriminating narrator: ‘I lose myself when I try to describe the
feminine intoxications, the wonderful fascination exercised by
this dark-eyed siren’ (AF:111). Aurora Floyd possesses the text.
The effect is one of simultaneously exploiting and satirising those
mid-Victorian ‘regimes of representation’ which ‘signify in the
historical process of redefinition of woman as image, as visibly
different’ (Pollock 1988:120).
Like Lady Audley, Aurora Floyd is continually presented as
spectacle, as a speaking picture of power, pride and beauty. The
reader is repeatedly invited to join a character (usually a male
character) in a voyeuristic spectating of the unwitting heroine—
as when John Mellish discovers his wife asleep in her dressing
room:

Aurora was lying on the sofa, wrapped in a loose

white dressing-gown, her masses of ebon hair uncoiled
and falling about her shoulders in serpentine tresses
that looked like shining blue-black snakes released
from poor Medusa’s head to make their escape amid
the folds of her garment.
(AF:227)

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Here, the heroine is ‘pictured’ in the ‘sleeping-woman’ pose much

favoured by male artists of the later nineteenth century. She is
represented by a heavily sexualised word-painting which is
typical of Braddon’s sixties novels. This aspect of Braddon’s
melodramatic style, like the paintings it replicates, offers a
representation of woman as simultaneously ‘an object of erotic
desire and a creature of self-containment, not really interested in,
and hence not making any demands upon, the viewer’s
participation in her personal erotic gratification’ (Djikstra
1986:69).12
The effect is a representation of female sexuality as voyeuristic
spectacle, which offered both male and female readers
pleasurable images of female erotic power. The potential danger
of this power is defused through the fetishisation of the text’s
gaze, and through the melodramatic style. As in the portrait
scene from Lady Audley’s Secret (see pp. 91–2) and in numerous
other passages in Braddon’s novels which represent female
figures in private female spaces (especially boudoirs and dressing
rooms),13 such writing (like the painting styles it both replicates
and satirises) combines sexual frisson with the promise of a
privileged access to feminine interiority.
Braddon’s writing both panders to a contemporary taste
created by Rossetti and his followers and, at the same time,
foregrounds in its satiric excess the way in which the Pre-
Raphaelites figured woman as fantasy, the ‘sign of masculine
desire’ (Pollock 1988:21). As Griselda Pollock has suggested, the
Pre-Raphaelite representation of woman as difference was a
direct intervention in the complex process of renegotiation of
gender roles which was taking place throughout the latter half of
the nineteenth century.

In the visual sign, woman, [which was] manufactured

in a variety of guises in mid-nineteenth-century British
culture, this absolute difference is secured by the
erasure of indices of real time and actual space, by an
abstracted…representation of faces as dislocated
uninhabited spaces which function as a screen across
which masculine fantasies of knowledge, power, and
possession can be enjoyed in a ceaseless play on the
visible obviousness of woman and the puzzling
enigmas, reassuringly disguised behind the mask of

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beauty. At the same time, the face and sometimes part

of a body are severed from the whole. Fetish-like they
signify an underlying degree of anxiety generated by
looking at this sign of difference, woman.
(Pollock 1988:123)

The cumulative effect of those scenes in which Braddon writes

the body is complex. Ultimately, however, they work to
destabilise the category of the feminine by simultaneously
reinscribing and satirically undercutting conventional codes for
describing and representing the female body.
The staging of the heroine as spectacle is also the site of another
important destabilising factor in Braddon’s novels, and a source of
their subversive potential. Within the narrative economy of a
particular text, the heroine usually has a functionally trangressive
role as subject or agent. However, this active trangression is
undercut or negated at the level of narration, where the heroine is
the passive object of the text’s gaze, placed in a specular
relationship to the reader, who, in turn, occupies a position of
mastery vis à vis the heroine. On the other hand, the frequent
changes in point of view involve the reader in constantly shifting
power relations with the heroine. The reader moves from
spectating her as the object of the text’s or narrator’s gaze, to
seeing her through the eyes of one or more of the other characters,
to sharing her own perspective, or being co-opted by the narrator
to a moral judgement or sympathetic understanding of her
heroine. These constant shifts tend to keep the heroine’s meaning
and significance in a state of flux. As in the contradictory or
double discourse on woman, Braddon’s heroines constantly shift
from being active agents to passive sufferers, from transgressors to
victims.

MASCULINITY, THE FEMININE IDEAL, AND

MODERN MARRIAGE
Although most of Braddon’s sixties novels, especially Lady
Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, focus on different kinds and
differing degrees of feminine transgression, they are not simply
stories of the thrills and spills of errant femininity (or, as it would
sometimes seem, stories about reforming or expelling it). Rather
they use the transgressive woman as both a trigger and a focus

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for a range of narratives of uncertainty about gender, class,

marriage and the family.
Uncertainties about gender are not confined to the definitions
of femininity, but are also demonstrated in the representation of
masculinity. Braddon’s novels habitually reproduce and satirise
contemporary anxieties about the blurring of gender boundaries
and gender functions. Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret is
used to focus attention on the social construction of gender as he
progresses from a period of ‘feminised’ indolence to a fully
‘masculinised’ role as head of the bourgeois family. Audley plays
a crucial role in Lady Audley’s Secret: the unmasking of a
duplicitous female by a feminised male. This unmasking provides
the novel’s central narrative dynamic—the cat-and-mouse game
in which Robert tries to penetrate and unmask the secrets of his
aunt, and she tries first to ensnare him sexually and then to kill
him. Both ploys are equally threatening to Robert’s masculine
identity.
The parrying relationship between nephew and aunt both
focuses on gender instabilities, and ultimately stabilises them.
Robert’s suspicions of his aunt are represented as a privileged
insight into her nature, which derives, in part, from his quasi-
incestuous attraction to her. His insight into Lady Audley’s
secrets is also associated with his own feminised identity. The
Robert Audley of the early stages of the narrative is a version of
the improper masculine, that is to say, he has not been properly
socialised into an acceptable masculine role. Audley is an
example of that recurring spectre of Victorian fiction, the young
man whose active energies and purpose are sapped by
‘expectations’ and by the lack of a necessity to earn his own
living. His brooding, sensitive nature is formed by his ‘feminine’
habit of reading decadent French novels; his lack of vocation or
employment supplies him with extensive leisure in which to
brood on the situation at Audley Court with the heightened
sensitivity and imagination produced by this reading.
In his pursuit of the secret of Lady Audley, Robert discovers
manhood and his vocation. He embarks on a chivalric quest, to
solve the mystery of George Talboys’s disappearance and Lady
Audley’s role in it. This chivalric quest is transformed into
bourgeois epic as, in his detective role, Robert increasingly
develops the legal skills which had merely bored him when he
was ostensibly practising at the Bar. Robert’s obsessive knightly

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detective quest, a central strand of the narrative, derives, in part,

from a masculine camaraderie and loyalty to George Talboys.
However, more importantly for the narrative and sexual
economy of the novel, Robert’s quest is also (and increasingly)
motivated by his love for George’s sister Clara. This relationship
functions to some extent as a displacement of the homoerotic
bonding of Robert and George. (There is a great deal of
narratorial insistence on Robert’s attraction to Clara’s close
physical resemblance to her brother.) However, its main function
is its role in the novel’s investigation and satirisation, as well as
reproduction and naturalisation, of a particular social
construction of masculinity. The movement from male bonding
to male-female bonding is presented as part of a process of
maturation and socialisation. As both motivator and reward of
the novel’s bourgeois epic, the transparent Clara becomes the
foundation of Robert’s emergence into a properly socialised
masculinity; his quest to unmask and expel Lady Audley becomes
the route to that destiny.
Clara is the true embodiment of the domestic ideal which
Lady Audley merely impersonates. She also embodies many of its
contradictions. Robert’s discovery of Clara comes at a crucial
stage in the repression and expulsion of his attraction to the
dangerous, duplicitous femininity of the femme fatale in Lady
Audley. It also plays a vital part in his conversion to the roles of
defender of the proper feminine, and of the patriarchal,
aristocratic family from the threat of dissolution.14 In this last
respect Robert acts as his uncle’s proxy as well as Clara’s. In fact
Robert’s quest ends in a subtle displacement and merging of
aristocratic and bourgeois values, which is complex in its effects.
Robert does indeed expel the disrupter of his uncle’s household
but, significantly, his actions do not result in the restoration of
equilibrium, or the reinstatement of the aristocratic family. The
patriarch Sir Michael retires from the scene, a broken man, and
Audley Court remains empty.
The aristocratic family is not so much restored as remade, in
the genial companionate union of Alicia Audley (Sir Michael’s
daughter) and Sir Harry Towers. The main focus of the novel’s
closure, however, is the bourgeois, suburban idyll ‘in a fairy
cottage…between Teddington Lock and Hampton Bridge’
(LAS:445), where Robert becomes the head of an idealised
affective family and a rising man of the legal profession. The

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idealised family of Robert, Clara, George and their respective

offspring not only replaces the aristocratic one of Sir Michael
Audley, but is also a renewal of the bourgeois family, in which
warmth and affection replace the cold formality of the
motherless family of Harcourt Talboys.
The concluding idyll of Lady Audley’s Secret is partly a
fantasy resolution of the contradictions of the Victorian
bourgeois family: a patriarchal institution which is, nevertheless,
persistently represented as a private feminised space. The
Thames-side cottage is a feminised domestic world in which,
paradoxically, men can be men. It is a world purged of the
improper feminine of illegitimate desire, passion and French
novels. However, Braddon’s use of the conventional closure of a
marriage which reinstates the order of the bourgeois family and
the domestic ideal, also foregrounds the contradictions of that
institution and that ideal, and destabilises them through satire.
The beginning of the novel’s concluding chapter has an element
of self-conscious excess, of over-perfection, as the redeemed and
redeeming younger generation eat strawberries and cream in
‘pretty rustic harmony’, and everything is ‘pretty’, ‘merry’ or
‘generous-hearted’.
The proper feminine of the domestic ideal is further undercut,
in both Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret, through the
juxtapositioning of problematic representatives of the improper
feminine with equally problematic representatives of the proper
or respectable feminine. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Clara’s capacity
to motivate the lethargic Robert Audley is a testimony to the
power of the proper feminine, but her dull, enduring passivity
and her subjugation to her father’s will clearly demonstrate the
negative aspects of this version of femininity. The norms of
respectable femininity are similarly questioned in the
counterpointing of Aurora Floyd’s story with that of her virtuous
cousin Lucy. Like Braddon’s transgressive women, the angelic
Lucy is also subjected to the specularity of the narrator’s gaze,
for example in the treatment of the agonies of her initially
unrequited love for Talbot Bulstrode. Bulstrode’s dilemma over
the competing charms of Lucy and Aurora serves as a focus for
a review of the limitations as well as the strengths of the
respectable feminine and the domestic ideal. His ‘ideal woman’ is
a powerful cultural stereotype:

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…some gentle and feminine creature crowned with an

aureole of pale auburn hair; some timid soul with
downcast eyes…some shrinking being, as pale and
prim as the mediaeval saints in his pre-Raphaelite
engravings, spotless as her own white robes, excelling
in all womanly graces…but only exhibiting them in
the narrow circle of a home.
(AF:34)

Lucy is, in fact, the very pattern of the domestic ideal, ‘exactly
the sort of woman to make a good wife’.

Purity and goodness had looked over her and hemmed

her in from her cradle. She had never seen unseemly
sights, or heard unseemly sounds. She was as ignorant
as a baby of all the vices and horrors of this big world
…and if there were a great many others of precisely the
same type of graceful womanhood, it was certainly the
highest type, and the holiest, and the best.
(AF:41)

Aurora Floyd contrives simultaneously to endorse this ideal and

satirise it, but above all to make it seem much duller than its
alternative, Aurora.
Lucy and Clara are, of course, common fictional stereotypes,
of the kind one expects to find in formulaic fiction such as
Braddon’s. Perhaps more unusual is the self-consciousness of
Braddon’s use of stereotypes, and the way in which this self-
consciousness foregrounds the ideological power of generic
conventions. Braddon’s novels also explore, from a variety of
perspectives, the hypocrisies, self-deceptions and repressions of
the aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic, male, and the social
codes over which he presides. These male stereotypes are often
used for satirical purposes, but here, as in other matters, the
effects of Braddon’s satire are complex. Masculine stereotypes or
values which are satirically undercut are, in several cases, finally
endorsed. Such complexity (even contradiction) is evident in the
treatment of Talbot Bulstrode and John Mellish in Aurora Floyd:
the former, rigidly proud, jealous of his social position and
fiercely moralistic; the latter, a more open, frank and generous
version of masculinity, a ‘big, hearty, broad-chested Englishman’

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in whom ‘the Rev. Charles Kingsley would have delighted’

(AF:48). The self-satisfied conservatism of the social code of each
of these men is satirised, but both are ultimately vindicated.
Partly this is an endorsement of a specifically contemporary
masculinity.

Surely there is some hope that we have changed for

the better within the last thirty years, inasmuch as we
attach a new meaning to this simple title of
‘gentleman’. I take some pride, therefore, in the two
young men of whom I write, for the simple reason
that I have no dark patches to gloss over in the history
of either of them.
(AF:51)

Like that of Robert Audley, the fully-formed masculinity of each

of these characters is constructed, finally, through complex
engagements with various versions of the feminine. Robert
Audley, as I have noted, is made as a man by detecting the
improper feminine in Lady Audley, by hunting down and
containing her secret, and expelling the improper feminine from
both himself and the family. In Aurora Floyd, where the
improper feminine is less alien and masculinity rarely as
compromised or threatened as in the earlier novel, Mellish
negotiates (rather than confronts) Aurora’s secret and
domesticates rather than expels the improper feminine.
Bulstrode’s cold, aristocratic masculinity is challenged and
destabilised by his encounter with the dangerous feminine of
Aurora, and humanised by learning to accept and forgive
feminine transgression (the ministrations of his wife, Aurora’s
cousin Lucy, are crucial here).
Gender and class are always complexly intertwined categories
in Braddon’s novels. The focus on specific versions of the
masculine and feminine is also a scrutiny of specific versions of
class. Ambivalences and anxieties about gender categories and
boundaries are, similarly, related to anxieties about class.
Braddon’s feminised males and transgressive or masculinised
women often have ambivalent class positions: they are socially
ambitious, their class origins are more lowly than their current or
desired social position, or they have not been properly socialised
to the class to which they belong. As I noted earlier, Braddon’s

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sensation plots are driven by family secrets, especially women’s

secrets, which are often connected with lowly social origins and/
or social ambition. The typical Braddon novel of the 1860s
involves a threat to the family (usually the aristocratic family)
from destabilising forces such as a lower-class woman or a
socially ambitious male. Such plots serve as a focus for numerous
anxieties about the mores of mid-nineteenth-century marriage.
On marriage, as on gender, Braddon’s novels offer a range of
voices and perspectives. The narrator repeatedly addresses the
understanding reader on the way things generally are in marriage
in the modern world. This is usually articulated in the woman-to-
woman address, which both Braddon and Wood use to position
the reader as a feminine subject and as a member of a community
which shares common feelings and values. This strategy is used
in the address to careless wives, which provides a context for
Aurora’s predicament.

Ah, careless wives! who think it a small thing,

perhaps, that your husbands are honest and generous,
constant and true, and who are apt to grumble
because your next-door neighbours have started a
carriage…stop and think of this wretched girl, who in
this hour of desolation recalled a thousand little
wrongs she had done to her husband, and would have
laid herself under his feet to be walked over by him
could she have thus atoned for her petty tyrannies…
Think of her in her loneliness, with her heart yearning
to go back to the man she loved.
(AF:290)

Such writing works to reinforce normative womanly virtues by

positioning the reader in a socially or sexually trangressive role,
and making her experience vicariously the frisson of having lost
the benefits (taken for granted by the ordinary bourgeois wife) of
the love of a good man. Although it has the effect of ‘talking up’
the value of ordinary marriage, this confident pontification is, to
some extent, destabilised by the particularities of the situations
which the novels dramatise, and by the use of a number of
different points of view.
The predicament of the woman who has married into a
superior social class is one important focus for Braddon’s critique

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of modern marriage. It is treated satirically in the depiction in

Aurora Floyd of Eliza Prodder’s self-confident negotiations of the
snobbery of the County families when she marries the banker
Archibald Floyd. Her years as an actress have accustomed her to
playing a part and to mixing with stage duchesses, and her fears
that ‘I shall die of my grandeur, as the poor girl did at Burleigh
House’ (AF:13) are unfounded. Elsewhere Braddon focuses
minutely on the rigours of the role of wife to the upper-middle-
class or aristocratic male, and particularly on the wife’s learning
to play the part expected of her by her husband and the society
in which she finds herself. The novels repeatedly focus on a wife’s
anxieties about being on public view—displayed by her husband
to his family and neighbours, or observed or spied on by servants
or other members of the household.15
Male fears and anxieties about marriage are also explored.
They are staged structurally through plots which focus on threats
to the patriarchal family by transgressive women. In addition the
reader is, from time to time, positioned within a male perspective
from which she views male expectations of women and of
marriage, and male fears about the social realities of the
marriage market. I have already noted Braddon’s focusing on the
fears and feelings of Mellish and Bulstrode in Aurora Floyd; the
bathetic scrutiny of Sir Michael Audley’s disappointments
following his proposal to Lucy is another interesting example:

He walked straight out of the house, this foolish old

man, because there was some strong emotion at work
in his heart…something almost akin to
disappointment; some stifled and unsatisfied longing
which lay heavy and dull at his heart, as if he had
carried a corpse from his bosom… He must be
contented, like other men of his age, to be married for
his fortune and his position.
(LAS:111–12)

The contradictions inherent in Victorian views of marriage,

notably the attempt to hold together a belief in the nobility and
sanctity of marital love with a belief in economically prudential
alliances, are the source of the narratives of marriage at the
centre of most of Braddon’s novels. They are seen at their most

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extreme in the scrutiny of Gilbert Monckton’s almost

masochistic fantasies about wifely betrayal in Eleanor’s Victory.

Yes, Gilbert Monckton had [apparently] discovered

the fatal truth that marriage is not always union and
that the holiest words that were ever spoken cannot
weave the mystic web which makes two souls
indissolubly one… Did not girls…marry for money,
again and again, in these mercenary days?
(EV II:140)

In Braddon’s fiction marriage is not merely a device of closure

but, as in the New Woman fiction of the nineties, a source of
story. One of her dominant plots (with the notable exception of
Lady Audley’s Secret) is that in which a wife who has married for
prudential reasons (whether these be financial or as a means to
some other desired end) learns to love her husband within
marriage. Marriage is thus not the goal of romantic love, but the
site upon which it is constructed.
Braddon’s narratives of marriage are usually structured
around a series of scenes from a marriage which is threatened by
secrecy and lack of understanding between the partners. The
most common narrative situation involves the suspicions of one
of the partners about the past or present secrets of the other.
Although these difficulties are causally linked to specific plot
situations, they are also seen as being inherent in the way women
and men are socially constructed along rigid lines of difference.
Men and women are shown as being foreign countries to each
other, largely as a consequence of the fact that they view each
other through stereotypes and ideals. In such narratives
marriage, the presumed site of union and mutual understanding,
is revealed as, in fact, a state of mutual isolation, secrecy and
misunderstanding.
Viewing the consequences of such secrecy is a major source of
narrative pleasure in Braddon’s fiction. Readers are invited to
observe and/or participate in the sufferings of characters who
have to endure the ‘tortures known only to the husband whose
wife is parted from him by that which has more power to sever
than any…wide extent of ocean—a secret’ (AF:145). The
preoccupation with secrecy in marriage adds another layer of
spectating to Braddon’s plots. The novels make frequent use of

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scenes in which a fearful and suspecting spouse watches his or

her partner in a scene with another, or others, from which the
spectating spouse feels excluded. Such scenes almost always
involve the spectating character in misreading what is being seen.
Such misreading is particularly prominent in Eleanor’s
Victory, in which husband and wife are separated by the secrets
of their past and by their different social experience. Both
habitually misread the signs of each other’s behaviour. Gilbert, in
particular, misreads a number of scenes in which he is the jealous
and masochistic spectator, such as this scene between Eleanor,
her friend Richard Thornton, and Launcelot Darrell, the man she
suspects of being responsible for her father’s death:

Following every varying expression of her face,

Gilbert Monckton saw that she looked at [Thornton]
with an earnest questioning appealing glance, that
seemed to demand something of him… Looking from
his wife to Richard, the lawyer saw that Launcelot
Darrell was still watched… Mr Monckton felt very
much like a spectator who looks on at a drama which
is being acted in a language that is unknown to him.
(EV II:209)

Such scenes of spectating are even more important in Ellen

Wood’s novels, and I shall return to the function of this spectator
ship in the next section.
Another aspect of secrecy that is foregrounded in Braddon’s
novels, and in sensation fiction generally, is its ability to
transform the home, in Victorian middle-class ideology a
domestic shrine, into a prisonhouse of suspicion. Indeed, as in
some popular women’s genres of the twentieth century, such as
the woman’s film and the family melodrama of the 1940s and
1950s (and possibly for similar reasons), the domestic setting of
the sensation novel is an extremely important part of its message
and its pleasures. One of these pleasures is the opportunity
afforded by the mise-en-scène for a sort of fictional equivalent of
a visit to a stately home. Many of Braddon’s novels are set in, or
involve visits to, rather grand houses, which are described in
lavish detail. The use of such settings offers two important
sources of narrative pleasure. First it is a kind of voyeurism,
allowing the reader to spy on the lives of those in a superior

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social class. Secondly, and more importantly for the ideological

work of sensation fiction, it reconciles the reader to the
limitations of her own marriage, home and social circle by means
of what one might call the ‘Dallas’ effect. Like melodramatic
television soap opera and cinematic family melodrama, sensation
fiction displays to its readers people with money, status and
power who, despite their possession of these desired attributes,
do not possess happiness. Moreover, since the admired wealth
and position are often built on guilty secrets they are insecure
and are easily lost. This both articulates social insecurity in a
time of rapid change, and also opens a space for the reader to
believe that, like femininity, class and social status are a form of
masquerade.
Braddon’s sensation novels thus play upon their readers’ social
and material ambitions only to turn them back on them selves
and reconcile readers to the mundane securities (however
limited) of their own lot. Each portrait of the beautiful, beloved
and/or powerful woman is matched by a scene focusing on her
misery and powerlessness. Every elaborate description of a lavish
interior is matched by a scene of disenchantment in which an
aspiring character is pictured in the setting which had previously
been the goal of his or her ambitions. Thus Honoria, the child of
the gutter (and worse), is pictured surveying the lands and woods
she has inherited from her husband only to discover that ‘the
possession of them means nothing to me’ (RE II:32). Similarly,
although ‘there was a time’ when the Bovaryiste Isobel Gilbert in
The Doctor’s Wife ‘would have thought it a grand thing to be
rich’ (347), it has passed when she inherits the house and lands
she had once dreamed of.
By juxtaposing the glamorous domestic setting with the scene
of disenchantment, Braddon’s novels articulate the
contradictions of the Victorian view of the home. On the one
hand the bourgeois home exists in the public sphere as a sign of
social status and site of conspicuous consumption. On the other
hand, it belongs to the private sphere of the moral and emotional
life. Braddon’s sensation novels variously negotiate, resolve, or
merely display those contradictions, but in certain cases they
work to reposition the woman as a domestic creature. Thus at a
key moment in her transformation from racy Girl of the Period
to reconstructed domestic woman, Aurora re-views the grand
rooms of Mellish Park, not as the potential theatre for her public

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display but as the setting of a domestic life endangered by

revelations about her secret past: ‘How pretty the rooms
look!…how simple and countrified! It was for me that the new
furniture was chosen… Good-bye, dear home, in which I was an
impostor and a cheat’ (AF:278–9). When she has repented, and
paid for, her transgressive past, Aurora can reoccupy her ‘dear
home’ as a doting wife and mother. However, she does so on new
terms. The narrative constructed around Aurora works to
translate her marriage and her possession of her home from (to
adapt Cixous’s terms) the economy of property to the realm of
the gift. Anxieties about marriage being a form of prostitution
are thus foregrounded by aspects of the sensation plot, but those
anxieties are ultimately dispelled as the novel’s central marriage
is transformed from an economic transaction to a freely given
exchange of love. The effect of this process in Aurora Floyd (and
perhaps in the sensation novel in general) is, in part, simply to
mask the real economic relations of marriage, but it also involves
an attempt to reassure (male and female) readers that these
relations are capable of transformation.

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 13
Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the
family, and the spectacle of
women’s suffering

Domestic melodrama, situated at the

emotional and moral centre of life, is the most
important type of Victorian melodrama; it is
here that we see primal fears clothed in
everyday dress.
(Vicinus 1981:128)

A small country town in the heart of

England was the scene some years ago of a
sad tragedy. I must ask my readers to bear
with me while I relate it. These crimes,
having their rise in the evil passions of our
nature, are not the most pleasant for the
pen to record; but it cannot be denied, that
they do undoubtedly bear for many of us
an interest amounting to fascination.
(Lord Oakburn’s Daughters:1)

Few of us are without some secret skeleton

that we have to keep sacred from the world.
(Lord Oakburn’s Daughters:339)

These last two quotations from Ellen Wood’s now-forgotten

Lord Oakburn’s Daughters contain many of the key elements of
her sensation novels (or, more correctly, sensation-influenced
novels) from the 1860s. All of these works are tales of ‘sad
tragedy’, set in fairly closed communities on the edges of small
English country towns. They are tales of crime and passion

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involving secret skeletons and the masks and strategies by which

those secrets are both generated and concealed. They are all
narrated by an intrusive, moralising and gossipy feminine
narrator, who, both explicitly and implicitly, acknowledges and
panders to a common fascination with the ‘evil passions of our
nature’, while ultimately distancing herself and her readers from
them. Wood adhered more closely than did Braddon to the forms
of sentimental domestic fiction, and her plot situations, character
types and overt moralising more nearly resemble domestic
melodrama than do those of her more satirically inclined
contemporary.
Wood’s novels from the 1860s are, typically, dynastic
narratives. They are stories of rivalry within and/or between
families, and often have complicated inheritance plots. Both the
dynastic rivalry and the inheritance plots turn on issues of
transgenerational and class competition. They also involve the
exchange of women between men and, quite often, the hero’s
exchange of one woman for another (morally and spiritually
superior) woman. These plots foreground questions of power
and authority within the family and society at large, and the
means by which they are sustained and legitimated. Trevlyn
Hold, for example, is the story of the usurpation of an estate
from a decaying aristocratic family (the Trevlyns) by an
aggressive rentier (Chattaway), and its ultimate transmission to
its rightful moral heir—the dispossessed yeoman farmer George
Ryle—who eventually becomes the manager of the estate and its
legally designated heir. Wood’s narrative is a version of the
family romance, the childhood fantasy, described by Freud, in
which the child plays out the Oedipal drama by substituting rich
or aristocratic parents for its own. In Wood’s narrative, class
frequently seems to be a more powerful driving force than sex.
In Trevlyn Hold the aristocratic family, the Trevlyns, fractured
by rivalry and dispersal, and so physically weak that the male
line is about to die out, is renovated by vigorous yeoman stock
which espouses all the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work and
strict conscience. By the end of the novel the new squire’s defence
of work suggests that the aristocracy has also embraced
bourgeois values:

If the fact of working is to take the gentle blood out of

a man, there’ll not be much gentle blood left for the

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next generation. This is a working age…the world has

grown wise, and we most of us work with the hands,
or with the head. Thomas Ryle’s son is a gentleman if
ever I saw one.
(TH:398)

The plot of Trevlyn Hold thus has the effect of squaring legality
with morality and of moralising the idea of the gentleman.
Verner’s Pride has a similarly complex, and even more sinister,
inheritance plot turning on intra-familial rivalries. This plot, like
that of Trevlyn Hold, works to authorise the claims to power of
the moral heir and true gentleman, Lionel Verner, but only after
he too has experienced dispossession and has been forced to
make his own way in the world.
The role of the aristocratic woman in this renovation of the
aristocracy by bourgeois values is particularly interesting.
George is named as the heir of Trevlyn Hold in his own right, but
he would, in any case, have been likely to inherit through
Maude, a Trevlyn daughter whom he has won for his wife by the
same virtues that have secured him the estate. Similarly Lionel’s
confirmation in his possession of Verner’s Pride is accompanied
by his marriage to the genteel, upper-class Lucy Tempest,
following a misguided first marriage to Sibylla West, the socially
ambitious daughter of an unscrupulous doctor.
It is clear that such plots both feed on and address profound
anxieties about class and the family at a time of great social
mobility. In Trevlyn Hold and Verner’s Pride Wood fuses
elements of the domestic and the sensation novel to provide a
kind of family melodrama which ‘opposes an old order and a
new order through successive generations’ (Rodowick 1987:9).
In both cases an older feudalism is replaced by a new social order
represented by something that looks very like the bourgeois
family. One of the most striking aspects of Wood’s representation
of this process is the way in which her narratives naturalise it.
Because both George Ryle and Lionel Verner are themselves
sufficiently closely linked to the old feudal order, the transition to
the new bourgeois world, although problematic and a source of
much narrative complication, is presented as natural. The social
and political implications of both the story and the transitional
process are obscured or erased; a social process is represented as
a personal and familial drama. David Rodowick has suggested

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that this erasing of the social and the political is characteristic of

domestic melodrama as a mode. In such melodrama, he argues:

[T]he family tries to substitute itself…for the global

network of authority in which it is implicated;
[domestic melodrama] also imagines itself as
addressing itself to an audience which does not believe
itself to be possessed of social power… [I]t is attentive
only to the problems which concern the family’s
internal security and economy… The power it reserves
for itself is limited to rights of inheritance and the
legitimation of the social and sexual identities in
which it reproduces its own network of authority.
(Rodowick 1987:270)

Wood’s most successful novel, East Lynne (like Lady Audley’s

Secret one of the most successful novels of the nineteenth
century), also explores the family as a site for the construction
and legitimation of social and sexual identities, and reproduces
the domestic melodrama’s preoccupation with the transfer of
power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. However, in this
‘dangerous and foolish work’ (Oliphant 1862:567) the transfer is
effected not by means of an inheritance plot, but through a
particular version of the middle-class dream. Richard Carlyle,
the industrious and successful country lawyer, purchases an
imposing house from a profligate aristocrat, Lord Mountsevern.
He also proposes marriage to Mountsevern’s daughter, Lady
Isabel Vane, in order (partly) to rescue her from the consequences
of her father’s profligacy. Carlyle’s ownership of East Lynne is a
public statement of his enhanced social status, which his
possession of Isabel confirms. Isabel is also seen as adding grace
and charm to his otherwise austere life. This middle-class dream
was, of course, also an established social practice in the mid-
nineteenth century. Money made in trade, industry and the
middle-class professions was used to purchase large houses or
country estates, and middle-class money allied itself with
aristocratic status through cross-class marriages.
On one level the central narratives of East Lynne explode this
dream, exposing it as a delusion. From the outset Isabel is a
failure as the wife of a middle-class lawyer. She is physically,
emotionally and (it would appear) morally frail. Brought up to a

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life of decorative uselessness, she is incapable of running

Carlyle’s household and is easily bested by his managing half-
sister Cornelia. She is seduced from the path of wifely virtue by
an aristocratic rake, with whom she elopes only to be deserted.
She is divorced, presumed dead and ultimately replaced as
Carlyle’s wife by the capable and resourceful middle-class
heroine Barbara Hare.
Although this is clearly one powerful narrative pattern which
the text would have generated for contemporary readers, the
story of Carlyle, Isabel and Barbara also has more diverse and
complex meanings. In East Lynne, as in Braddon’s novels, the
reader is offered a shifting range of identifications and reading
positions. The female reader in particular is unlikely to see Isabel
either as merely the embodiment of aristocratic inefficacy, or the
moral exemplum of the ‘careless’ wife (although she is clearly
both of these). The details of the representation of Isabel and her
story are greatly in excess of the demands of these specific moral
and didactic requirements. Nor is East Lynne simply the
narrative of the transfer of social and political power from a
previously dominant aristocracy to a rising bourgeoisie: a process
of renovation (of the aristocracy) and incorporation (of the
bourgeoisie). It is also the story of the constantly changing
relations of power between men and women, and of the
intersections of class and gender. Key aspects of this narrative
turn on the ways in which class identities are differently
gendered, and the ways in which gender is differently constructed
in different classes. Definitions of gender, of masculine/feminine
roles and the structure and politics of the family are thus at the
centre of this bestseller, which has been dismissed by many critics
as a merely conventional and conservative domestic melodrama
combining sin and sentiment in somewhat unequal proportions.16
East Lynne is both a story of the feminine and a feminine
story. The address of Wood’s novels is consistently (and certainly
more emphatically than Braddon’s) woman-to-woman. The way
in which the story is unfolded replicates the rhythms of women’s
conversation. The pace of the narrative is always leisurely—even
when climaxes and crises are at hand—and the narrator
habitually refers backwards and forwards in the narrative,
reminding the reader of apparently trivial details, or anticipating
later developments. For example, when Isabel returns to East
Lynne disguised as a governess, the narrator enquires

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conversationally, ‘Shall I tell you what she did? Yes, I will…’

(EL:410). A little later she notes that Isabel has discarded all her
former possessions with the exception of a miniature of her
mother and a small golden cross: ‘Have you forgotten that
cross?’ she asks (EL:412), and proceeds to remind the reader of
the significance of its earlier appearance in the narrative (when
Levison had clumsily broken the doubly sacred object). The
narrator persistently addresses the reader directly, assumes a
shared experience and a community of values with her readers,
or solicits the reader’s attention for a particular character’s point
of view, or a particular moral point of view.
This apparently easy, gossipy address, full of trivia and ‘much
occupied with servants and the lower classes…with explicit
details of dress, furnishings and the colour schemes of
fashionable carriages’ (Hughes 1980:111), positions the reader
within a feminine discourse of a specific social register. Similarly
the much-noted moralising of the narrator, and even the straining
for gentility (attributed by some critics to Wood’s own social
insecurities as the daughter of a glove manufacturer) are also
part of a discourse—the discourse of respectable or proper
femininity—which constructs morality along class and gender
lines. The social and moral strain and anxiety of Wood’s address
are integral to that discourse.
East Lynne is not only a feminine narrative, it is also a
narrative of femininity. Most of the central characters are
women, and each of them is represented at some point as a
feminine stereotype to be compared and contrasted with other
such stereotypes. Thus Isabel is compared with Barbara Hare,
Mrs Hare, Afy Hallijohn and Cornelia Carlyle in her various
roles of the aristocratic, childish, dependent wife, the fallen
woman, or the suffering mother; Barbara appears as the
stereotype of the active middle-class wife and modern mother;
Mrs Hare as the tyrannised, invalid wife and devoted mother;
Afy as the servant with social pretensions, and fallen woman;
and Cornelia as the competent but shrewish old maid.
The central male characters are also, to some extent,
feminised. Levison, the seducer, although a sexual predator, is
represented as somewhat feminine in his narcissism and
sensuality. His cowardice and lack of honour certainly render
him ‘unmanly’ within the terms of the novel’s gendered moral
discourse. Paradoxically, Carlyle, the very model of ‘manly’

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honour and restraint, also occupies an ambiguous gender

position. Initially dominated by his competent, combative and
masculinised half-sister, Cornelia, he is consistently blind to the
tensions in his own home. This is partly because he is, as a man,
presumed to be inherently incapable of fathoming the mysteries
of the domestic sphere, and partly because he is frequently absent
from it and habitually preoccupied with the concerns of the
masculine world of work. In other words, Carlyle demonstrates
a structural masculine incomprehension of the domestic: the
novel implies that men’s position within the family simply does
not equip them to read the signs of the domestic sphere. Carlyle
thus becomes part of the novel’s demonstration and analysis of
the way in which different gender roles are produced and
function within the family. In this respect he is seen as, to some
extent, responsible (through ignorance and inefficacy) for Isabel’s
dilemma. The well-intentioned, but ignorant and hence
unsympathetic husband is, in part, responsible for a difficult
domestic situation for which the wife pays the price of
banishment and exile.
Carlyle is presented at various stages of the narrative as a
failed patriarch in his own household. His gender identity is
further problematised (at least in terms of the prevailing
stereotypes) by his secret alliance with women (Barbara Hare
and her mother) to frustrate the wishes of the domestic tyrant,
Justice Hare. Carlyle is thus placed in a very interesting position.
On the one hand he is unable to assimilate and accommodate, in
his own (first) family, two polarised versions of the feminine: the
woman who is all feeling (Isabel), and the aggressive, managing
‘phallic mother’ (Cornelia). On the other hand, through his
involvement with Barbara and Mrs Hare, he himself becomes a
kind of super-woman or super-mother. On their behalf he defends
the affective family which persists (or subsists) within the stern
patriarchal family of Justice Hare. Moreover, through his role in
exonerating Richard Hare from wrongful accusations of murder,
he effectively strikes the father dead, since on learning of his
son’s innocence (and thus recognising the harshness of his own
conduct) Justice Hare suffers a stroke from which he never
recovers: the patriarch is unmanned.
These paradoxes and ambivalences, and, most importantly,
Carlyle’s confusion about his own position in the dynamics of the
various family groupings, are no doubt part of the novel’s appeal

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to both male and female readers. Carlyle’s story offers the reader
a version of the male experience of the contradictions of the
patriarchal family as constituted in mid-Victorian middle-class
society, as well as explaining (or rationalising) that predicament
to a female audience. In this way it explores some of the anxieties
about the bourgeois family which I have discussed in previous
sections. The evolution of Carlyle’s family history is also
important here. He moves between three families: the first is
actually run by a martinet spinster (Cornelia), but is supposedly
presided over by a dependent child-like woman (Isabel), who
combines the characteristics of domestic angel, decorative object
and, ultimately, the fallen woman (in this case as victim rather
than demon). The second is tyrannically ruled by an old-
fashioned patriarch (Hare), who seems more of an eighteenth-
than a nineteenth-century figure. In this family women have
virtually no influence even in the domestic sphere. (Mrs Hare is
afraid to order tea a few minutes before the time prescribed by
her husband, even though she is ill and desperately thirsty.)
Carlyle ultimately moves beyond these problematic families to a
third—a modernised version—presided over by a capable wife
with modern ideas of domestic management and motherhood,
who actively supports her husband’s new career as Member of
Parliament. At this level the novel is a narrative about the
making of the modern, professional, middle-class family, which
inscribes middle-class insecurities about social mobility, warns
middle-class men against the growing practice of taking
aristocratic wives, and middle-class women against embracing
the excessive refinement and susceptibility to feeling of the
upper-class woman.
The narrative of Carlyle’s two marriages may be read as a
staging of the Freudian Oedipal drama by which normative
feminine sexuality is constructed. The marriage of Carlyle and
Isabel (who represent, in displaced form, the father and mother
of the Freudian drama) is threatened by the rebellious daughter
(Barbara) who desires the father (Carlyle) and must reject (and in
this case replace) the mother (Isabel). However, in its latter
stages, as E.Ann Kaplan (1989) has suggested, East Lynne also
contains an alternative version of this drama. The restaged
version articulates precisely what the middle-class family
suppresses: an alternative trajectory of feminine sexuality. This
second version may be read in two ways. First it could be seen

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simply as a staging of the Freudian drama from the mother’s

point of view: thus, Isabel (as disowned wife) painfully yearns for
the return of the husband/father who has been ‘stolen’ by the
daughter. Alternatively it could be seen as a quite different story,
in which the suffering child’s yearning to replace the mother in
the father’s affections is both sublimated and (infinitely)
deferred: sublimated into intense maternal feelings, and deferred
for the duration of this earthly life. Adapting Nancy Chodorow’s
rereading of Lacan’s view that it is desire for the lost mother (not
the father) that is crucial in the formation of female sexuality,
Kaplan (1989) has offered a very persuasive psychoanalytic
reading of East Lynne, which suggests that Isabel’s desire for the
child, which dominates the final section, represents a sublimated
longing for the mother rather than the father. East Lynne thus
transforms the Oedipal drama into ‘maternal melodrama’.
However one reads it, East Lynne’s alternative version of
Isabel’s role in the Oedipal drama seems to involve the
frustration of all feminine feeling within the family: (re)union
with the father/husband must be infinitely postponed, the desire
for the child cannot be articulated and can only be achieved
through death. In this respect, as in others, East Lynne follows
nineteenth-century melodrama’s habitual pattern of articulating
both female desire and women’s powerlessness.
Apart from the Oedipal drama and the story of the making of
the modern middle-class family, the other obvious structural
pattern in this novel is its official moral(ising) narrative. This
narrative is a parable of the dangers of sexual passion and
(female) marital indiscretion, in which the erring wife (Isabel) is
fiercely punished, and the patient virtue of the steadfast woman
(Barbara) is amply rewarded. Although clearly both morally and
socially conservative, it is more complex than has sometimes
been suggested. In fact this narrative of conventional sexual
morality is another version of the making of the modern middle-
class family, which enacts some of the elements that are
suppressed in the first version. In both versions the changing
roles of Isabel Vane/Carlyle and Barbara Hare/Carlyle are
central. The first narrative moves from a woman-dominated (but
fractured) family (run by Cornelia), to a companionate affective
family (presided over by Barbara), via an excluded third term—
the tyrannical patriarchal family of Justice Hare. Similarly, the
second version moves from a sexually transgressive wife who is

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all feeling (Isabel), to a competent, sexually chaste wife (Barbara)

who has learned to govern her feelings, via the excluded third
term of Afy Hallijohn.
Afy is a stock character of Victorian fiction, in both its high
culture and popular modes. She is the saucy servant who apes her
superiors and attempts to achieve her social ambitions by sexual
means. East Lynne’s particular treatment of this stereotype
demonstrates the ways in which discourses of class and gender
intersect in the production of sexual ideology. As in some of
Wood’s other novels, for example in the depiction of the sexually
misused and discarded Rachel Frost in Verner’s Pride, a sexually
exploited female servant is the origin of an important strand of
the mystery narrative. Lower-class women are thus figured as a
disturbance of the sexual economy of the middle-class family (as
in the discourse on the prostitute discussed earlier).
In East Lynne the stories of the upstart servant and the
aristocratic heroine are carefully juxtaposed. The similarity of
their situations is obvious: they are both seduced and abandoned
by the same man (Thorn/Levison). However, the effect of the
narrative’s insistence on the similarities between the sexual
transgressions of Afy and Isabel is ultimately to call attention to
the fundamental difference between them. Afy is not required to
undergo the punitive moral, emotional and physical suffering
which is constructed for Isabel. Isabel is harrowed; Afy is
ridiculed. Isabel is required to die a lingering and pathetic death;
Afy’s punishment is a somewhat comic public humiliation at the
trial of her father’s murderer, and the curtailment of her social
ambitions by marriage to a cheese-monger. To be sure, the sexual
crimes of Afy and Isabel are different. Afy has merely left her
father’s home to become Levison/Thorn’s mistress, whereas
Isabel both enters an adulterous relationship and deserts her
husband and children. However, even when this has been take
into consideration, significant discrepancies remain.
Afy is required to suffer less than Isabel because of the
presumption (heavily underlined by the narrator) that she is less
emotionally and morally refined than her social superior. Afy’s
fall is presented by the narrator as a mixture of folly and
wilfulness; if the character reflects upon her situation at all it is
to see it as a career move. However, Isabel’s is a fall from grace,
which is accompanied by exquisite agonies of moral

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scrupulousness and emotional self-torture, both of which are

presented in class terms.

How fared it with Lady Isabel? Just as it must be

expected to fare, and does fare, when a high-
principled gentlewoman falls from her pedestal…
It is possible that remorse does not come to all
erring wives as immediately as it came to Lady Isabel
Carlyle—you need not be reminded that we speak of
women in the higher positions of life. Lady Isabel was
endowed with sensitively refined delicacy, with an
innate, lively consciousness of right and wrong.
(EL:288–9, my italics)

Even though her fall is more serious than Afy’s, Lady Isabel
remains within the discourse of proper femininity from which
Afy is excluded by her class identity. Moreover, Afy plays a
crucial role in constructing and sustaining the category from
which she is herself excluded. Afy and the class to which she
belongs are one means by which proper femininity is maintained.
The ideological work of the narrative which I have been
describing may also have provided an important source of
narrative pleasure for contemporary readers. Like many of their
modern counterparts, these readers no doubt went to fiction
(especially their ‘lighter reading’) not only to find out about the
world, but also to have their sense of the world confirmed and
their social and sexual fantasies elaborated and enacted.
However, both the pleasures and the messages of Wood’s
bestseller are diverse and contradictory, especially for women
readers.
One important source of East Lynne’s appeal to women was
its feminine focus on the family. For the most part it deals with
women’s experience of the family from a woman’s point of view.
Like many of Wood’s other sensation-influenced novels of the
1860s, but in a more concentrated form, East Lynne dwells on
women’s role and position in the family and household, and on
the nature and sources of their domestic power, or lack of it. The
novel contains one very powerful example of the ruling domestic
woman, in Cornelia, and works towards instating Barbara Hare
as the model of commanding household competence, but it also
suggests the precariousness of women’s domestic power.

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Every scene in East Lynne that shows a woman reigning in

social and/or domestic triumph is matched by at least two that
depict women confused, confined and passive. This novel
(perhaps to an even greater extent than Braddon’s) is full of
scenes of domestic entrapment, which represent female
characters observing the events of their household and feeling
powerless to influence them. Women’s power is usually exercised
only in relation to children and other women. This subordinated
form of power, and the intra-female rivalry it produces, are
central to the novel’s emotional dynamics.
Rivalry between women within and for the domestic space is
a particularly important sub-text of East Lynne. Throughout the
narrative Isabel is portrayed as being entrapped within the
domestic space, in situations that she does not understand, either
with or by hostile or unsympathetic women. In marrying Carlyle
she exchanges one such situation for another. Carlyle’s fortuitous
visit to Castle Marling, and his proposal of marriage, come at the
climax of Isabel’s trials as a dependent female relative in the
home of her father’s heir, Lord Mountsevern. At Castle Marling
she has been falsely accused and mistreated by Mountsevern’s
wife, who finds Isabel’s innocence and beauty a threat to her own
power, which is exercised largely through controlled flirtations.
Isabel’s sense of confinement within a domestic sphere in
which she has no voice, and from which she cannot escape (since
she has nowhere else to go), is replicated in somewhat different
terms at East Lynne. Her father’s former house, refurbished for
her occupation, should have been the scene of Isabel’s
triumphant homecoming. Instead, under the domestic
management of Cornelia, it is a place of confusion and impotent
suffering (confusion and suffering which Isabel is unable to
communicate to anyone else, especially her husband). The point
is made very forcefully in the description of Isabel’s arrival at her
new home, and is underlined by a later narratorial gloss:

Isabel would have been altogether happy but for Miss

Carlyle… She deferred outwardly to Lady Isabel as
mistress; but the real mistress was herself, Isabel little
more than an automaton. Her impulses were checked,
her wishes frustrated, her actions tacitly condemned
by the imperiously willed Miss Carlyle. Poor Isabel,
with her refined manners and her timid and sensitive

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temperament, stood no chance against the strong-

minded woman, and she was in a state of galling
subjection in her own house.
(EL:169–70)

This novel’s focus on women within the domestic space exposes

the contradictions of the ideology of the separate spheres, at a
time when that ideology was undergoing a crisis. Throughout the
first half of the nineteenth century, women’s lack of public
political power was usually justified by the argument that within
their own domestic sphere, as wives and mothers, they held
complete sway, and from their position of moral, spiritual and
emotional superiority they exercised influence over the (male)
public sphere. East Lynne, on the other hand, exposes the severe
limitations of this ideology by depicting wives who are
tyrannised within their own households, whether by men or
women. The novel also tends to suggest that, since real power
resides with men, the separation of the spheres actually works
against the interests of those women who conform most closely
to prevailing definitions of proper femininity or ‘womanliness’,
especially to those aspects which stress childlike dependence,
malleability, and moral and emotional sensitivity, and which cast
women in the role of creators (or at least non-disturbers) of
domestic peace. Lady Mountsevern (the femme fatale) and
Cornelia Carlyle (the masculinised old maid) both derive their
power and authority from their failure to conform to these
versions of the feminine.
If its representation of women’s domestic entrapment and
subordination speaks to, and for, women readers’ own
dissatisfaction with their lot, then other aspects of the novel’s
representation of the family work to contain this dissatisfaction.
The family and the domestic sphere, no matter how
uncomfortable, are presented as both the protector of women
and the agent by means of which excessive female sexuality is
contained. For example, Isabel is shown as being most vulnerable
to sexual temptation during her period of reluctant exile from
her home and family when she is sent to France to recover her
health.
One of the most important strategies of containment and
management of women’s familial discontent is the prolonged and
intense focus on the sufferings which result from Isabel’s (self-

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induced) exclusion from the household in which she had once felt
unhappy and trapped. In the final volume, where Isabel is
repeatedly portrayed as a spectator of scenes of domestic
intimacy between Carlyle and Barbara, the family becomes for
Isabel (and by extension for the reader) the object of desire rather
than the cause and focus of discontent. This process works to
defuse women’s discontent and to reposition them as domestic
creatures. However, at the same time, the story of the defence of
an affective maternal family within and against the controlling
patriarchal family (which is undertaken by Mrs Hare, Isabel,
Barbara and the servant Joyce) also offers women a potentially
empowering fantasy in which the family is reclaimed as a
revitalised women’s space.
Perhaps the major and most complex source of narrative
interest and pleasure for the first women readers of East Lynne
derived from its foregrounding and problematising of
motherhood. For much of the nineteenth century, and certainly
throughout the 1860s, the ‘womanly woman’ was defined in
terms of maternity. East Lynne breaks down this single term
and offers a range of versions of motherhood. Ironically, the
most commanding mother figure in the novel is the childless
Cornelia, the epitome of the active controlling phallic mother
by whose offices the Law of the father is transmitted and
mediated in the domestic sphere. Cornelia would surely have
generated conflicting responses in contemporary female
readers, who would have been likely to share her common-
sense, bourgeois values, but to reject her obstruction of
romantic and domestic fulfilment. Mrs Hare, on the other
hand, is the vehicle for the articulation of the frustrations of
women’s role within the patriarchal family, and of resistance to
subjugation. In the passive, dependent Mrs Hare (and, later, in
Isabel) readers are asked to recognise the maternal bond as the
strongest of all bonds, and maternal feelings as a hidden and
private space from which women may resist their domestic
oppression.
This novel’s intense focus on motherhood has led recent critics
(such as Kaplan 1989) to describe it as a ‘maternal melodrama’,
a mode which, as Linda Williams (1987) has suggested, has
‘historically addressed female audiences about issues of primary
concern to women’ (305). Such melodramas, Williams argues,
habitually place their readers or spectators in a range of feminine

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subject positions, and ‘demand a female reading competence’

which derives from the way in which feminine subjectivity is
defined and constructed by ‘the social fact of mothering’ (305).
The central narrative of East Lynne is certainly structured
around maternal experience and competing definitions of
motherhood. The novel’s double structure involves two heroines,
Isabel and Barbara, and turns on a comparison of their roles as
mothers and their differing conceptions of motherhood. Barbara,
the ‘successful’ heroine, in many respects represents the type of
the modern mother. She is presented as suitably adoring, but also
as a woman whose maternal feelings are constrained and
contained by her sense of what is due to her husband. She has
thoroughly modern ideas on children’s place in the domestic
economy: ‘If I and Mr Carlyle have to be out in the evening, baby
gives way. I should never give up my husband for my baby’
(EL:418). Barbara is an advocate of women’s moral and
emotional leadership of the household, a role she considers to be
incompatible with (and indeed compromised by) close daily
contact with children.

I hold an opinion…that too many mothers pursue a

mistaken system in the management of their family.
There are some, we know, who lost in the pleasures of
the world, in frivolity, wholly neglect them…nothing
can be more thoughtless, more reprehensible; but
there are others who err on the opposite side. They are
never happy but when with their children…They wash
them, dress them, feed them; rendering themselves
slaves, and the mother’s office a sinecure… She has no
leisure, no spirits for any higher training: as they grow
older she loses her authority…
The discipline of that house soon becomes broken.
The children run wild; the husband is sick of it, and
seeks peace and solace elsewhere… Now, what I trust
I shall never give up to another, will be the training of
my children… I hope I shall never fail to gather my
children round me daily, at stated periods, for higher
purposes: to instil into them Christian and moral
duties…. This is a mother’s task… A child should
never hear aught from its mother’s lips but winning

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gentleness; and this becomes impossible, if she is very

much with her children.
(EL:415–16)

This passage deserves close attention since it seems to be an

interesting example of the novel’s weaving in of an extrafictional
feminine discourse, in this case the discourse of the domestic-
conduct book or the woman’s or family magazine article. This
discourse is itself fractured and contradictory. To read Barbara’s
set-piece speech against the grain (as perhaps one is encouraged
to do by its sharp juxtaposition with the very different version of
mothering represented by Isabel) is to see how it reveals the
division of labour, and the dependence on servants in the
domestic hierarchy which sustains this version of mothering. It
also reveals the splitting of the mother herself: her function of
moral guardian and guide, and her supposedly natural role as
carer, both of which are integral to the ‘womanly woman’ ideal,
are shown to conflict.
Isabel’s story is a maternal melodrama or a drama of
motherhood. Hers is not simply the story of a fallen woman or
an erring wife, it is also, most emphatically, the story of a fallen
and hence suffering mother. Isabel’s maternal suffering (within
the wider context of the novel’s representation of mothering)
foregrounds the contradictory demands made on women by the
equation of true womanhood with maternal feeling. Isabel is a
woman, and in particular a mother, who loves too much. Her
maternal feelings, like other aspects of her emotional life, are
characterised by excess. For approximately the final two-thirds
of the novel Isabel is consistently represented and defined as a
grieving, sacrificing and suffering mother. Once she begins to
entertain jealous doubts about Carlyle and Barbara she channels
all her feminine feeling into her children, the only socially
sanctioned outlet for female desire, apart from heterosexual love
within marriage. Her children are the focus of her anxieties
about leaving East Lynne for the continental visit recommended
by her doctors (again male authority figures combine to
constrain the behaviour of women and compel them to act
against their ‘natural’ desires). The loss of her children is the
primary source of both her pain and her repentance following
her elopement with Levison. In this respect the novel rehearses
what must have been a profound fear for many women at this

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time. Given the provisions of the divorce laws in cases of female

adultery, fear of separation from children was clearly a powerful
force in controlling the sexual behaviour of married women.
Following the loss of her husband and lover, Isabel’s whole
identity (for both the character and the reader) is defined by her
motherhood. Within the novel’s moral and didactic economy
Isabel is thus constructed as an over-invested mother, another
version of the improper feminine which must be expelled from
the text and replaced by the normative controlled and controlling
proper femininity of Barbara Hare. However, within the text’s
emotional and psychological economy Isabel has quite a different
function. Throughout the novel, but particularly in its final
volume, the reader is repeatedly invited to identify with Isabel
through the text’s staging of the spectacle of her maternal
suffering. The reader is simultaneously made into a spectator of
Isabel’s sufferings and drawn into an emotional investment in
them through the narrator’s rhetorical excess. As is usual in
women’s sensation fiction, such excess is accompanied by
protestations of the narrator’s linguistic and representational
inadequacies.

I do not know how to describe the vain yearning, the

inward fear, the restless longing for what may not be.
Longing for what? For her children. Let a mother, be
she a duchess, or be she an apple-woman at a stall, be
separated for a while from her little children: let her
answer how she yearns for them. She may be away on
a journey of pleasure; for a few weeks, the longing to
see their little faces again, to hear their prattling
tongues, to feel their soft kisses, is kept under…but as
the weeks lengthen out, the desire to see them again
becomes almost irrepressible. What must it have been,
then, for Lady Isabel, who had endured this longing
for years.
(EL:397–8)

This passage actively constructs a maternal longing which it

expects its readers to recognise as ‘natural’. Significantly this
longing transcends those differences of class which the novel so
carefully establishes elsewhere. There is also a certain irony in
the fact that the apparently unbearable maternal deprivation

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which is created and described is, in a sense, actively sought by

the mothers who are escaping from their own maternal and
domestic commitments in reading the novel.
The reader’s spectating of Isabel’s sufferings is not confined to
such set-piece scenes of rhetorical excess. The reader is
repeatedly positioned as a spectator who watches Isabel silently
and feelingly watching painful scenes. In the final volume, Isabel
is the frequent spectator of the connubial and familial bliss
between Barbara and Carlyle. Through her disguise as a
governess she watches her own children and, most poignantly,
becomes the helpless and inarticulate spectator of her son’s
lingering death. This aspect of Isabel’s story has been described
as masochistic, as a ‘prolonged, luxurious orgy of self-torture’
(Hughes 1980:115). This so-called masochism of the text is
clearly an important source of its pleasures for the middle-class
woman reader. Isabel’s long-drawn-out suffering not only makes
the didactic case against female adultery in an extreme form (and
hence confirms the reader’s official morality), it also affords the
reader the opportunity of spectating feelings of anxiety,
separation, loss and claustrophobia which arise from middle-
class women’s experience of motherhood and domesticity. Thus,
although Isabel is redundant insofar as it is her function to be
erased from the text and to be replaced by the controlled,
competent and controlling Barbara, she also functions as the
repository of the text’s and the reader’s emotional ambivalence
and resistance.
In its representation of the masochism of the maternal
melodrama, East Lynne comprehends (in the sense of both
embracing and understanding) women’s desire for the child,
and their anxieties about the separation from the child—
anxieties which according to Lacanian psychoanalysis replicate
their own feelings of loss and separation from the mother. The
text thus permits its readers to enjoy Isabel’s sufferings and
longings while, at the same time, requiring them to reject these
in favour of properly oriented maternal feelings. However,
although readers must finally reject Isabel, their emotional
investment in her suffering leads to a questioning of the
conditions which produce it.
This discrepancy between the heroine’s and the reader’s
perspective is an important source of the potential subversiveness
of the text. The reader’s emotional investment in Isabel creates a

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space for resistance of the text’s ‘official’ morality—that

maternal suffering and death are the inevitable and just
consequences of female adultery. Recent Marxist-feminist critics
have been right to warn of the dangers involved in appropriating
literary texts for feminism by over-valuing the space for
emotional resistance that they seem to offer. On the other hand,
it would seem to be equally misguided to label as conservative or
reactionary any text which does not offer a thorough-going
structural analysis of capitalist patriarchy, together with a model
for changing it. East Lynne tends to leave its readers, like its
sacrificial heroine, feeling powerless to change the situation.17
Nevertheless it has, in the meantime, offered a critique of (or, at
the very least, raised serious questions about) that situation.
The subversive sub-text of East Lynne (what Kaplan 1989,
following Jameson 1981, calls its political unconscious) derives
from the way in which it allows (or even requires) its readers to
think two otherwise contradictory things at once; in other words,
from what Bakhtinian theory would describe as its dialogism.18
One of the most prominent aspects of this dialogism can be seen
in the novel’s manipulation of point of view, and particularly in
the way in which it appears to require its readers to condemn a
character with whom they are also supposed to identify and
sympathise. The middle-class reader (especially the female
reader) must ultimately reject Isabel, with whom she has become
increasingly involved as the text progresses, in favour of Barbara,
a character who is much more like the reader’s everyday self-
conception, but who is represented as progressively less
sympathetic.
These shifts of sympathy and identification depend partly on
the way in which the text positions the reader vis-à-vis the
characters. In order to see how this works we need to look more
closely at the structural juxtapositioning of the two main female
characters, and more particularly at their changing positions
within a triangular relationship with Carlyle. It would appear
that the reader’s sympathies usually lie with the character who
forms the excluded third term of this triangle. Thus, the highest
point of the reader’s sympathetic identification with Barbara is in
the first part of the novel when she is positioned as the jealous
outsider, spectator of Carlyle’s and Isabel’s wedded bliss. Indeed,
the reader is most closely involved in Barbara’s emotional life in

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those scenes in which she transgresses those norms of the proper

feminine which she is later used to exemplify.
In the early stages of the novel Barbara is associated with
silent but active rebellion against her father, and with suppressed
passionate feelings for Carlyle, which surface in a particularly
ungenteel scene in Chapter 16 (‘Barbara Hare’s Revelation’),
which portrays ‘one of those moments in a woman’s life when
she is betrayed into forgetting the ordinary rules of conduct and
propriety; when she is betrayed into making a scene’ (EL:165).
At this stage the reader is also made into an intimate witness of
Barbara’s attempts to govern her emotions so that she may view
with equanimity the scenes between Isabel and Carlyle. However,
once Barbara has effectively changed positions with Isabel, she is
viewed from a more distanced perspective and becomes of less
emotional interest. In a similar way the reader’s emotional
involvement with Isabel intensifies as she, in turn, becomes the
spectator in the triangle: first, when she suspects the constant
têtes-à-têtes between her husband and Barbara (when they are, in
fact, consulting about Barbara’s brother), and (most powerfully)
in the final volume when Isabel is living at East Lynne disguised
as governess to her own children.
Partly as a result of this manipulation of point of view, East
Lynne destabilises its own norms. Although the novel ultimately
rejects the transgressive, improper femininity of Isabel in favour
of Barbara’s proper femininity, it has in the process, to some
extent, destabilised the reader’s identification with, and
commitment to, the normative category of bourgeois femininity.
The character who is to become the type of such femininity is
presented most feelingly, and as most feeling (and the capacity
for feeling, after all, is one of the defining characteristics of
nineteenth-century femininity) when she transgresses that norm
(and is revealed as a barely governable mass of feeling and
outrage). On the other hand, the character who becomes the type
of the improper, transgressive feminine is presented most
sympathetically as the adoring self-sacrificing mother. (Isabel is
that striking paradox: the whore as madonna.)
The dialogism, by means of which East Lynne subverts its
own norms, is also a function of the novel’s movements between
different sets of generic conventions. This generic slippage, which
is found in a great deal of women’s sensation fiction, is one of the
main sources of the moral and structural ambiguity of the central

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female characters. The meaning and significance of a particular

female character fluctuate according to the generic conventions
through which she is mediated at different points in the
narrative. Thus Barbara is represented as the villainous ‘other
woman’ of melodrama, but appears as a heroine when the mode
is that of sentimental domestic fiction, while Isabel is the
suffering domestic heroine, but becomes the fallen woman as
villain when positioned by the norms of melodrama.
Despite the apparently conservative morality and sexual
politics of its ending, East Lynne (like many other sensation
novels by women) offers a particularly striking example of the
Bakhtinian view of the subversive relationship between popular
and official forms.19 In this case the (originally) popular lower-
class form of melodrama subverts, or at least destabilises, the
dominant middle-class forms and norms of domestic fiction. The
particular mixture of sin and sentiment in East Lynne serves to
expose the contradictions of the proper feminine, even as the
novel works to re-establish it.

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 Part III
Breaking the Bounds:
The Improper Feminine
and the Fiction of the
New Woman
 14
The New Woman

The New Woman is simply the woman of to-day

striving to shake off old shackles, and the
immense mass of ‘revolting’ literature cannot
have grown out of nothing, or continue to
flourish upon mere curiosity.
(Stutfield 1897:115)

The 1890s was…a period in which a number of

women writers, dealing as feminists with the
social and sexual rights of women, secured a
prominence which at times developed into
sensation… They helped to wrench English
fiction into new channels.
(Rubinstein 1986:24)

The twin questions ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘What does a

woman want?’, and the plethora of answers they provoked, were
even more troubling and pervasive in the culture of the 1890s
than they had been in the 1860s. They were given a new focus in
the figure of the New Woman, one of the most widely and loudly
discussed subjects in the public prints of the mid-nineties. (The
year 1894 seems to have been the New Woman’s annus
mirabilis.) Who or what was this creature who so powerfully
seized the public imagination, and who was analysed, reviled,
caricatured and parodied in fiction and in the words and images
of newspapers and magazines? First and foremost the New
Woman was a representation. She was a construct, ‘a condensed
symbol of disorder and rebellion’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1985:247)

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who was actively produced and reproduced in the pages of the

newspaper and periodical press, as well as in novels. The New
Woman (and the moral panic which surrounded her) was yet
another example of the way in which, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, femininity became a spectacle.1
This particular version of the staging of the spectacle of
femininity, as Terry Lovell (1987) has argued, placed the ‘gender
order…under spotlights’, and led to ‘a furious debate on what it
meant to be a real man, a real woman’ (119). Traditional
assumptions about the inviolability of these latter categories
were also called into question by the new sexual science. In The
Psychology of Sex (1933, first version published in 1897)
Havelock Ellis theorised a fluidity of gender categories which the
New Woman dramatised. ‘We may not know exactly what sex
is’, he noted, but ‘we do know that it is mutable, with the
possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex…that its
frontiers are mutable, and that there are many stages between a
complete male and a complete female’ (225). While Ellis
analysed and theorised, Punch’s ‘Angry Old Buffer’ fulminated
against the dissolution of established gender categories, in which
the New Woman writer and her ‘tales all slang and sin’ played a
prominent part:

…a new fear my bosom vexes;

Tomorrow there may be no sexes!
Unless, as end to all pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other.

Woman was woman, man was man,

When Adam delved and Eve span
Now he can’t dig and she won’t spin,
Unless ‘tis tales all slang and sin!
(Punch April 27, 1895:203)

The ‘New’ in New Woman signified not only the supposed

novelty of the type, but also (and more ominously for her critics)
the type’s alleged obsession with novelty. The New Woman was,
according to a prominent opponent, ‘consumed with a desire for
new experiences, new sensations, new objects in life’ (Stutfield
1897:105). To the readers of the Cornhill, she was represented as
a body and a fashion system, both of which violated the code of

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the proper feminine. Her ‘simple’, ‘close-fitting’, ‘tailor-made’

and ‘manly’ style of dress ‘adds a somewhat aggressive air of
independence which finds its birth in the length of her stride’; her
attitudes are as ‘strong and independent’ as her hands; she has a
‘discontented mouth, and a nose indicative of intelligence, and
too large for feminine beauty’. The Cornhill’s New Woman is
unshockable, ‘superficially deep’, ‘crushing’ to mild young men,
and (most important of all) ‘conspicuously innocent’ of any
interest in children: ‘She has tried to prove that woman’s mission
is something higher than the bearing of children and the bringing
them up. But she has failed’ (all quotations Scott and Hall
1894:365–6).
The New Woman was the embodiment of a complex of social
tendencies. The title named a beacon of progress or beast of
regression, depending on who was doing the naming. To her
supporters she was an elevated creature who had been ‘sitting
apart’ from the ‘cow-kind of woman’, the ‘scum’ woman, and the
‘Bawling Brotherhood’ in ‘silent contemplation…thinking and
thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for
herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and
prescribed the remedy’ (Grand 1894:270–1). The alternative
version, the New Woman as cultural demon, had its origins in
the ‘Wild Women’ (Eliza Lynn Linton’s sobriquet for the
unsuccessful suffrage campaigners) and in the ‘Revolting
Daughters’ (those rebels against parental control and the
constraints of prevailing ideas of the proper feminine), whose
doings filled the pages of the middle-class periodicals in the early
nineties.2
Opponents of the New Woman tended to represent the
phenomenon in terms of the world-turned-upside-down of
revolutionary excess, or to associate it with the ‘persistent clamor
[sic]’ of the ‘Workingman’ (Ouida 1894:610). Linton, who had
been an extremely vocal and opinionated commentator on
modern woman since the 1860s, viewed the embryonic New
Woman through the ‘mirror’ of recent history in which she saw
‘the Parisian woman of the Revolution…repeated wherever
analogous conditions exist’ (1891a:80). She represented late
nineteenth-century women’s demands for inclusion in political
life as both a feminisation and a proletarianisation of the public
sphere.

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 BREAKING THE BOUNDS

The franchise for women would not simply allow a

few well-conducted, well-educated, self-respecting
gentle-women to quietly record their predilection for
Liberalism or Conservatism, but would let in the far
wider flood of the uneducated, the unrestrained, the
irrational and emotional.
(ibid.)

On the whole, however, the New Woman was represented as less

directly and actively political than the Wild Woman. Rather she
was figured as a symptom or harbinger of social change, whose
‘dominant note…[was] restlessness and discontent with the
existing order of things’ (Stutfield 1897:105).
The New Woman represented a threat not only to the social
order, but also to the natural order. Many doctors believed that
the development of a woman’s brain induced infertility by
causing the womb to atrophy, and hence jeopardised the survival
of the race. In addition, the spectre of the ‘mannish’ New Woman
who refused her biological destiny of motherhood threatened to
dissolve existing gender boundaries. Paradoxically the New
Woman was represented as simultaneously non-female,
unfeminine and ultra-feminine. The New Woman’s loss of female
characteristics was evident in the ‘bearded chin, the bass voice,
flat chest and lean hips of a woman who has failed in her
physical development’. Her lack of femininity was both the cause
and consequence of her resisting traditional womanly roles—‘a
curious inversion of sex, which does not necessarily appear in the
body, but is evident enough in the mind’ (both quotations Linton
1891a:79). The New Woman’s hyperfemininity was signalled by
her extreme susceptibility to feeling; she was a creature whose
proper feminine affectivity, ‘the dearer, tenderer emotions of the
true woman’ (83), had become excessive and degenerate and had
thus entered the domain of the improper feminine.
In the New Woman the self-sacrificially other-directed feeling
of the regime of the proper feminine had allegedly become self-
directed and self-absorbed, and manifested itself as ‘an intense
and morbid consciousness of the ego’ (Hansson 1896:79). The
New Woman was also said to be unduly interested in and
familiar with sexual feeling, and the New Woman writing was
supposedly saturated with sex.

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 THE NEW WOMAN

Emancipated woman in particular loves to show her

independence by dealing freely with the relations of
the sexes. Hence all the prating of passion, animalism,
‘the natural workings of sex,’ and so forth, with
which we are nauseated. Most of the characters in
these books seem to be erotomaniacs. Some are
‘amorous sensitives’; others are apparently sexless,
and are at pains to explain this to the reader. Here and
there a girl indulges in what would be styled, in
another sphere, ‘straight talk to young men.’ Those
nice heroines of ‘Iota’ and other writers of the
physiologico-pornographic school consort by choice
with ‘unfortunates,’ or else describe at length their
sensations in various interesting phases of their lives.
(Stutfield 1895:836)

The ‘erotomania’ of the New Woman writers was widely held to

be part of a general decadence which had infected the culture via
contemporary French literature. According to W.F. Barry (1894)
the New Woman writing displayed the ‘French combination’ of
‘sensuous introspection…the careful Epicurean tasting of life’s
flavours, and the doctrine of “thrill,” which are not only
decadent in their origin…[but] bring the taint into the book
which describes them’ (307–8).
The New Woman was persistently represented as an hysteric,
whose degenerate emotionalism was both symptom and cause of
social change. As symptom, her hysteria was a degenerate form
of her natural affections. It was also thought to be a form of
brain-poisoning induced by the pressures of modern life and by
women’s attempts to resist their traditional roles and ape those of
men. As cause, hysteria threatened social disintegration and,
indeed, the future of the race, by disabling women and
preventing them from fulfilling their ‘natural’ roles of wives and
mothers.
The New Woman thus challenged traditional gender
boundaries in paradoxical ways. The mannish New Woman
threatened such boundaries from one direction by quitting the
sphere of the proper feminine, aping masculinity and becoming a
new intermediate sex. On the other hand, these boundaries were
also eroded by the New Woman’s hyperfemininity. The New
Woman as hysteric threatened to invade and infect the whole of

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society with a degenerative femininity, which had the ‘inevitable

effect of sapping manliness and making people flabby’ (Stutfield
1897:842) and ‘hysterically susceptible’ to ‘outside’ (i.e., foreign)
influences (Linton 1892:457).
The function of the hysteritised New Woman in fin de siècle
representations is thus analogous to the role of the female
hysteric in Freudian psychoanalysis. They are both produced as
‘the spectacle of femininity in crisis’ (Cixous and Clément
1987:9). Since, in the nineteenth century, cultural health was
defined in terms of the regulation of the proper feminine, the
spectacle of improper femininity represented by the New Woman
as hysteric also served as the spectacle of a culture in crisis.
If the New Woman was produced by the multiple
contradictions that characterised late Victorian conceptions of
the feminine, the New Woman writers (in varying degrees)
reproduced those contradictions. However, they also—in
different ways and to differing degrees—exposed and explored
them. They engaged in a complex negotiation of the available
discourses on woman, which challenged, transposed and, on
occasions, transformed the terms of the dominant discourse. The
New Woman writing, like the New Woman herself, became a site
upon which ‘the “naturalness” of gender and the legitimacy of
the bourgeois social order’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1985:245) were
contested. Ultimately we may conclude that the New Woman
writers, like their earlier Victorian predecessors, ‘remained
within the terms of the ideology whose discursive rules [they]
violate’ (Poovey 1989:83), but, as I hope to show in later
sections, their writing constantly pushed against and disturbed its
boundaries.

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 15
The New Woman writing and
some marriage questions

It was impossible that the demands of

women for freedom should become a
feature of modern life without the marriage
relation, as at present understood, being
called into question.
(Caird 1897:67)

The Woman Question is the Marriage

Question.
(Grand 1894:276)

Although sometimes more experimental in form, and almost

always more didactic and overtly polemical than the
sensationalists, the New Woman writers shared many of their
predecessors’ preoccupations. Chief among these was a common
concern with women’s marital and familial roles. Like Braddon
and Wood, the New Woman writers of the 1890s focused
minutely on the domestic space and, whether writing as feminists
or as anti-feminists, engaged in a probing exploration and
critique of marriage and the family. ‘In almost every case’, wrote
W.T.Stead in 1894, ‘the novels of the modern woman are
preoccupied with questions of sex, questions of marriage,
questions of maternity’ (65). Even those writers who sought to
affirm the ‘naturalness’ of marriage and motherhood (as Mrs
Henry Wood had in the 1860s) could only do so within the terms
of the renewed contest over those institutions in the 1890s.
Nineteenth-century definitions of femininity and of female
sexuality were inextricably linked to contemporary definitions of

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marriage and to the social and political functions it served. As

the dominant definitions of femininity were more and more
fiercely contested in the latter half of the century, the Marriage
Question not only appeared to be increasingly problematic, it
also became more polarised. At one extreme marriage was seen
(by both feminists and anti-feminists) as woman’s highest and
most natural calling. At the other it was a form of slavery or
legalised prostitution. Many, perhaps most, reviewers saw the
New Woman fiction as part of a general attack on marriage by
fiction writers who, according to Margaret Oliphant (1896),
constituted ‘The Anti-Marriage League’. Although for Oliphant
this league included both male and female writers (Thomas
Hardy was singled out for particularly hostile treatment), one of
the strongest objections to the anti-marriage fiction (as to the
sensation novel) was the prominence of women in its production
and mediation. Oliphant clearly saw the New Woman writers as
founder-members of the league, and also attacked the part played
by women readers in creating a market for anti-marriage fiction.
Hugh Stutfield, whose one-man campaign against the
‘degeneracy’ of contemporary fiction has already been described,
was also exercised by the prominence of women writers and the
female perspective in the fictional critique of marriage.

The horrors of marriage from the feminine point of

view are so much insisted upon these days, and the
husband-fiend is trotted out so often both in fiction
and drama, that one wonders how the demon still
manages to command such a premium in the marriage
market.
(Stutfield 1895:835–6)

The developing debate on the Marriage Question, which was so

clearly an important component of the New Woman writing, was
given fresh impetus and direction by a series of articles by Mona
Caird, which were collected under the title of The Morality of
Marriage in 1897. Caird’s first article on the subject, simply
entitled ‘Marriage’, appeared in the Westminster Review (1888),
which published numerous essays on marriage and divorce
throughout the 1890s. Caird’s opening salvo generated widespread
commentary and discussion, and was the occasion of a protracted
correspondence (some 27,000 letters) in the Daily Telegraph

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 THE NEW WOMAN

throughout the summer of 1888, under the general title Is

Marriage a Failure? The avowed purpose of Caird’s essays was:

…to bring evidence from all sides, to prove that the

greatest evils of modern society had their origin,
thousands of years ago, in the dominant abuse of
patriarchal life: the custom of woman purchase. The
essays show that this system still persists in the
present form of marriage and its traditions, and that
these traditions are holding back the race from its best
development. It is proved, moreover, that it is a mere
popular fallacy to suppose that our present sex
relationship is a natural and immutable ordinance.
(Caird 1897:1)

Caird grounded her case in ‘the facts of history, sociology, heredity,

and indeed all human experience, rightly understood’. In order to
make that case she adopted, by turns, the stance (and the
appropriate discourses) of the historian, the anthropologist and the
sociologist, as well as engaging with the discourse of post-
Darwinian scientific debate. These debates and discourses are also
incorporated into her novels on the Marriage Question, seen by
some simply as rather crude and inartistic attempts to mix polemic
and fiction, and to further the attack on marriage by more accessible
and popular means than her periodical essays. Certainly many of
Caird’s fictional characters appear to be used as mouthpieces for her
anti-marriage doctrine. For example, Hadria, the thwarted heroine
of The Daughters of Danaus, directly echoed the essayist’s attack on
the ‘customs and traditions’ of marriage when:

[She] wondered why it was that marriage did not

make all women wicked—openly and actively so. If
ever there was an arrangement by which every evil
instinct and every spark of the devil was likely to be
aroused and infuriated, surely the customs and
traditions that clustered around this estate constituted
that dangerous combination.
(DD:168)

Caird, however, does not simply translate the rhetoric of the

essays into fictional form. She constructs a narrative and

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 BREAKING THE BOUNDS

develops a rhetoric of feeling which dramatise and explore the

dangerous combination produced by a conventionally restrictive
and loveless marriage, a sensitive woman, and a particular
cultural stereotype of femininity. Like her essays, The Daughters
of Danaus foregrounds the ideology of female self-sacrifice
which conventional middle-class marriage produces, and by
which it is reproduced.
Like many other novels of this period The Daughters of
Danaus is particularly fierce in its indictment of the covert
tyranny of the ideology of self-sacrificial motherhood.
Recapitulating the ‘Revolting Daughter’ debates in the
Nineteenth Century (1894), Caird’s novel represents Hadria as
the victim of her mother and of her mother’s view of marriage
and the family, before she herself becomes the victim of marriage.
Caird focuses minutely on the social forces which produce
Hadria as the latest link in a chain binding women together
under the domestic yoke, and makes much of women’s
complicity in their own subjection and in that of their sisters.
(Hadria is duped into an inappropriate marriage and
subsequently persuaded to return to her ill-matched husband by
his sister’s half-truths, misrepresentations and appeals to
conventional views of woman’s nature and role.) In short, this
novel persistently emphasises the lack of fit between the heroine’s
sense of self, and the versions of proper femininity transmitted
via the culture (starting with the mother).
Like the sensation novelists Caird focuses on the constraining
and claustrophobic nature of the domestic space. In The
Daughters of Danaus this is sharply contrasted with the freedom
of the moors surrounding Hadria’s familial home; with the
countryside around her marital home where she roams at liberty;
with the free space of The Priory (the usually unoccupied home
of Hadria’s mentor, Professor Fortescue), which provides the
heroine with a refuge of privacy where she may exercise her
musical vocation; and with the licensed liberty of the Garret (an
attic in the family home) in which Hadria and her siblings
construct an alternative world of sexual equality—‘the
Preposterous Society’. In the Garret sisters debate on equal terms
with their brothers despite their own ‘inferior’ education. In that
private space Hadria is free to articulate her feelings, and to
express her musical sensibility and youthful energies in dancing
reels, without being prey to the dangers which (as the novel

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 THE NEW WOMAN

repeatedly emphasises) attend the woman of strong feeling in the

sexual politics of the social world. Indeed, one of the more
interesting rhetorical devices in this novel is its habitual prefacing
of key episodes in Hadria’s history with a scene anatomising her
sensations in the heightened emotional state induced by her
response to music or dancing.
Although it repeats the arguments of her essays and, to a great
extent, replicates their discourse, Caird’s novel puts into play a
variety of voices and a variety of views on the Woman and
Marriage questions. Ultimately Margaret Oliphant’s category of
the ‘Anti-Marriage’ novel proves too limiting for this, as for
many other New Woman novels which address the Marriage
Question. Like her essays, Caird’s novel explores different forms
of marriage, and alternatives to marriage. One of the most
obvious ways in which she does this is to adapt the contrasting-
sisters plot—a staple of women’s fiction from the eighteenth
century onwards.
In The Daughters of Danaus the story of the initially
freethinking Hadria’s entrapment by the discourse of proper
femininity is juxtaposed with the story of her sister Algitha’s
rejection of womanliness and the familial role assigned to her by
that discourse. Algitha finds fulfilling philanthropic work in
London, and ultimately enters into a modern marriage of equals
with a socialist New Man. Hadria’s decline into a restrictive and
frustrating marriage is also compared with the situation of the
single woman. A melodramatic sub-plot depicts the emotional
sterility and heightened vulnerability of the friendless spinster
schoolteacher who is seduced and betrayed by Hadria’s would-be
lover, Professor Theobald. There is also a sustained examination
of the single state which is chosen by Valeria Du Prel as the
necessary condition for the exercising of her vocation as a writer.
Valeria’s sense that her work fails to compensate for the lack of
close family ties is contrasted with the frustration of Hadria’s
musical vocation by the pressures of familial life (an important
aspect of the novel, and a point to which I shall return).
The Daughters of Danaus, like many (perhaps most) New
Woman novels, does not simply attack marriage, but rather
renders it problematic. Much New Woman fiction represents
modern marriage as an ‘impossible’ institution. The impossibility
of marriage and (by extension) of women’s situation is
attributed, both explicitly and implicitly, to the double bind of

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the contradictory nature of the discourse on woman. As Augusta

Webster noted (quoted in Caird 1897:103), ‘people think women
who do not want to marry unfeminine; people think women who
do want to marry immodest’ (and hence unfeminine, since
modesty was one of the defining characteristics of femininity).
The heroine of Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia articulates a similar
contradiction when she notes that women are expected to be
entirely innocent of sexual desire and ignorant about sexual
activity before marriage, and to embrace both wholeheartedly as
soon as they marry.
The general effect of the New Woman novel—whether we
understand the term to refer to a single text or to a group of
texts—is to suggest the ‘impossibility’ of women’s situation. In
the New Woman fiction, as in melodrama, women’s lives are
presented as inherently problematic, and unhappiness is the
norm. Whatever path they choose, whether they conform to or
break with convention, women are likely to be thwarted and
frustrated. For example, George Egerton’s two volumes of short
stories, Keynotes and Discords, constitute a frequently
depressing catalogue of the impossibilities of women’s lives as
currently constituted. They are full of contradictory situations
and stark contrasts and choices. Stories about women yearning
for their lost lovers, their lost illusions about their lovers, or their
lost illusions about romantic love itself (such as ‘An Empty
Frame’), and stories of dreamy unrealised relationships (such as
‘Her Share’) are contrasted with stories of women trapped in
marriage with a brute (‘Wedlock’, ‘Under Northern Sky’ and
‘Virgin Soil’). The woman who sacrifices all for love is
juxtaposed with the equally marginalised, self-possessed working
girl who befriends her (‘Gone Under’), and a woman’s desire for
adventure and self-realisation is juxtaposed with the
contradictory desire for, and demands of, motherhood (‘A Cross
Line’).
The impossibility of women’s lives in the context of modern
marriage customs and their attendant gender roles is the central
preoccupation of Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia. This
impossibility is, in part, figured as a persistent gap between
female desire and the social actuality of women’s lives. Whether
their desires are those of the traditional, ‘womanly woman’, or
the New Woman (however the ‘new’ may be expressed or
defined), Dowie’s female characters are all revealed as pursuing

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 THE NEW WOMAN

chimeras. Even if they succeed in achieving their ambitions, or

realising their desires (and this applies particularly to the various
marriage or ménage plots), those ambitions and desires are seen
to be hollow and tainted.
The novel’s heroine is a case in point. Gallia, the
representation of a thoroughly modern young woman of
advanced ideas, seeks to rebel against woman’s conventional role
and take control of her own life. Gallia enjoys some measure of
success in redefining what it means to be a woman, or more
specifically (as in The Daughters of Danaus) a woman of the
upper middle classes, by distancing herself from her family, and
rejecting her mother and the social and familial duties of her
gender and class. Instead of ‘coming out’ for the London season,
Gallia (like a number of her real-life contemporaries) attends
lectures at Oxford in an attempt to improve upon the ‘home
education’ usually considered suitable for girls of her class.
Although thoroughly disillusioned with modern sex relations, she
(like many liberal feminists of the 1880s and 1890s) ultimately
becomes convinced that maternity is woman’s true and highest
vocation, and chooses a husband on the basis of his suitability
for procreation. In this last respect Gallia is a version of the New
Woman as regenerator of the race. Motherhood is represented
not as a mere lapsing back into the traditional role of the
womanly woman, but as a freely chosen and newly defined
feminine role—that of the reinvigorator or saviour of the race by
means of the woman’s sexual selection of a non-degenerate male.
However, Dowie’s novel deliberately constrains and undercuts
its heroine’s self-determination by foregrounding her unresolved
conflicts and desires. For example, the daughter’s unsatisfactory
relationship with her mother is not only used as the impetus for
her own conversion to the idea of motherhood; it also suggests the
potentially limiting conditions of the maternal role she chooses for
herself. Similarly Gallia’s rational choice of husband leaves a
surplus of desire in her unresolved feeling for the rejected and
rejecting object of her emotional and sexual desires, Dark Essex.
This latter character, whose discovery that he suffers from a heart
condition both symbolises and confirms his detachment from
social and personal commitment, is almost a parody of a feminised
version of modern masculinity. He is an aesthete, cocooned in the
world of Oxford colleges: a neurotic New Man, who doesn’t know
what he wants of either life or women. He is one of the male

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borderliners classified by Andrew Wynter in The Borderlands of

Insanity (1877), who inhabit the ‘Mazeland’, ‘Dazeland’ and
‘Driftland’ of a mind which has lost all sense of a ‘directing’ or
‘controlling power’ (quoted in Showalter 1991:11).
Dowie’s novel further destabilises and problematises the idea of
‘woman’ by focusing on gender stereotypes. Both the novel and the
characters within it habitually represent women (and, to a lesser
extent, men) as and through stereotypes. As in so many New
Woman novels the female characters in Gallia read more like
contemporary journalistic sketches of modern female types than
complex fictional creations: Gallia herself is the emotionally
inconsistent bluestocking, the ‘Revolting Daughter’ turned race
mother; Mrs Leighton, the worldly-wise society woman who uses
the influence of the domestic sphere in the public world; Gallia’s
mother, the self-sacrificial wife and mother, whose sufferings reveal
the emotional costs for women of their complicity in the
construction and perpetuation of the domestic ideology; Margaret
Essex, the pure woman with a spiritual power that is supposed to
redeem her future husband’s rakish past; Cara Lemuel, the Pre-
Raphaelite fleshly woman of the artistic demi-monde; Gertrude
Janion, the Girl of the Period (twenty years or so more ‘advanced’),
whose supremely cynical social climbing is satirised, but whose open
cynicism is also used to satirise the pretensions and hypocrisies of
modern mores. The appropriation (in some cases a
reappropriation), reworking and re-presentation of journalistic
stereotypes are in fact strategies found in much New Woman
fiction. By exploring such stereotypes and putting them to work in
new contexts, the New Woman writers engaged with current
discourses on woman and intervened directly in contemporary
debates on the Woman Question.
In Gallia many of the characters have difficulty in seeing
beyond current stereotypes. Indeed, the novel suggests that
individual identity has been completely subsumed by accepted
gender roles. The debilitating effects of this process have been
compounded by the current ‘boom of women’, in which every
new idea, every new version of femininity is rapidly converted
into a stereotype, and hence contained and defused. Thus, Gallia
declines to write about her eugenicist ideas because:

One would only be grouped with all the other women

who are said to be leading the ‘Sexual Revolt,’ and

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that would do the ideas harm, for no one would take

them seriously… What [women] say makes so much
noise that nobody hears properly what it is.
(G:195)

This latter problem is, of course, a central one for the novel itself,
as indeed it is for the New Woman writing in general. It is the
problem of devising ways of ensuring that women’s voices are
heard. Gallia resolves it by juxtaposing a multiplicity of voices
on current issues and especially on the Woman and Marriage
questions. This polyphonic effect is both amplified and
problematised by the shifting narratorial tone, particularly in the
representation of Gallia. Never quite sure whether they are
meant to sympathise with, or condemn, the central character, the
disorientated readers consequently listen with increased
attentiveness both to the heroine and to the range of female
voices which surround her. The novel’s irony and its brittleness of
tone have a further destabilising effect. Just as Braddon wittily
subverts the domestic novel in the 1860s, Dowie (among others)
subverts the 1890s novel of modern life.
Dowie is at her most brittly urbane and ironic (and also most
sensational) in her treatment of the double standard of sexual
conduct, which had become the subject of renewed controversy
in the wake of the campaign for the repeal of the Contagious
Diseases Acts, and other social- and sexual-purity campaigns.
Gallia scrutinises the double standard from a variety of
perspectives, beginning with an early scene in which its heroine,
reading a newspaper article about the state regulation of vice,
articulates her perception of the ways in which the prostitute, or
the demi-mondaine who becomes the mistress of the middle-class
man, ‘assures my class a good deal of its immunity’ (G:54), and
underwrites (so to speak) the proper feminine.
This perception is both reinforced and rendered more complex
by the novel’s subsequent focusing on the ethical and sexual
politics of a number of triangular relationships, and its
exploration of the different predicaments of the middle-class
male, his mistress, and the respectable woman who is to become
his wife. Dowie uses a conventional narrative pattern, by means
of which the erring middle-class man is ‘rescued’ by romantic
love and marriage to a forgiving, pure woman. However, she
puts this narrative to satirical and critical purposes, first by

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travestying it in her main plot. Here, despite (even partly because

of) her knowledge of his earlier sexual adventure with an artist’s
model (Cara Lemuel), Gallia eugenically selects Mark Gurdon as
the husband who will enable her to fulfil the maternal (rather
than wifely) function which she comes to regard as woman’s
central role. The critical focus is also maintained in the sub-plot
depicting the triumph of romantic love, in which the angelically
pure Margaret Essex rescues the errant artist, Leighton, by
forgiving his previous sexual adventures (while striving to remain
ignorant of the details). This latter narrative foregrounds the
angelic woman’s complicity in sustaining the double standard
and in exploiting ‘fallen women’, the precariousness of whose
situation is exposed in the novel’s frank and detailed portrayal of
Cara Lemuel.
In its treatment of the double standard, Dowie’s novel not
only offers an improperly feminine representation of the
demimonde and the sexual sensations of ‘respectable’ middle-
class men and women, it also manifests a similarly improper
scepticism about the idea of the proper feminine. Gallia puts the
complexities of female emotions under the microscope, satirically
demystifies the sanctities of romantic love, marriage and
motherhood, and adopts a stance of unmasking the network of
sexual, economic and psychological exploitation upon which
modern marriage is constructed.
Other New Woman writers adopt a more apocalyptic tone in
addressing these latter aspects of the Marriage Question. Sarah
Grand’s novels offer a particularly fierce indictment of genteel
society’s complicity in the degradation of women through the
operations of the double standard. Her bestseller The Heavenly
Twins, and also The Beth Book, focus directly and minutely on
the plight of women trapped within degrading marriages. The
Beth Book depicts its heroine’s entrapment in, and ultimate
escape from, marriage to a coarse and brutal adulterer, whose
exploitation of women extends to his professional life as doctor
in charge of one of the Lock hospitals which operated the
Contagious Diseases Acts. The Heavenly Twins has two parallel
degrading-marriage plots. In the first, Evadne, a woman of
independent views and high principles, having learned on her
wedding day of her husband’s former sexual debauchery, refuses
to live with him. She later succumbs to familial pressure and
joins him in a marriage of form only, which is used as the vehicle

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for an exploration and exposure of the sexual politics of the

marriage relation. In the parallel plot, Edith, the embodiment of
the totally innocent pure woman, fails to heed Evadne’s warnings
about the past life of her fiancé Sir Moseley Mentieth, and pays
the price in bearing him a sickly, syphilitic child and herself
succumbing to a syphilis-induced brain fever.
Whether wittily urbane, or apocalyptically admonitory, the
New Woman writers’ explorations of marriage and their
exposure of the double standard not only brought the difference
of view to bear on modern marriage and the gender roles it both
required and constructed, but also offered an alternative view on
gender. They viewed gender difference differently, and their
procedures represented a challenge to some of the dominant
ideologies.

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Writing difference differently

Like the sensation novelists, the New Woman writers were

accused of knowing and, more importantly, articulating ‘much
that ladies are not accustomed to know’ (James 1865:593),
especially about sex and the pathology of sexual disease. Arthur
Waugh (1894) was not alone in holding ‘women-writers
…chiefly to blame’ for ‘the latest development of literary
frankness’, which ‘in fiction…infects its heroines with acquired
diseases of names unmentionable’ (217–18). In their overt and
explicit treatment of the double standard and the pathology of
sexual disease, the New Woman writers were involved in a
reworking of those discourses on prostitution and female
sexuality within which the sensation novelists wrote.
The sensation novel, as I suggested earlier, was produced
within a polarised discourse in which female sexuality was
represented as either non-existent or all-pervading. The family
was figured as the protector of a feminine purity which was itself
(contradictorily) threatened by an invading female sexuality—
that of the prostitute or fallen woman, who was seen as the
bearer of corruption and disease. In contrast, the New Woman
writers figured men as both the physical and moral corrupters of
the family. The sexually threatening woman, the femme fatale
successor of the murderous women of sensation fiction, remained
a potent cultural image in the works of fin de siècle male writers
and artists. By the 1890s, however, the deadly syphilitic male
‘had become an arch-villain of feminist protest fiction, a carrier
of contamination and madness, and a threat to the spiritual
evolution of the human race’ (Showalter 1986a:88).
In her representations of the diseased male, Sarah Grand, like
many of her female contemporaries, appropriated and reversed
the terms of male scientific discourse. Throughout the nineteenth

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century an evolutionary theory of sexual difference was used to

account for and perpetuate women’s subordination within
existing social relations. Particularly in the latter part of the
century, scientific discourse figured women’s resistance to their
conventional social roles as contrary to the laws of nature, and
as threatening the health and continuance of the race. The New
Woman writers boldly transposed the terms of this discourse,
making their male characters serve as both the symptoms of a
diseased society and as the carriers of actual disease. ‘Proper’
(i.e., socially sanctioned) masculine behaviour, not improper
femininity, was thus represented as the main threat to the future
of the race. Several New Woman writers compounded the irony
of this reversal by using doctors—especially specialists in
women’s ailments—as bearers of disease and disorder, rather
than their curers: for example, Grand’s Dan Slane (in The Beth
Book) and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s Dunlop Strange (The Story of
a Modern Woman), who is responsible for the deaths of both the
lower-class woman he seduces and the middle-class woman he
wishes to marry.
More importantly, many of the New Woman writers
transposed the fundamental terms of evolutionary discourse, and
in the process transformed that discourse, by valorising its
hitherto negative terms. Both Spencerian and Darwinian theory
placed women lower in the evolutionary scale than men. For
Spencer, woman was undeveloped man; for Darwin, man was
developed woman. In either case woman was deemed to be closer
than man to the animals and savages. However, although
physically and intellectually less highly evolved than man,
woman (or more precisely domestic bourgeois woman) was held
to be spiritually and morally superior. Like other feminists Grand
mobilised this contradiction to form a counter-ideology in which
the male of the species was figured as less highly evolved than the
female, and hence closer to brute nature. Grand’s male villains
are portrayed as not only physically diseased, but also as merely
appetitive creatures.
Grand’s novels represent this male brutishness not by means of
a feminist rhetoric of argument, but by a rhetoric of feeling and
sensation. By focusing on her heroines’ feelings of repulsion,
Grand makes the reader also feel the brutishness of socially
sanctioned masculinity. The Beth Book, for example, documents
minutely the heroine’s pained endurance of her husband’s coarse

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appetites. His sexual attentions are represented as crude, merely

self-gratifying, and repulsive, and his excessive interest in food
and drink makes meal-times difficult for his wife to endure.
The effects of Grand’s focusing on the claustrophobia of the
domestic space are thus quite different from those of the
sensation novel (and indeed from some other feminist writers),
where the focus is on the woman’s imprisonment in (and
sometimes resistance to) the domestic ideology and the feminine
ideal. Instead Grand foregrounds ‘the effects of the man’s mind
upon the woman’s, shut up with him in the closest domestic
intimacy day and night, and all the time imbibing his poisoned
thoughts’ (BB:356). Indeed, most of Grand’s main female
characters are represented as the victims of an atavistic male
sexuality which (despite its primitivism) has, and is enforced by,
social and cultural authority. In The Heavenly Twins the Church
and the family (the cornerstones of the State), represented in the
person of Edith’s father, the Bishop, connive at placing an
ignorant young girl in the power of a lecherous and sexually
diseased man, while Evadne’s first husband, Colquhoun, employs
the resources of the culture (Zola’s novels) in an attempt to
‘educate’ her sexual feelings.
Perhaps because it simply reverses the dominant discourse, the
feminist counter-discourse retains its contradictions. Many of the
New Woman writers, for example, seem actively to (re)construct
a biologically essentialist ideology of sexual difference in which
woman, as the more highly evolved form, was held to be more
civilised and hence more closely associated with the cultural
domain than man. This view underwrote the feminists’ claims to
wrest cultural and political power from the patriarchal
institutions in which it was so inappropriately lodged. At the
same time, however, because of her maternal function, woman
was also closely associated with nature, indeed, was even
represented as its embodiment. Many feminists and New Woman
writers resolved this contradiction by both spiritualising and
moralising maternity and womanhood.
Thus, rather than blurring gender boundaries and gender
difference, as many of their critics claimed, some New Woman
writers re-emphasised them. At the same time, many of these
writers also challenged the customary association between
gender difference and biological sex, by focusing on the social
construction of gender and of gender roles. Traditional gender

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stereotypes are certainly viewed differently in Sarah Grand’s

novels. Both The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book devote a
great deal of space to the portrayal of wild, idiosyncratic children
who enjoy or endure unconventional childhoods. The Heavenly
Twins, Angelica and Diavolo, are portrayed in a lengthy period
of pre-gendered existence, in which Angelica, the more active,
vocal and physically daring, displays most forcefully those
characteristics conventionally described as masculine. Grand’s
narrative focuses on the way in which the twins are educated and
produced as differently gendered subjects, and on their resistance
to their socially assigned roles (including a sustained episode
devoted to Angelica’s cross-dressing, to which I shall return).
Almost to the end Angelica remains a spirited female devil, while
Diavolo resists full cultural masculinisation and remains a
sensitive, spiritual, quasi-angelic creature—a sort of asocial (and
virtually asexual), feminised and feminist New Man (like the
knightly figure of Beth’s fantasy at the end of The Beth Book).
The contradictions of the counter-discourse on woman are
particularly evident in its association of womanhood with
maternity (or, more precisely, maternal feeling) and with feeling
or affectivity. I want to explore this by looking, first, at the
development of a variant of the marriage plot, which was also
used in a number of sensation novels: the narrative of a woman
who, having married for reasons of expediency, subsequently
comes to love her husband. In other words this is a plot in which
both romantic love and the domestic narrative are recuperated.
In the 1890s this narrative takes on a new meaning, since it often
involves the education and transformation of an avowedly anti-
domestic, unwomanly heroine who is recuperated for True
Womanhood.

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Feeling, motherhood and True
Womanhood

The opposition of the ‘womanly woman’ and her rebellious or

improperly formed ‘other’ is the site upon which the Girl of the
Period, and her successors, the Wild Women, Revolting
Daughters and (later) the Shrieking Sisterhood are constructed.
‘Womanliness’, as Penny Boumelha (1982) has argued, is a
‘socially constructed concept’, ‘an ideal or aspiration’ rather than
an ‘inherent disposition’ (74). Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’
articles, which enjoyed a new currency in the 1880s and 1890s
(following their publication in volume form in 1883), were based
on the assumption that it was, regrettably (at least as far as
Linton was concerned), perfectly possible for any particular
woman to be unwomanly. Certainly, most of the feminist writers
of the 1880s and 1890s openly rejected the concept of
womanliness. Their fiction is full of restless, searching women
who have either deliberately rejected this socially constructed
womanliness, or who have been imperfectly socialised. The
rejection of womanliness is sometimes figured in a female
character’s rejection of her mother. Imperfect socialisation (i.e.
social feminisation) is also attributed to inadequate mothering,
sometimes by a woman disabled by her immersion in the self-
effacing, self-sacrificial role of the proper feminine ideal, and
sometimes by a woman disabled by her failure to conform to this
ideal.
In the late nineteenth century the rejected womanliness was
replaced by ‘Womanhood’ or ‘True Womanhood’, terms which
denoted ‘an immanent natural disposition, originating in a pre-
determining physiological sexual differentiation’ (Boumelha
1982:86). In some 1890s writers (Egerton, for example) True
Womanhood is distinguished from, and opposed to, the

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traditional womanly role. In others the heroine’s discovery of her

True Womanhood coincides with her acceptance of a womanly
role; the discredited or problematic concept of womanliness is
thus recuperated by a revitalised concept of womanhood. Sarah
Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, and A Yellow Aster by Iota
(K.M.Caffynn) both represent this latter process, albeit from
different points of view, since Grand’s sympathies were with the
feminists while Iota was an avowed anti-feminist.
In The Heavenly Twins the recuperative narrative is reworked
in an extravagant, even parodic form. Angelica, who transgresses
all the norms of proper femininity, proposes marriage to a
longstanding family friend who, she believes, will let her do as
she likes. She is a prototypical ‘Revolting Daughter’, who enters
a chaste marriage in order to escape the constant social pressure
to marry, and thus obtain the freedom from social constraints
which middle-class marriage afforded to women, without
accepting the social and domestic burdens and obligations which
usually accompanied it. Angelica’s unconventional marriage
provides the arena for her experiments in life, the chief of which
forms the strange ‘Interlude’ of ‘The Tenor and the Boy’. In this
episode Angelica, disguised as her brother, throws off the
shackles of her feminine identity and embarks on a series of
night-time visits to the Tenor who admires and idealises her (as
Angelica) from afar. For the female character (and perhaps for
the female reader) this period of cross-dressing serves to enact a
fantasy of liberation from the constraints of her gender. As
Angelica remarks when her deception is uncovered:

‘I had the ability to be something more than a young

lady, fiddling away her time on useless trifles, but I
was not allowed to apply it systematically, and ability
is like steam—a great power when properly applied, a
great danger otherwise… This is the explosion,’—
glancing round the disordered room, and then looking
down at her masculine attire.
(HT:450)

For the reader the hallucinatory writing of the Interlude conjures

up a dream-world where gender boundaries dissolve and reform
in disconcerting ways. The whole episode is charged with the
frisson of ambiguous sexuality: the Tenor is clearly attracted to

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the Boy, but it is unclear whether this is a homoerotic attraction,

or an attraction to Angelica’s essential femininity. The episode
also offers a strange (and, because of the disguise, displaced)
version of a narrative more common in the novels of male writers
in this period, in which a male character is destroyed by the
experiments and whims of a New Woman (Hardy’s Jude and
perhaps also Giles Winterbourne spring most readily to mind). In
this case the Tenor’s slide towards death coincides with his
discovery that the ‘Boy’ is a woman.
Angelica’s response to the Tenor’s death and, more
particularly, the maternal sympathy she feels for the choirboy
who mourns him, inaugurate the birth of her True Womanhood,
and also her movement towards acceptance of her womanly role.

All that was womanly in Angelica went out to the

poor little fellow. She would have liked to have
comforted him, but what could she say or do? Alas!
alas! a woman who cannot comfort a child, what sort
of woman is she?
(HT:519, my italics)

Angelica’s journey to full womanhood proceeds by a series of

epiphanies of feeling until, in a rewriting of George Eliot’s
conversion narrative, she ‘awoke to the consciousness…that she
herself was an insignificant trifle on the face of the earth’
(HT:542). It is, however, worth noting that the consciousness to
which Angelica awakes is not Gwendolen Harleth’s
consciousness of her human insignificance and indeterminate
future, but Dorothea Casaubon’s recognition of her proper
womanly role.
Angelica’s recuperation is completed when she acknowledges
her need of a loving husband. Like the Interlude of the Tenor and
the Boy, this phase of the narrative is also marked by a
melodramatic excess which verges on the parodic and comic.
Angelica’s return from the wilder shores of unwomanly
eccentricity is represented by means of wild dreams ending in a
tableau of reconciliation in which traditional gender roles appear
to be re-established, as she falls on her knees and, in effect, thanks
‘heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’ (As You Like It:III, iv).
Iota’s A Yellow Aster offers a somewhat different, although no
less melodramatic, version of this recuperative narrative. The

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heroine, Gwen Waring, one of two children of a pair of unworldly

scientists who live entirely for their work, grows up deficient in
proper womanly feeling and possessed of eccentric ideas. She is a
strange, hybrid creature, as unnatural as the yellow aster of the
title. Gwen’s unnaturalness is directly attributed to her mother’s
unwomanly abstraction, self-absorption and immersion in her
companionable intellectual rapport with her husband. To use the
terminology of Nancy Chodorow (1978)—who argues that
existing gender relations in western societies are reproduced
through the reproduction of female mothering—Gwen is a
character in whom mothering has failed to be reproduced.
Inadequately mothered, Gwen embarks on adult life with an
unwomanly sense of herself as an active agent, a knight-errant
with her own quest to pursue, rather than the object of some one
else’s quest. ‘I will attain like Paracelsus’ (YA:78), she avers.
However, her knightly quest comes to an early conclusion when,
‘as an experiment’ and ‘because I like new sensations’ (YA:29),
she marries Humphrey Strange. In this narrative one set of
textual signals telegraphs the presence of the febrile New
Woman, wandering between two worlds, while the practised
reader of romantic fiction also recognises the signs of a woman
waiting to discover her true identity through love.

Love is a mere name to me… I must be honest too,

and tell you that I shouldn’t know how to dispose of
a whole heart full of love…in the face of all this I
want to accept your offer. I don’t know why; I really
believe it is not I…who wants this, it is something
outside me that wants it for me. I never felt so
impersonal in all my life.
(YA:129)

As the novel goes on to suggest, that impersonal ‘something

outside me’ is the True Womanhood that is waiting to claim her.
This essential womanhood is figured in the portraits and sketches
which her husband’s friend Brydon makes of her; these
representations, from the outset, suggest aspects of Gwen’s
nature which are as yet unapparent to the ordinary eye. As in
Lady Audley’s Secret, the secret of Gwen’s essential feminine
identity is staged for the reader as a spectacle produced by the
privileged gaze of the male artist. Brydon’s portraits keep one

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step ahead of Gwen’s development until portrait and character

coalesce in a final tableau vivant in which Humphrey (newly
returned from an exile to which Gwen had banished him) awakes
from a feverish sleep to see Brydon’s last portrait apparently
come alive, as Gwen steps out from in front of it.
Before she discovers her True Womanhood and her womanly
role, the unredeemed Gwen sees marriage as legalised
prostitution. Her discovery that she is expecting Humphrey’s
child is used as the occasion of a feeling attack on ‘unnatural’
loveless marriage and conventional moral values which is typical
of New Woman writing.

Now I must sit under those deep, all-pervading eyes of

his and feel myself ten thousand times his chattel…
Talk of the shame of those women who have children
out of the pale of marriage, it’s nothing to the shame
of those who have children and don’t love. Those
others, they have the excuse of love—that’s natural,
that purifies their shame; this—our life—the portion
of quite half the well-to-do world—this is unnatural.
(YA:247)

The sanctification of motherhood which emerges in the above

passage to link prostitute, kept woman and wife in a community of
True Womanhood is the key to the novel and to the development of
its central female characters. In an interesting variant of the
maternal melodrama noted in the sensation novel, G wen’s mother
undergoes a crisis in which she discovers her maternal feeling in and
as a drama of suffering. Paradoxically, maternal feeling is
represented as at once natural (a disposition awaiting discovery),
and as acquired through the experience of suffering. Gwen’s
mother’s story hinges on the discovery of a lack which she first
learns to acknowledge and name, and then to rectify through
observing, and learning from, the maternal behaviour of other
(more conventionally socialised) women.
Gwen’s own rebirth into womanhood begins with a moment
of revelation in which she simultaneously affirms her link to her
mother and her own unborn child.

As her mother kissed and bit, and mumbled over her

hand, and half sang little quaint snatches of baby

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song…her own baby leapt in her womb’, and the

scales fell from her eyes, and her heart melted within
her, and the breast of her dying mother was as an
open book to her.
(YA:273–4)

This melodramatic passage provides a graphic account of the

reproduction of mothering as a process in which daughters are
perpetually reproduced as affective creatures, and as the
nurturers of the next generation, through the bond with the
mother. Gwen (like Angelica and a host of other female
characters in the fiction of this period) is recuperated for True
Womanhood through the birth of proper feminine feeling, which
is associated with the biological fact of maternity and the social
practice of mothering. True Womanhood is thus defined as
affectivity. It is the New Woman writing’s engagement with this
equation of feeling and the feminine that I want to explore next.

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Woman’s ‘affectability’ and the
literature of hysteria

The rhetoric of feminists, anti-feminists, misogynists and the

proponents of the womanly woman coincided in its identification
of woman with feeling. This equation of feeling and the feminine
should hardly be surprising to readers of the novel, since
throughout the nineteenth century (and, arguably, from its
inception), the novel was preoccupied with women and feeling.
Indeed it could be argued that the novel has always tended to
represent woman as feeling. The fiction of the 1890s, whether
written by men or by women, was both produced by and
engaged with a complex and contradictory discourse on woman’s
supposedly affective nature, a discourse which, by equating
woman with feeling, assigned her either to the domain of the
irrational, or to that of the supra-rational.
In the first case woman was represented as a pre-logical being,
existing outside of rationality in a state of nature; she was like a
child, and hence dependent and in need of nurturing and
guidance. This was precisely the view that had been rejected by
the earliest feminist campaigners.3 When sexual feeling was
included in this particular equation, woman became the
embodiment of a danger which had to be controlled. (Both of
these versions of feminine ‘affectability’ were central to the
strategies of containment of the domestic ideology.)
On the other hand, when associated with the supra-rational,
woman was represented as being above, rather than beyond,
rationality. She was associated with the order of nature, but was
held to transcend both nature and rationality by means of her
spirituality and intuitive powers. This latter view is clearly an
important component in the construction of both domestic woman
with her feminine influence, and the feminists’ regenerative

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woman with her mission to rescue a degenerate civilisation. The

equation of woman with supra-rational feeling also usually
involved associating her with an emotionality which transcended
sexuality. Woman as feeling was thus either humanity in a state of
nature, or nature in its most highly evolved form. This
contradiction is evident in many late nineteenth-century
popularisations of post-Darwinian science. George Romanes
(1887), for example, attributed the ‘Mental differences between
men and women’ to a female emotionalism which is at once
disabling and the source of women’s superior spirituality.
‘[W]oman as contrasted with men’, he argues, is disabled by her
emotions, which ‘are almost always less under control of the
will—more apt to break away, as it were, from restraint of reason,
and to overwhelm the mental chariot in disaster’ (657–8), but this
same emotionality—in its guise of ‘intuitive insight’ (655)—is also
the source of woman’s moral and spiritual superiority.
This contradictory view of feminine affectivity is central to the
writing of George Egerton, best known for her two collections of
short stories, Keynotes and Discords. These stories, together with
her curiously fragmentary (and now little-known) novel, The
Wheel of God, represent feeling as the key to ‘the enigma of
woman’, what Egerton called that ‘terra incognita’ of the female
self (quoted in Gawsworth 1932:58), which was her central
concern. Virtually all of her fictions stage the drama of the
heroine’s grappling with the riddle of her femininity and the
mystery of ‘what it is we [women] need to complete us’ (D:198).
In this drama, as in the psychoanalytic discourse which
developed in the late nineteenth century (and in its Lacanian
revisions), feminine affectivity, indeed femininity itself, is defined
as a lack.

Perhaps we seek a key to the enigma of our own

natures, we try man after man to see if he holds
it…[but] perhaps we are merely the playthings of
circumstances.

Femininity is also contradictory and duplicitous. It is feared,

repressed and concealed.

[We are] contradictions, leading a dual life…our

varying moods bound up with the physiological

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gamut of our being. We have been taught to shrink

from the honest expression of our wants and feelings
as violations of modesty, or at least of good taste. We
are always battling with some bottom layer of real
womanhood that we may not reveal; the primary
impulses of our original destiny keep shooting out
mimosa-like threads of natural feeling through the
outside husk of our artificial selves, producing
complex creatures.
(Both quotations D:198)

Egerton’s stories undertake an investigation of that ‘bottom layer

of real womanhood’, posited on the existence of ‘the primary
impulses of our original destiny’ which precede socialisation.
This process involves the excavation or unmasking of ‘the untrue
feminine of man’s making’, and the discovery of the ‘strong, the
natural, the true womanly [that] is of God’s making’ (K:42).
Egerton’s representation of the feminine tends to align itself on
the nature side of the nature/culture debate. Her ‘true womanly’
is ‘woman’s witchcraft’, ‘the eternal wildness, the untamed
primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best
woman…[which] may be concealed but is never eradicated by
culture’ (K:22). Anticipating the version of the feminine
celebrated by some late twentieth-century feminists (particularly
by French theorists of the feminine, such as Hélène Cixous and
Luce Irigaray), Egerton tends to represent woman as a pre-
cultural primitive, bound to the mysteries and cycles of nature.
Woman is the sorceress who contains within herself the repressed
past of a culture, ‘who in the end is able to dream Nature’, and
who ‘incarnates the reinscription of the traces of paganism that
triumphant Christianity repressed’ (Cixous and Clément 1987:5).
Thus, in a passage which also anticipates D.H.Lawrence’s The
Rainbow,4 The Wheel of God stages its heroine, Mary, enacting
a rite of spring in which she is said to feel the call of the spring
as ‘the primitive in her, untouched by its passage through all the
centuries…closer to the forces of nature than man—genetic
woman’ (WG:95).
The most sensational (in several senses) aspect of Egerton’s
primitivism, as far as her first readers were concerned, was her
insistence on the primacy and autonomy of women’s sexual
feeling, and her detailed representation of an eroticised feminine

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sensibility, Egerton’s writings directly challenged the repressive

hypothesis of the dominant discourse on female sexuality,
focusing instead on the deforming or explosive consequences of a
social repression which contradicts woman’s ‘nature’ (the idea of
‘woman’s nature’ does not seem to have been problematic for
Egerton). As the first-person narrator of the framed narrative
‘Now Spring Has Come’ remarks, women ‘repress and…repress,
and then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our
sexual and emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of
some sort’ (K:57).
Egerton’s challenging of the dominant discourse (as the last
quotation suggests) comes from within the terms of that very
discourse. Her version of woman and of female sexuality is itself
produced by a polarised (and contradictory) discourse in which
woman is either asexual, or omni-sexual. In several stories this
polarisation is foregrounded by Egerton’s use of contrasting
paired characters: the self-controlled (indeed self-repressed),
respectable working woman and the fallen woman, ‘Mrs Grey’,
who has given all for love in ‘Gone Under’, or the struggling,
self-contained woman writer and her misused, drunken landlady
(whose situation as an unmarried mother has resulted in an
unsuitable marriage) in ‘Wedlock’.
Although Egerton’s stories also offer a range of shrewd,
reflective and self-reliant women (see, especially, the heroine of
‘A Psychological Moment’), most of her women are represented
as hypersensitive creatures possessed of unnameable desires and
inexpressible yearnings. They are so many stringed instruments
whose strings, tautened to breaking point, await the touch of the
right circumstances, or man. (Mary’s ritual dance of spring, for
example, is made even more electric by her longing for a male
partner.) All too often instrument and player are kept apart (by
the adverse circumstances of contemporary woman’s lot) and,
‘like a harp that has lain away…the strings are frayed, and no
one ever call[s] out [the woman’s] music’ (D:170).5 Alternatively,
many of Egerton’s stories contrive to suggest that the man has
not yet been born who is sufficiently attuned to the delicate
instrument of female sensibility and sexuality.
If an autonomous sexuality is one key to the enigma of
woman, maternal feeling (as opposed to the mere fact of physical
reproduction) is the other.

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[T]he only divine fibre in woman is her maternal

instinct …Every woman ought to have a child, if only
as a moral educator…a woman who mothers a
bastard, and endeavours bravely to rear it decently, is
more to be commended than the society wife who
contrives to shirk her motherhood. She is at heart
loyal to the finest fibre of her being, the deep
underlying instinct, the ‘mutter-drang,’ that lifts her
above and beyond all animalism, and fosters the
sublimest qualities of unselfishness and devotion.
(D:100–1)

Here, as in the dominant discourse, woman is identified with

nature: if she suppresses the maternal instinct ‘it turns to a
fibroid sapping all that is healthful and good in her nature’
(D:100). However, since Egerton (in common with many late
nineteenth-century feminists) also spiritualises maternity,
woman, in fulfilling her natural function, is held to transcend
merely brute nature.
By fusing together an autonomous female sexuality and a
sublime maternity Egerton’s stories appear to wrest woman from
the familiar whore/madonna dichotomy of the dominant
discourse. However, paradoxically, her identification of woman
with nature, and even her apparently disruptive insistence on the
primacy of female sexual feeling, combine to reinscribe woman
in an essenb’alist discourse in which women’s lot is determined
by physiology, and woman is a creature who is by nature
affective and ‘affectible’. In practice, however, the effect of her
writing is rather more complex: Egerton does not simply
reproduce this essentialist discourse, she also appropriates and
interrogates it. Although she may ultimately remain within it, she
puts it to new uses by attempting to reclaim autonomous feeling
as a source of power, and by dwelling on the destructive effects
of feminine self-sacrifice.
In Egerton’s fictions, like those of many of the New Woman
writers, the conventional association of feeling and the feminine
is not merely a topic of the narrative, it is also part of the
narrative texture. Like a number of New Woman writers Egerton
developed an aesthetic practice in which, at its most highly
charged moments, writing became equated with feeling. In fact,
to some of its earliest readers and critics the New Woman writing

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simply was feeling; it was an hysterical literature, written (and

read) on the nerves.

George Egerton[’s]…perceptions are of the nerves…

she personifies our modern nervousness, and her best
characters are quivering bundles of nerve… [W]riters
of this type…are always purely subjective… Like all
introspective work… Egerton appeals to women far
more than to men, for her instinct enables her to
perceive the fundamental traits of woman’s nature.
(Stutfield 1897:109–10)

In other words, Egerton’s writings were read as the discourse of

the hysteric. Indeed, like Cixous and Irigaray (and with some of
the same problems), Egerton sought to appropriate the culturally
ascribed role of hysteric and to use it actively, rather than merely
to bear it as the mark of the wounded victim. Egerton’s fictions
reverse the negative associations of feeling and the feminine, and
instead analyse and celebrate the vitality and complexity of a
specifically feminine feeling.
An excellent example of this can be found in ‘A Cross Line’, a
story which is structured around the changing currents of the
restless desires of its central character, who is, as in virtually all
of Egerton’s stories, an unnamed woman. In this case (again, not
untypically) the central character bears all the signs of the New
Woman and her contradictions. She is both self-sufficient and ‘a
creature of moments’ (K:24), unwomanly and hyperfeminine.
Her unwomanliness is signalled by her brown hands, her skill in
the ‘masculine’ pursuit of fishing, and the fact that she roams the
countryside freely, has a frank mode of address (friendship with
her is ‘like chumming with a chap’, says her husband), is sexually
tolerant, and tends to take the sexual initiative. Most
unwomanly of all is her apparent lack of maternal feeling, which
is signalled by her disgust at small things (in sharp contrast to her
husband’s ‘maternal’ delight in the ducklings on their
smallholding). On the other hand, hyperfemininity is signalled by
her restless nerviness and emotionality: ‘One speculation chases
another in her quick brain… There is a look of expectation in her
quivering nervous little face’ (K:13). Her highly charged
eroticism is another sign of the hyperfeminine; she is represented
as both erotic object (the object of the desiring gaze of the

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stranger whom she meets on one of her rambles), and as

powerfully desiring subject.
The plot of this story (insofar as any of Egerton’s stories can
be said to have a plot) appears to be conservative and
essentialist: a woman fantasises about and contemplates escape
from the constraints and tedium of domestic life, but becomes
resigned to her lot when she discovers (or belatedly
acknowledges) that she is expecting her husband’s child, and
accepts the maternal role. Woman is once more defined by her
biological reproductivity. However, the conservative narrative
trajectory of this story is apparently subverted by aspects of its
narration. This is particularly true of the much-discussed ‘clouds’
passage. 6 This interior monologue, semi-detached from the
narrative, forms an extended piece of lyrical writing which writes
the unconscious, defines the feminine as and through feeling, and
explores and celebrates the energy and complexity of a particular
woman’s feeling and fantasies. It is an extraordinary passage,
and worth quoting at length:

Summer is waning and the harvest is ripe for

ingathering, and the voice of the reaping machines is
loud in the land… Overhead a flotilla of clouds is
steering from the south in a north-easterly direction.
Her eyes follow them. Old time galleons, she thinks,
with their wealth of snowy sail spread, riding breast
to breast up a wide blue fjord after victory…
Somehow she thinks of Cleopatra sailing down to
meet Antony, and a great longing fills her soul to sail
off somewhere too—away from the daily need of
dinner-getting and the recurring Monday with its
washing; life with its tame duties and virtuous
monotony. She fancies herself in Arabia on the back of
a swift steed. Flashing eyes set in dark faces surround
her, and she can see the clouds of sand swirl, and feel
the swing under her of his rushing stride. Her
thoughts shape themselves into a wild song…to the
untamed spirit that dwells in her.
(K:18, my italics)

The energy and extravagance of this opening passage of the

‘clouds’ section enact (rather than merely describe) a fantasy of

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escape from mundane domestic duties. It is an example of that

feminine economy of excess, that overflow of eroticism which
(for Cixous) characterises l’écriture féminine. The reader is
caught up in the character’s asocial fantasy of female power, and
is co-opted to her point of view as she moves from revelling in
sensuous and sensual feeling to delighting in her power over the
audiences she invents for the scenes of her performance.

Then she fancies she is on the stage of an ancient

theatre out in the open air, with hundreds of faces
turned towards her… Her arms are clasped by
jewelled snakes, and one with quivering diamond
fangs coils round her hips. Her hair floats
loosely…and the delicate breath of vines and the salt
freshness of an incoming sea seem to fill her nostrils.
She bounds forward and dances, bends her lissom
waist, and gives to the soul of each man what he
craves, be it good or evil. And she can feel now, lying
here in the shade of Irish hills…the grand intoxicating
power of swaying all these human souls to wonder
and applause. She can see herself with parted lips and
panting, rounded breasts…sway voluptuously to the
wild music that rises…She can feel the answering
shiver of feeling that quivers up to her from the dense
audience…And the men rise to a man and answer her,
and cheer, cheer till the echoes shout from the
surrounding hills.
(K:19–20, my italics)

Elaine Showalter (1991) has read this passage in terms of the fin
de siècle preoccupation with the veiled woman who ‘stood as a
figure of sexual secrecy and inaccessibility for Victorian men’,
and also signified ‘the quest for the mystery of origins, the truths
of birth and death’ (145). Egerton’s heroine (in Showalter’s
reading) ‘autoerotically imagines herself’ (156) in the role of that
most famous of fin de siècle veiled women, Salome. The fantasy
version of herself that Egerton’s nameless heroine projects is, like
Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a Medusan figure whose ‘hair floats
loosely’, and whose ‘arms are clasped by jewelled snakes’. Freud
(as Showalter points out) ‘interpreted the myth of the Medusa’s
head as an allegory of the veiled woman, whose unshielded gaze

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turns men to stone’ (145). However, unlike this castrating

Medusa, Egerton’s Salome activates her male audience, makes
them share in her feeling and acknowledge the power of her
performance with cheers. This particular act of female unveiling
‘substitutes power for castration’ (Showalter 1991:156).
Egerton’s Salome is an image of female power, the laughing
Medusa envisaged by Hélène Cixous (1981): ‘she’s not deadly.
She’s beautiful and she’s laughing’ (255).
In this passage, Egerton stages her heroine in the process of
staging herself as a combination of the sorceress and that ‘Newly
Born Woman’ who will, in Cixous’s phrase, live beyond the
‘character’ assigned to her by the patriarchy. 7 For a brief
moment, the language of the ‘clouds’ section celebrates the magic
and power of the woman as sorceress or hysteric, whilst avoiding
the burdens of guilt which are conventionally attached to these
roles. Like Cixous’s and Clément’s (1987) Newly Born Woman,
Egerton’s heroine’s fantasy version of herself is ‘innocent, mad,
full of badly remembered memories…she is the seductress, the
heiress of all generic Eves’ (6).
The dreamlike nature of the ‘clouds’ section, and its lack of
causal connection with the rest of the story, are used to figure the
feminine as a ‘wild zone’,8 ‘the imaginary zone‘ which every
culture has ‘for what it excludes’ (Cixous and Clément 1987:6).
However, I think it would be a mistake to see this piece of
writing as simply offering what some late twentieth-century
feminists might see as a liberating carnival of the hysteric’s
fantasy.9 The clouds passage also disrupts its own disruption. It
distances the reader from the character’s fantasy, as it slides into
a more discursive analysis of ‘the problems of [woman’s]
complex nature’ (a complexity which the passage also
articulates). It examines women’s habitual denial of their own
power and desire, and their collusion with man’s ‘chivalrous,
conservative devotion to the female idea he has created’.

And her thoughts go to other women she has known.

…joyless machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling
maids grown old in the endeavour to get settled,
patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent
husbands until they wear out… She busies herself with
questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for excitement,
for change… And she laughs… [B]ecause of the

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denseness of man, his chivalrous, conservative

devotion to the female idea he has created blinds him,
perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex
nature… Deep in through ages of convention [a]
primeval trait burns, an untameable quantity… [I]t is
there sure enough, and each woman is conscious of it
in her truth-telling hours of quiet self-scrutiny—and
each woman in God’s wide world will deny it, and
each woman will help another to conceal it—for the
woman who tells the truth and is not a liar about
these things is untrue to her sex and abhorrent to
man, for he has fashioned a model on imaginary lines,
and he has said, ‘so I would have you,’ and every
woman is an unconscious liar, for so man loves her.
(K:21–3)

The clouds section offers an interesting variant of that staging of

the feminine that I identified in the sensation novel. Whereas in
the sensation novel this is done by means of various scenes or
melodramatic tableaux, in the clouds passage a woman is staged
in the process of staging her own femininity. In each case acting
is used in a different way and signifies differently. As I suggested
earlier, the sensationalists’ staging of the feminine reproduces or
engages with the pervasive fear that femininity is itself a form of
acting—a masquerade. At first glance it might appear that the
woman’s imaginary performance in the clouds passage is being
used to signify the truth (or essential femininity) that underlies
the mask of social femininity. However, ultimately the elliptical
and evasive nature of Egerton’s narrative (and its refusal to
analyse or disclose motivation) has the effect of disrupting the
idea of a stable feminine identity. Instead the story presents us
with a multiplicity of selves, or a self in process.
More generally, Egerton’s tendency to reproduce an
essentialist discourse of ‘True Womanhood’ is repeatedly
undercut, and rendered more complex by her preference for
episodic forms and fragmented narrative. The effect of the varied
viewpoints afforded by her choice of the short-story form, and by
her use of shifting perspectives within those stories, is to
emphasise multiplicity and to focus on differences (between
women) as well as difference (as a universal, essentialist gender

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category). The same might be said of her fragmentation of

narrative in her episodic novel The Wheel of God.
Moreover, although Egerton’s fiction foregrounds feminine
affectivity, it also problematises and interrogates the dominant
discourse on woman’s ‘affective nature’. By persistently focusing
on the problems which affectivity poses for particular women,
Egerton’s stories open up a space for resistance to it. In Egerton’s
work sexual and maternal feeling are both woman’s glory and
her curse. Such feelings trap women in ‘Wedlock’ (the title of a
story in Discords, my italics), bind them to violent, drunken,
lecherous, or simply boring and unresponsive men, make them
emotionally vulnerable and subject to drink, despair and
derangement. At a time when women were bombarded from all
sides with cultural messages (often contradictory) seeking to
persuade them of the glory of their womanly feeling, it was
perhaps salutory to be offered a series of representations of the
depressing consequences of such feeling, and to be asked to
consider the possibility that the ‘crowning disability of my sex’ is
‘affection’, and that ‘affectability’ is one of ‘the tragedies of her
sex’ (WG:95).
Several other New Woman writers simultaneously celebrate
the feminine and/as feeling, and problematise the conventional
association of woman with feeling. Grand’s The Heavenly Twins
both recuperates the ‘deviant’ Angelica for proper womanly
feeling and, at the same time, depicts the destruction of another
woman (Edith) by that same socially sanctioned womanliness.
However, perhaps the most interesting example of the way in
which the novel interrogates the conventional view of women is
its representation of Evadne. In this case, as in Egerton’s
writings, a woman’s feelings (or woman’s feeling) are not simply
a topic of the narrative, they are also a narrative medium, since
Evadne is persistently represented through sensation and feeling.
The nature and status of Evadne’s feelings become particularly
important in the novel’s final section, in which the impersonal
third-person narrator is replaced by the first-person narrative of
Galbraith, Evadne’s doctor and subsequently her husband. In this
final book, the feeling female subject becomes the object of the
male, medical gaze. The third-person narration, with its
privileged access to the character’s subjectivity, invites the
reader’s sympathetic identification with, and intuitive
understanding of, Evadne’s feelings as suffering. The first-person

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narrative of Galbraith, on the other hand, scrutinises those

feelings as hysterical symptoms. The third-person narrative offers
the reader a subjective understanding of the character’s feelings
as the history of her interiority; Galbraith views the character
from the outside and through the lens of the nascent science of
psychology, which claims a privileged knowledge of women’s
interiority.

The sign she made was deceptive, and probably only a

man of my profession, accustomed to observe, and
often obliged to judge more by indications of
emotions than by words, would have recognised its
true significance.
(HT:573)

One of the effects of this shift of narrative perspective is to

problematise the female hysteric. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
(1985) has pointed out, nineteenth-century medical discourse
represented the hysteric as ‘the embodiment of a perverse or
hyperfemininity’ (198). To Grand’s medical men, hysteria is
perverse femininity, or feminine perversity. They suspect their
patients of ‘extraordinary systems of fraud and deceit’ (HT: 573),
equate ‘these female illnesses’ with ‘depravity’, and seek to ‘cure’
them by moral management: ‘steady moral influence will do all
that is necessary. The great thing is to awaken the conscience’
(HT:375).10 Grand’s third-person narrative, however, tells the
hysteric’s story differently, and from the woman’s point of view.
Seen from this perspective, hysteria may appear to be less a
disease or psychopathology than a social role produced by the
nineteenth-century family, a form of withdrawal or resistance by
means of which ‘women, to escape the misfortune of their
economic and familial exploitation, chose to suffer before an
audience of men’ (Cixous and Clément 1987:10).
The discourse of woman’s affectivity which is developed in the
third-person narrative of The Heavenly Twins represents
Evadne’s ‘hysteria’ as both withdrawal and resistance. It is a
form of hyperfemininity, which even as it disables the character
also marks her out as a moral heroine who is superior to the men
who seek to diagnose and treat her. In the feminised moral
economy of Grand’s novel, Evadne’s nervous symptoms are the
embodiment and barometer of her superior feminine sensitivity

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to the evils of a degenerate world. Evadne is an example of what

Juliet Mitchell (following Cixous) describes as the hysteric as
creative artist, one who ‘suffer[s] from reminiscences’ and who
has heard, or seen, something that has made her ill (Mitchell
1984:298).
The narrative form of The Heavenly Twins thus restages the
contest, which was being waged more widely in the New Woman
fiction and in the culture at large, about how and by whom
‘woman’ and women’s feelings might be defined. In the next
section I shall explore the figure of the creative woman as one of
the sites upon which this contest was waged.

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 19
Writing women: writing woman

[L]ate-Victorian readers had become

accustomed to novels by women which
were as much about the problems of being
a woman writer as about the problems of
women in society.
(Showalter 1985:viii)

I realised that in literature, everything had

been better done by man than woman
could hope to emulate. There was only one
small plot left for her to tell; the terra
incognita of herself, as she knew herself to
be, not as man liked to imagine her—in a
word to give herself away, as man had
given himself in his writing.
(Egerton, quoted in Gawsworth 1932:58)

If women’s sensation novels had proclaimed themselves women’s

texts by focusing on women’s sensations, adopting a woman-to-
woman address and working within what was perceived to be a
feminine genre, many New Woman novels situated themselves as
women’s texts by making writing women and women’s writing
their subjects. By foregrounding the figure of the woman writer,
such novels foreground the problems of their own production. In
addition, the woman writer, or more generally the woman artist
(Caird’s Hadria, for example, is a musician), is repeatedly used as
a way of figuring the lack of fit between women’s desire, the
socially prescribed norms of the woman’s lot, and the actuality of

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women’s lives. In some New Woman fiction the writing or

creative woman was also a vehicle for celebrating female desire.
Writing the woman writer’s sensations and consciousness became
a form of writing the woman as a feeling, experiencing subject,
rather than as merely the victim of her affectivity, or as the object
of a specular gaze (as is the case in the work of most male
authors of the 1890s). Several of the New Woman writers also
used the figure of the woman writer or artist as a means of
exploring and interrogating the medical discourse on hysteria.
Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book offers one of the most sustained
representations of the sensibility of the woman artist. The
childhood and adolescence of Grand’s heroine, Beth, comprise a
kind of portrait of an artist as a young woman. Much of the
earlier part of the novel focuses on the minute details of the
myriad sense impressions that constitute the history of Beth’s
coming to self-consciousness, as she emerges from being ‘as
unconscious as a white grub without legs’ (BB:10) into an
awareness of self and of her relationship to, and separateness
from, the world she inhabits. Many of the passages which
involve this process function as both representations of the
character’s consciousness, and celebrations of the writer’s self-
consciousness. The language of these passages is frequently in
excess of the demands of the mere portrayal of character; writing
itself is foregrounded.
The young Beth is depicted as a ‘fine instrument, sensitive to
a touch’ (BB:43), whose senses are unusually acute, and whose
memory ‘from the first…helped itself by the involuntary
association of incongruous ideas’ (BB:17). She is a dreamer and
a visionary, possessed of a ‘further faculty’, beyond mere
intellect, which enables her to look upon life ‘as if from a height,
viewing it both in detail and as a whole’ (BB:28). The subjectivity
which Grand constructs for her character is partly that of the
Wordsworthian infant, trailing clouds of glory, and partly a late
nineteenth-century version of the Kristevan semiotic—that
domain of instinctual, psychosexual drives which, according to
Kristeva, precedes language and is repressed as the child enters
the realm of the symbolic and of social communication.11
Grand’s Wordsworthian infant is a ‘natural’ poet seeking to
name the sights and sounds of the world around her and to
articulate a pre-intellectual sense of the world. This vision of the

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poet is expressed in Beth’s description of the genesis of her ‘song

of the sea in the shell’:

It just came to me…I used to listen to the sea in the

shell in the sitting-room, and I tried and tried to find
a name for the sound, and all at once song came into
my head—The song of the sea in the shell. Then I was
lying out here on the grass when it was long…and you
came out and said, There’s a stiff breeze blowing,’
And then it blew hard and then stopped, and then it
came again; and every time it came the grass went—
swish-h-h! The swish of the grass in the breeze…Then
the leaves—it was a long time before anything came
that I could sing about them. I used to try and think it,
but you can’t sing a thing you think. It’s when a thing
comes, you sing it.
(BB:68)

Beth is also celebrated as a kind of infant witch, connected by a

pre-conscious, pre-linguistic race-memory to a mysterious
ancestry and a world of dream and the irrational, from which she
becomes separated only by her entry into phallocentric language
and the workaday world of her historic self.

Beth had the sensation of having been nearer to

something in her infancy than ever she was again—
nearer to knowing what it is the trees whisper—what
the murmur means…It may have been hereditary
memory, a knowledge of things transmitted to her by
her ancestors…the recollection of a condition anterior
to this, a condition of which no tongue can tell, which
is not to be put into words.
(BB:27–8)

Kristeva’s version of the semiotic, whatever reservations one

might have about its essentialism, does provide a useful lens
through which to view Grand’s representation of Beth. Feminist
exponents of Kristeva have explicitly linked the semiotic to the
feminine because of its association with the mother’s body before
the child’s entry into the ‘male’ symbolic order. As Alice Jardine
writes (1981), ‘This space before the sign, the semiotic, has been

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and continues to be coded in our culture as feminine: the space of

privileged contact with the mother’s female body’ (228). Beth’s
‘further faculty’, the source of both her independence and her
creativity, is similarly associated with her connection with the
body of the mother (notwithstanding the fact that she has a
distant and difficult relationship with her actual mother) through
her ‘recollection’ of the birth process. This ‘recollection’ also
prefigures her later rebirth into feminist activism.

One other strange vision she had which she never

forgot. With her intellect she believed it to have been
a dream, but her further faculty always insisted that it
was a recollection. She was with a large company in
an indescribable, hollow space, bare of all
furnishments because none were required; and into
this space there came a great commotion, bright light
and smoke, without heat or sense of suffocation. Then
she was alone, making for an aperture; struggling and
striving with pain of spirit to gain it; and when she
had found it, she shot through, and awoke in the
world. She awoke with a terrible sense of desolation
upon her, and with the consciousness of having
traversed infinite space at infinite speed.
(BB:28)

Beth is, in part, a portrait of the artist as young romantic, set

apart by a super-sensitivity which gives access to a vision which
can never be fully articulated in language. Gender, however, adds
another problematic dimension to the romantic artist’s
predicament. Historically, women writers have had even greater
difficulty than their male counterparts in articulating their inner
visions, because they have not had equal access to language.
Beth’s story, like that of most nineteenth-century women, is
shaped by her inadequate education (her own education is
sacrificed for that of her brother), and also by prevailing notions
of the proper feminine. In order to become a writer Beth must
learn, from life as well as from books, much that women are not
accustomed to know: ‘you can’t write if you don’t know how
everyone talks’ (BB:190). The Beth Book repeatedly emphasises
the fact that the attributes which make Beth a writer are precisely
those that unmake her as the conventionally socialised woman,

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and thus consign her to the improper feminine of the unwomanly

woman.
As I suggested in the first part of this book, contemporary
discourses of art and of woman rendered the phrase ‘woman
artist’ a contradiction in terms. A number of the women writers
of this period not only engaged with this discursive problem, but
also focused on the practical problems that follow from it, and
from the nature of women’s social situation. Mona Caird (1897),
for example, invited ‘anyone [who] wishes to know why many
women have not written Shakespeare’s plays (as it is generally
quaintly expressed)’, to consider the inhibiting effects of ‘the
weary detail of domestic duties, of the unending petty
responsibilities, the constant call “to give small decisions and
settle minute emergencies”’ (5–6). In The Daughters of Danaus
Caird wrote feelingly, as Mary Cholmondeley was later to do in
Red Pottage, of the erosion of female creativity by the constant
demands of domestic and familial duties.
Cholmondeley’s heroine, Hester Gresley, suffers physical and
nervous breakdown as a consequence of being forced to rise at
daybreak in order to secure a period for uninterrupted writing. A
similar (this time non-fictional) story is told by Alys Pearsall
Smith in her contribution to the ‘Revolt of the Daughters’
controversy. In ‘A reply from the daughters II’ she rehearses the
history of a girl with an insatiable desire for study whose family
‘strongly objected to her taking time from the family life for this
purpose’. The girl developed the habit of rising several hours
before anyone else in order to pursue her studies, and
consequently needed to sleep in the afternoon.

Not knowing the cause, no one objected to this. It was

considered in the family that she was delicate, and
must on no account be disturbed in this daily nap.
Whereas had she wished to…study [in this nap period]
she would have been indignantly reproved for her
selfishness. For her surface need of a nap she found
sympathy and consideration, for her vital need of
study she found only reproof.
(Smith 1894:445)

This practice of secret study was one of the ‘symptoms’

documented by Freud and Breuer in their Studies in Hysteria

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(1895). Hysterical girls, they noted, were likely to be ‘lively,

gifted, and full of intellectual interests’. Among the ‘hysterical’
women they treated were ‘girls who get out of bed at night so as
secretly to carry on some study that their parents have forbidden
for fear of overworking’ (quoted in Showalter 1991:40).
The musical vocation of Caird’s Hadria is not merely
constrained by parental and (later) husbandly dictates, and her
womanly duties; it is, ultimately, destroyed.

[H]er greatest effort had to be given, not to the work

itself, but to win an opportunity to pursue it…[her
mother] opposed her daughter’s endeavours… It was
not good for a girl to be selfishly preoccupied…
If Hadria yielded the point on any particular
occasion, her mood and her work were destroyed,
through the nervous disturbance and the intense
depression which followed the winning of a liberty
too dearly bought… [This] process told upon her
health…The injury was insidious but serious. Hadria,
unable to command any certain part of the day, began
to sit up at night.
(DD:109)

Both Caird and Cholmondeley give an interesting twist to the

conventional view of the female artist (especially the 1890s
woman writer) as hysteric. Instead of representing artistic work as
the product of the hysteria or nerves of the aspiring woman artist,
both authors represent ‘hysteria’ (or breakdown) as produced by
artistic effort in adverse circumstances, or by the lack of an outlet
for creative desire. Red Pottage stages this process particularly
melodramatically, by having its writer-heroine succumb to a
complete breakdown induced by her evangelical brother’s
destruction of the manuscript of the novel which she has produced
at such great physical and emotional cost.
Cholmondeley’s own work, as her journals suggest, may well
have been produced by the frustrations and constraints of her life
as a daughter of the vicarage. Vicarages have, of course, been a
productive breeding ground for women novelists in England, and
Cholmondeley appears to have an acute awareness of the painful
ironies of this fact when she makes her otherwise sympathetic
Bishop articulate the repressive hypothesis of Hester’s creativity.

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[T]he best thing that could happen to Hester is to be

thrown for a time among people who regard her as a
nonentity, who have no sense of humour, and to
whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has
at heart…She is so susceptible [to sympathy and
admiration], so expansive, that repression is positively
necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up
steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a
country vicarage.
(RP:87)

Several of the New Woman writers anticipated Virginia Woolf’s

sense that the woman artist might best ‘get up steam’ if she had
£500 a year and a room of her own. They also dramatised the
problems for women of acquiring the necessary mental, as well
as physical, space for creative production. Caird’s Hadria sets up
(with some difficulty) a room of her own in Paris, but she is
unable to free herself from ‘the peculiar claims that are made, by
common consent, on a woman’s time and strength [which] weave
their tiny cords around her’ (DD:322). Her vocation as a
composer is destroyed by a combination of these external
constraints and the self-suppression which results from her
internalisation of them.
Sarah Grand provides another perspective on ‘a room of one’s
own’ by constructing for her heroine a secret room that is not
simply a private place, but is, in effect, her secret, private self.
Beth’s discovery of the secret room in her marital home is both
the realisation of a wish-fulfilment fantasy (shared by the author
and the character, and also implicating the reader) and a way of
figuring the character’s interiority. Beth’s wish for ‘some corner
where she could be safe from intrusion’ (BB:345) is answered a
few lines later by the discovery of ‘a narrow door flush with the
wall’, scarcely perceptible to the eye, which leads into ‘a
charming little room’. The narration of this episode and the
description of the room are suffused with a sense of
homecoming.

Everything about her was curiously familiar, and her

first impression was that she had been there before.
On the other hand, she could hardly believe in the
reality of what she saw, she thought she must be

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dreaming, for here was exactly what she had been

pining for most in the whole wide world of late, a
secret spot, sacred to herself, where she would be safe
from intrusion.
(BB:347)

The room is a feminine space. It is, in part, another of Beth’s

‘recollections’, since it closely resembles the room of her aunt and
mentor, Victoria. Showalter (1978a) reads this episode as a
‘feminist fantasy’ and a ‘housewife’s dream’ (208, 209), and
dismisses as ‘improbable’ the process of self-education to which
it leads. It is an example of what Showalter takes to be a radical
failure of the women’s writing of the 1880s and 1890s: ‘Given
the freedom to explore their experience, they rejected it, or at
least tried to deny it. The private rooms that symbolize their
professionalism and autonomy are fantastic sanctuaries closely
linked to their own defensive womanhood’ (215). Of course,
Grand’s secret room is both improbable and fantastic, but it is
also Utopian, and utopianism has always been an important
element in revolutionary or progressive political movements such
as feminism. The secret room serves not as a means of escape
from reality and the self, but as a route to reality and the self.
This is not to say that the episode is not problematic. In fact its
structural relationship to what precedes and follows takes us
back to some of the central contradictions about feeling and the
feminine to which I referred in the previous section.
In her apparent endorsement of Beth’s period of self-
disciplining and self-education, the narrator would seem to
dismiss the aesthetic realm which is valorised both in and by the
writing in the earlier part of the novel.

Wholesome consideration of the realities of life took

the place of fanciful dreams…purposeful thought was
where the mere froth of sensuous seeing had been; and
it was thought that now clamoured for expression
instead of…verses and stories,
(BB:356–7)

This might be viewed either as a positive turn to the practical and

the political, or alternatively (and more negatively) as a turning
back to a self-sacrificial conception of the feminine, and a

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consequent rejection of self-directed and self-expressive feeling

and sensation. In the end the novel merges these two
perspectives. Ultimately, Grand’s narrative requires its heroine to
abandon the (so to speak) absence of writing in the secret room,
for the presence of the speaking body. By the end of the novel
Beth is made to undergo a quasi-religious conversion, as a result
of which she discovers her vocation as a public speaker who has
the power to act upon the feelings (as well as the minds) of her
audience. Grand’s descriptions of Beth’s public speaking bear an
interesting resemblance to Hélène Cixous’s descriptions of the
privileging of the voice in feminine writing: ‘writing and
voice…are woven together’; woman ‘physically materializes
what she’s thinking; she signifies with her body’ (quoted in Moi
1985:114).
The secret room itself also undergoes a transformation; it is
transplanted to London, and in the process it is put to work in
two distinct aesthetic modes. On the one hand it is transformed
from its initial role of scene and product of (feminine) fantasy,
and is reconstructed as a London garret in the New Realist
narrative of hardship and struggle (in the manner of Gissing), in
which Beth attempts to make a life as an independent woman.
On the other hand, the garret itself becomes the secret room of
romance, the site of the enactment of an aesthetic fantasy of
romantic love which reworks Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’.
In effect the New Realist narrative is captured for Romance
through the figure of Brock, the young artist whom Beth
befriends. Brock becomes merged with the visionary Sir Lancelot
figure which originally appears to Beth in a dreamlike sequence
as she contemplates the emptiness of life in her marital home:

As he came abreast of the window, the rider looked

up, and Beth’s heart bounded at the sight of his face,
which was the face of a man from out of the long ago,
virile, knightly, high-bred, refined…It was as if he had
recognised her; and she felt herself as if she had seen
him before, but when or where, in what picture, in
what dream, she could not tell.
(BB:432)

In reworking Tennyson’s allegory, Grand also domesticates it.

Tennyson’s Lady drifts beautifully and mysteriously towards

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death when she leaves the lonely room in which she weaves her
web, and pursues Sir Lancelot. Grand’s heroine, on the other
hand, performs her self-sacrificial, self-immolating act by nursing
her Lancelot (Brock) from the brink of death, at the cost of her
own health, before they are both reborn into a new life.
Ultimately, like so much of the New Woman writing, The Beth
Book is unable to break free of the discourse of the proper
feminine. Within this discourse it proves impossible to write the
woman writer. The portrait of the artist as a young woman is
replaced by the portrait of the mature woman as public speaker,
and as the womanly woman who sacrifices her own health to
nurse the struggling male artist. The sensuous becomes
spiritualised; individual rebellion is ultimately reincorporated
into the traditional attributes of the proper feminine: duty, self-
sacrifice and suffering. However, as in the sensation novel, there
remains a surplus, a residual challenge to the proper feminine, in
the excess (often a melodramatic excess) of the writing, not only
of the early scenes, but also of the final dreamlike stages of the
recuperative narrative.
Another favourite character in the New Woman writing is the
struggling professional writer who pursues her vocation as much
out of economic need as from the need for self-expression.
Financial hardship, following the death of her father, forces
Mary Erle, the heroine of Ella Hep worth Dixon’s The Story of a
Modern Woman, to abandon her early artistic vocation. She
sacrifices her ambitions to be admitted to the Royal Academy
School to study painting and begins a career as a hack writer in
order to support herself and to maintain her brother in the
educational pattern considered appropriate for a young man of
his class. Like many women writers throughout the nineteenth
century, Mary turns to fiction writing because this was one of the
few careers available to a partially educated but completely
untrained middle-class woman.
Dixon uses Mary’s initiation into literary production and
London literary life as a means of satirising the contemporary
literary market-place. However, as in Gissing’s anatomisation of
New Grub Street, satire is progressively replaced by a bleaker
vision as Dixon’s heroine is portrayed succumbing to the physical
and psychological pressures of maintaining the level of literary
output necessary to meet her financial commitments. The most
concentrated piece of satire is found in Chapter 10 (‘In Grub

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Street’), which recapitulates Gissing’s attack on the metropolitan

literary machine with an admirable economy and lightness of
touch. Dixon uses Mary’s experience of Grub Street as a means
of focusing on its coarse masculinity, its sexism (depicted in the
vignette of Mary’s morning in the offices of The Fan), and its
systematic marginalisation of women writers and women’s
writing. These attitudes are summed up by the editor of
Illustrations, whose view of the scope of the woman writer and
of writing for women is summarised in his advice that ‘with
practice, you may be able to write stories which other young
ladies like to read’ (SMW:107).
The clash between Mary’s developing experience and her
encounter with the values of the literary market-place becomes
the focus for an exploration and questioning of certain ideas
about acceptable forms of literary representation, particularly
representations by and for women. Like many of the novels of
this decade, The Story of a Modern Woman is extremely ‘self-
conscious about its own textual status’ (Flint 1990:vii). It is a
realistic novel about the lives of women which is, in part, about
the impossibility of writing (or, more specifically, publishing)
realistic novels about women’s experience. Its heroine’s desire to
write and publish a novel that ‘would be a bit of real life’ and
‘have twenty-seven years of actual experience in it’ is constantly
thwarted by the exigencies of a market-place which ‘would take
anything in a newspaper’ but demands a fiction ‘fit to go into
every parsonage in England’, a fiction for ‘healthy English
homes’ (SMW:181). To some extent Dixon’s novel transcends the
conditions of its own production, since it does succeed, however
obliquely, in telling the story of the young woman in Regent’s
Park of whom Mary observes: If that tawdry-looking girl could
write down her story…we should have another masterpiece! It is
because they suffer so that women have written supremely good
fiction’ (SMW:122).
The relationship between female suffering and literary
production, and the conflict between the demands of the writer’s
vocation and those of the woman’s vocation (as defined by the
regime of the proper feminine) are also examined (admittedly
more obliquely) in George Egerton’s ‘Wedlock’. In this story, an
unnamed woman writer observes the developing tragedy of the
woman in whose house she lodges. The writer is introduced

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immediately following a scene depicting the landlady’s collapse

in a drunken stupor.

The woman lay…with her feet thrust out in her half-

buttoned boots, and her hands hanging straight down.
The sun crept round the room, and at length a clock
chimed four…A woman sitting writing at a table…
looks up with relief, and moistens her lips; they are
dry. A pile of closely written manuscript lies on the
floor beside her…
She is writing for money, writing because she must,
because it is the tool given to her wherewith to carve
her way; she is nervous, overwrought, every one of
her fingers seems as if it had a burning nerve-knot in
its tip; she has thrust her slippers aside, for her feet
twitch; she is writing feverishly now, for she has been
undergoing the agony of a barren period for some
weeks, her brain has seemed arid as a sand plain…she
has felt in her despair as if she were hollowed out,
honeycombed by her emotions as she has cried over
her mental sterility.
(D:123–4)

Two pictures of female suffering are here carefully anatomised

and sharply juxtaposed. In the first, a lower-class woman has
rendered herself insensate in an effort to avoid the emotional
consequences of her economic dependence on a man who
mistreats her. In the second, a middle-class woman is rendered
hypersensitive by the isolation and emotional harrowing of the
vocation which she pursues in order to remain economically
independent.
The passage I have quoted links these women together and
focuses on their common suffering, but the rest of the story
focuses on the ways in which they are separated from each other
by the contradictions of the proper feminine. The writer is
ultimately separated from her landlady by the proper feminine,
even as she herself is separated from it. She is separated from the
proper feminine by the demands of the writer’s vocation, which
conflict with the proper feminine’s demands that a woman
should be self-sacrificing and sympathetic to the emotional needs
of others. Thus, although the writer feels a sympathy for her

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landlady’s predicament, her need for quiet and calm conditions

in which to undertake her work leads her to withdraw from the
scene of suffering; sympathy is replaced by detached observation.

The…[writer] observes her closely as she does most

things—as material. It is not that her sympathies are
less keen since she took to writing, but that the habit
of analysis is always uppermost. She sees a
voluptuously made woman, with a massive milk-white
throat…she is attractive and repellent in a singular
way.
(D:129)

As the concluding sentence of this quotation begins to suggest,

the female writer is also separated from the landlady by the
proper feminine. Her own genteel, middle-class sensibilities are
both fascinated and appalled by the lower-class woman’s
physical presence and her lack of control.
The woman writer’s brief appearance in this story is also used
to explore and make explicit the role of class in the construction
of the proper feminine. In fact this story seems to disrupt
conventional boundaries of gender difference precisely at the
point of class difference; it is the working-class man (a bricklayer
working nearby) who becomes sympathetically engaged in the
landlady’s tragedy (and attempts to avert it), while the genteel
female writer distances herself from it. This disruption is,
however, a double disruption: the writer’s self-distancing is the
product of both her middle-class sensibility and that suppression
of ‘proper womanly’ feeling which is a function of her need for
economic survival.
In fact the complex interrelationship and interdependence of
women’s emotional and economic situations are recurrent
concerns in all of Egerton’s writing. Egerton’s New Women, like
those in Jean Rhys’s novellas of the 1930s, are ‘new’ only in their
refusal or inability to fit easily or silently into established gender
roles and social patterns. They are, for the most part, trapped by
economic or emotional neediness (or by a combination of the
two), and escape their dependence on a man, if at all, by various
routes of desperation—the death of the oppressive male (‘Under
Northern Sky’), madness (‘Wedlock’), decline and death (‘Gone
Under’).

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On the whole, Egerton offered a sharply polarised view of the

female predicament. On the one hand, her women can seek self-
realisation, or follow their own desires, with all the attendant
risks of increased economic and emotional vulnerability and
social ostracism. On the other, they are left with the boredom,
meanness and restriction of the conventional female lot.
Alternatively they can write a different story, or at least they can
choose to turn to the blank page on which a new kind of story
might be written. One version of this blank page is presented at
the end of ‘Virgin Soil’, which pictures its heroine standing ‘once
more on the platform where she stood in the flush of her
girlhood’ (D:162), when she had embarked on her wedding
journey; she then takes the train in the opposite direction to an
unknown destination. Similarly the heroine of ‘A Psychological
Moment’ removes herself from the melodramatic novelette of the
degrading liaison into which she has been blackmailed by a
dissolute cynic, and embarks on the path of silence and exile (and
possibly cunning), undeterred by the dragons of fear and
convention.

‘There are no dragons in the world nowadays that one

cannot overcome, if one is not afraid of them, and sets
up no false gods.’ […]
She…sits watching. One great star blinks down at
her like a bright glad eye, and hers shine steadily back
with the sombre light of an undaunted spirit waiting
quietly for the dawn to break, to take the first step of
her new life’s journey.
(D:66)

This disruptive, quasi-utopian vision of a brave new world in

which women might make their way undeterred by dragons does
indeed break the bounds of the proper feminine. It also,
apparently, approaches the limits of what can be written.
Egerton’s brave New Woman is frozen in a tableau which
prefigures but does not embody action. The Story of a Modern
Woman also ends with its heroine’s vision of the future, but
Dixon, unlike Egerton, not only plots the future, she also writes
it. However, when the mode is realistic, the mood tends to be
pessimistic.

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It was London that lay stretched out at her feet;

majestic, awe-inspiring, inexorable, triumphant
London.
Standing alone, there on the heights, she made a
feint as if to grasp the city spread out before her, but
the movement ended in a vain gesture, and the
radiance of her face was blotted out…
(SMW:271)

Whereas D.H.Lawrence’s young male thought-adventurer Paul

Morel, in a similar scene at the end of Sons and Lovers, strides
off ‘towards the faintly humming, glowing town’, Dixon’s New
Woman writer ‘plod[s] homewards in the twilight of the
suburban road’ (SMW:271).

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 20
New Woman: new writing

Now that woman is conscious of her own

individuality as a woman, she needs an
artistic mode of expression, she flings aside
the old forms, and seeks for new.
(Hansson 1896:78–9)

[T]he language is seldom choice; and the

manner is self-conscious, or even pedantic
…[D]eclamation, argument, caricature,
interminable prosing of everyone to his
neighbour, and absolute farce, make
amends for the absence of genuine humour,
of wit and comedy, of refinement and ease
in the dialogue.
(Barry 1894:295, on The Heavenly Twins)

Late nineteenth-century reviewers and many late twentieth-

century feminist literary historians have concurred in finding the
New Woman writing aesthetically flawed. It is said to buckle
under the weight of its feminist rhetoric, its ‘ethical
propagandism’ and ‘abstract intellectualism’ (Williams
1925:436). It is accused of lapsing into formal conventionalism
and ideological conformity, or alternatively of collapsing
inwardly into aesthetic dead ends, or the dead end of
aestheticism. Elaine Showalter has found the New Woman
writers and their successors guilty of both of these apparently
contradictory failings. Turn-of-the-century women writers, she
has argued, were trapped in the aesthetic dead end of a
conservative ideology.

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While male writers explored the multiplicity of the

self, the myriad fluid lives of men, women were
limited by the revived biological essentialism of post-
Darwinian thought. The unchanging nature of woman
as pure spirit made good politics but bad fiction.
(Showalter 1986a:110)

On the other hand the New Woman writers, and more especially
their immediate successors, were ‘confined’ by what Showalter
describes, elsewhere, as the ‘self-annihilation’ of ‘the female
aesthetic’ (1978a:240). I have tried to suggest throughout this
part of my study that the reinsertion of some of the New Woman
writers and their texts into their socio-aesthetic contexts yields a
more complex picture.
The 1880s and 1890s were a significant ‘moment of change in
fiction’ (Boumelha 1982:93). It was a period of great
experimentation in fictional practice, and of acrimonious debate
about the appropriate form and content of fiction. Following the
1870 Education Act, which produced a larger and more socially
differentiated constituency for the novel, there was a significant
increase in the number of outlets for fiction. The role of the
circulating libraries was greatly diminished, removing one
powerful pressure for formal conformity and decorous subject-
matter. Both the fiction market and the novel itself became more
stratified into the commodified medium of mass entertainment
and instruction, and the increasingly fetishised aesthetic object of
an intellectual high culture.
Gaye Tuchman has recently argued that this stratification of
the novel was part of a process of ‘edging woman out’ of the
serious high-art novel. She describes the period 1880–99 as one
of ‘redefinition’ of the novel, ‘when men of letters, including
critics, actively redefined the nature of a good novel and a great
author…[preferring] the new form of realism that they associated
with “manly”—that is great—literature’ (Tuchman 1989:8). As I
have suggested in Part I of this book, late nineteenth-century men
(and women) of letters were a great deal more divided and
confused about both the desirability and ‘manliness’ of realism
than Tuchman suggests. Moreover, hers is a history written from
the perspective of the supposed victors, and tends to lose sight of
the nature of the particular battles. To look again at the women
writers of the 1890s is to see the importance of the part they

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played in the period of redefinition of fiction. Whether reviled or

admired, their work was taken very seriously by critics. It was
also in great demand with readers. The attempts of the New
Women writers to write for women, to write about women and,
in some cases, to write woman herself, led them to use the
available forms in new ways and to look for new (often self-
consciously modern) ways of writing.
As I have suggested, writing the New Woman involved a
negotiation not only of the discourse of the proper feminine, but
also of the discourses of fiction—language, form and genre. To
write the New Woman and to write woman (or women) anew
was to write the, as yet, unwritten. It was, in effect, to write the
unwritable in terms of ‘the weary ways of fiction’ which ‘make a
pivot of the everlasting love story…as if there was nothing else of
interest in life but our sexual relations’ (BB:373).
It is no mere coincidence that this latter critique of the
conventional nineteenth-century novel (voiced by Sarah Grand’s
Beth in The Beth Book) should echo George Eliot’s ‘Silly novels
by lady novelists’ (1856), for Eliot is clearly a model for some of
the New Woman writers (most notably Grand), who sought to
emulate the large scale, high seriousness and visionary tone that
the earlier writer had brought to the woman’s novel. In the
1890s, however, the sage utterances of Eliot’s meditative,
masculine narrators were usually replaced by a visionary and
hortatory feminist (or anti-feminist) rhetoric which disrupts the
narrative and undermines the authority of the univocal
omniscient narrator.
In the hands of the New Woman writers the massive,
multiplotted, panoramic Eliotean novel increasingly became
fragmented into episodes, or abandoned in favour of the
developing new form of the short story. Many of the New Woman
novels (for example, Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book and the
massive and unwieldy Heavenly Twins, and George Egerton’s The
Wheel of God) are so fragmented and episodic, and employ such
a wide variety of fictional modes (naturalism, documentary,
romance, allegory, satire and melodrama) that they are more like
collections of short stories than novels. Indeed The Wheel of God
is less the novel it claims to be than a collection of episodes in the
life of a modern woman. There is little narrative pressure. The
central female character (Mary Desmond) is viewed from various
angles and in a variety of situations in relation to a number of

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representative modern types. The narratorial medium ranges from

the coolly forensic to the effusively lyrical, as Egerton attempts to
write the modern woman in (to adapt D.H.Lawrence’s phrase) the
process of becoming self-responsible.
The grand synthesising vision of the traditional realist novel
was, it seemed, not an appropriate—or indeed possible—medium
for writers who were seeking to question and redefine woman’s
place in the world. Instead the New Woman writers sometimes
adopted a proto-modernist form, using a proliferation of voices
and perspectives to challenge fixed views. Grand’s changing
narrative distance in The Beth Book, the move from the third-
person to the first-person narrator in The Heavenly Twins, and
her persistent mixing of modes (realism, dream, allegory) are
examples of this. Perhaps this polyvocality and multi-perspective
approach are best seen, however, in George Egerton’s stories,
with their habitual use of multiple narrators, framed narratives
and dramatised consciousness (often in combination). Indeed,
although Egerton’s stories put women under the microscope by
focusing minutely on a succession of particular (though usually
unnamed) female characters, they employ a range of narrative
techniques that tend to evade explanation and dissolve causation.
The effect, as in much of the New Woman writing, is to
problematise moral and behavioural categories and, more
particularly, to problematise the category of woman.
Their efforts to write the New Woman and engage with her
situation led the New Woman writers, by various routes, away
from the old realism (both the miniaturistic detail of the domestic
novel, and the ethical high realism of George Eliot). Sometimes
they abandoned realism altogether. Sometimes, like their male
contemporaries, they articulated their sense of the modern world
through the new naturalism imported from France and
Scandinavia. On the whole, however, the New Woman writers
developed an impressionistic and intuitive, rather than a
pathological, forensic, categorising naturalism. Indeed many of
these writers might perhaps best be seen not (as their
contemporaries often saw them) as failed masculine realists, or
incomplete pathological naturalists, but as experimental writers
who anticipated the attempts of Dorothy Richardson and
Virginia Woolf to develop a specifically feminine voice and form
for fiction.

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The experiments of the New Woman writers were part of that

redefinition of realism that took place in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century—a redefinition which disrupted the
gendered discourse on realism with its privileging of the
(supposedly) generalising and scientific masculine imagination.
Many of the New Woman writers were exponents of the
feminine New Realism such as those described by R.Brimley
Johnson in 1920, who sought ‘with passionate determination, for
that reality which is behind the material, the things that matter,
spiritual things, ultimate Truth’ (xiv–xv).
In their various and varying ways the New Woman writers
broke the bounds of the proper feminine by moving away from
their permitted role as the observers and recorders of surface
minutiae. They refused to stay within the usual scope permitted to
women writers—the anodynely domestic, the gently didactic, the
uplifting and improving, and, above all, the private—and engaged
in ‘debate upon economic, religious and sexual questions’
(Williams 1925:436). Several of them also appropriated the
conventional idea that ‘Woman is the most subjective of all
creatures’, and focused minutely on subjective realities. This self-
conscious reversal of the negative association of femininity and
subjectivity challenged both the gendered discourse on the form
and content of fiction, and the dominant forms themselves. As
Laura Marholm Hansson observed:

Formerly women’s writings were, for the most part,

either directly or indirectly the expression of a great
falsehood. They were so overpoweringly impersonal…
Now that woman is conscious of her individuality as
a woman, she needs an artistic mode of expression,
she flings aside the old forms, and seeks for new.
(Hansson 1896:78–9)

Although many of the New Woman writers found that the old
forms were not to be easily thrown aside, they nevertheless
appropriated the idea that feeling was woman’s special province.
They developed a rhetoric of feeling, often articulated in a
language of melodramatic excess which ‘implicitly insists that the
world can be equal to our own most feverish expectation of it’
(Brooks 1976:40). The New Woman writing, like that of the
women sensationalists, addresses its audience (as Christine

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 NEW WOMAN: NEW WRITING

Gledhill argues melodrama does) ‘within the limitations of the

status quo, of the ideologically permissible’, and articulates
‘demands inadmissible in the codes of social, psychological or
political discourse’. Both the contemporary cultural significance
of these two groups of writers, and their continuing importance
in the late twentieth century, lie in ‘this double acknowledgement
of how things are in a given historical conjuncture, and of the
primary desires and resistances contained within it’ (Gledhill
1987:38).

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 Conclusion: reading out
women’s writing

Despite the fact that both the women’s sensation novel and the
New Woman writing caused a sensation in their own day, and
were widely discussed as examples of new and often disturbing
trends in fiction, they nevertheless rapidly disappeared from view,
leaving (according to the critical consensus) little lasting
impression upon the history of fiction. Thus Patrick Brantlinger,
re-examining the sensation novel in 1982, drew attention to its
ephemerality, describing it as ‘a minor subgenre of British fiction
that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade later’ (37).
Similarly, David Rubinstein, an historian who writes interestingly
and sympathetically about the New Woman fiction, concludes that
it was ‘in decline by 1896 or so’ (1986:25), and that the female
New Woman writers ‘contributed little of permanent value to the
development of English fiction’ (33–4). Many of the feminist
critics who have rediscovered the New Woman writing in the wake
of post-1960s feminism have been moved to ponder the question
of ‘why it was that the men who took up the themes of feminism
in their fiction were the ones who had literary survival value, and
not the women’ (Lovell 1987:107). A similar question might be
asked about the sensation novel. Why has interest in the work of
Braddon and Wood lagged so far behind the revival of interest in
Wilkie Collins?
The rapid disappearance from critical view of both the
women’s sensation novel (and perhaps the sensation novel in
general) and the New Woman writing may, in part, be seen as a
function of their topicality. They were both very much of their
own time. They registered the pulse of contemporary feeling and
were deeply implicated in the immediate social and political
issues of their day. Many of the sensation novels grew out of

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specific concerns about women’s social and familial roles. Many

of them, too, were directly inspired by historical events, notably
the sensationally reported criminal trials which filled the
newspapers in the 1850s and 1860s. Henry James’s (1865)
observation that ‘Modern England—the England of today’s
newspapers—crops up at every step’ (593) in the sensation novel
might also be applied to the New Woman writing, since it too
shared this journalistic quality. The New Woman fiction of the
1890s both derived from, and became part of, specific press
campaigns, and it also arose from and intervened in specific
political debates.
The very immediacy and contemporaneity of the fiction
discussed in this book were clearly important factors in its
disappearance from view once the immediate historical
conditions of its production had passed away. Looked at another
way, however, the historical oblivion and critical neglect suffered
by the women sensationalists and New Woman writers are not
untypical of the fate of women’s writing more generally. A closer
examination of some of the reasons for this neglect may shed
interesting light on the processes by which women’s writing is
read out of (literary) history.
Both the hostile contemporary reception and the later critical
neglect of the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman
fiction may be connected with the fact that these novels were
associated with—to (mis)appropriate Raymond Williams’s
terms—residual or emergent forms,1 rather than with a dominant
form of fiction. The literary status of both groups of writers was
also compromised by their association with ‘low art’. The
women’s sensation novel was connected with residual popular
forms, such as melodrama with its low-art and working-class
associations, and with other low discursive forms, such as
sensational newspaper journalism. On the other hand, the most
successful of the women’s sensation novels also shared some of the
characteristics of emergent (and, significantly, ‘feminised’) forms
of ‘high art’, such as the fleshly school of poetry and painting
pioneered by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. The female
sensationalists’ interest in marriage as a source of narrative, rather
than as merely a device of closure, also anticipated the
development of the marriage-problem novel by ‘high-culture’
novelists such as George Eliot (in Middlemarch and Daniel

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 CONCLUSION

Deronda in the 1870s), Thomas Hardy, George Moore and

George Meredith, as well as the New Woman writers.
Similarly the New Woman writers’ subject-matter and their
eclectic mixing of styles and forms linked them to both residual
and emergent forms. In their preoccupation with unconventional,
socially and sexually trangressive women, they looked back to
the middle-brow fiction and journalism of the 1860s, to the ‘fast
women’ and ‘Girls of the Period’ who filled the pages of the
newspaper and periodical press and generated so many of the
concerns of the sensation novel. Their depictions of such
contemporary types as the ‘Wild Women’, ‘Revolting Daughters’
and the New Woman also connected them with non-literary, low
discursive forms, most notably journalism. As I suggested in an
earlier section, the New Woman writers, to an even greater
extent than the women sensationalists, were part of an extra-
literary cultural and political formation. Their own claims to
literary status were and undoubtedly are compromised by this
association. Moreover, like those of the sensation novelists, their
novels were further tainted by their reputation as bestsellers.
Their preoccupation with sexuality, and their sexual
frankness, also caused the New Woman writers to be linked to
the residual forms of ‘pernicious literature’ and French
naturalism of the 1870s and 1880s, while also linking them to
the emergent forms of ‘Ibscenity’ and sex-problem literature that
developed around the turn of the century. Their interest in gender
identity, and the various ways in which they articulated or
demonstrated gender confusion, also led them to be associated
with another emergent formation, that of the fin de siècle
decadence. The subjectivity of some New Woman writing
produced a fiction of feminine self-consciousness which
anticipated the feminine New Realism of Dorothy Richardson
and Virginia Woolf in the opening decades of the twentieth
century. The New Woman fiction was thus marginalised as both
a residual and debased form of French decadence, and an inferior
and ancillary form of an emergent avant-gardism and
modernism.
Perhaps the most important factors in the lack of literary
survival power of the writers I have looked at are connected with
issues of gender. Terry Lovell (1987) has identified a set of
‘loosely defined rules or codes, which have tended to work
against’ (131–2) the literary survival of women writers. The

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concepts of the auteur and the œuvre are central to these codes.
Lovell argues that, with a few notable exceptions such as
Wuthering Heights:

[I]t is authors rather than books that survive… It is

the auteur who is constructed in literary criticism
rather than the text. A single text is seldom enough to
establish that status. Once it is established, however,
all the author’s texts become worthy of study however
flawed any particular one may be.
(Lovell 1987:132)

Clearly this ‘rule’ or ‘code’ of acceptance tends to disadvantage

the New Woman writers, many of whom produced a very small
fictional œuvre. The reasons for this varied from writer to writer.
In some cases it was connected with a heavy involvement in other
(non-fictional) forms of writing, and other kinds of work—
especially political work of various types. This small fictional
output can also be explained, as Lovell notes, by the fact that
‘women in the nineteenth century typically began their literary
apprenticeships later in life than their male colleagues. If and
insofar as they were also encumbered with pressing domestic
duties, they would have been additionally handicapped’ (132).
The situation is, however, more complex and contradictory
than Lovell’s model allows. The women sensationalists, for
example, seem to have been handicapped in the literary survival
stakes not by the fact that they wrote too little but, on the
contrary, by the fact that they wrote too much. In the case of
these writers more was clearly taken to mean worse: because
they produced much that was merely meretriciously potboiling,
all of their work is labelled as inferior, unlike the work of an
auteur, whose inferior productions are treated seriously as the
flawed works of a master.
Mass-production by the chief of the women sensationalists
introduces the catch-22 of the ‘professionalism’ of women
writers. Writing, as Nigel Cross points out in The Common
Writer (1985:166), was one of the few professions open to
women in the nineteenth century. Female drudges (to use Cross’s
term) such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Rhoda
Broughton, Ouida, etc. were clearly ‘professional’ in the sense
that they earned their living from producing fiction. As applied

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to these women writers, ‘professionalism’ was invariably a

denigratory term. The (female) ‘professional’ wrote to order,
according to set formulae, in order to satisfy markets. The (male)
‘artist’, on the other hand, exercised a vocation and wrote out of
an inner (rather than pecuniary) need. However, because they
were women, Braddon and others had, paradoxically, also to be
regarded as amateurs. They were women first, and writers
second. Thus, the memoirs of Braddon and Wood written by
their sons both emphasise the fact that their mothers’
professional avocations never diverted them from their familial
and domestic duties.2 In fact, in terms of the available discourses,
women could be neither fully-fledged professionals nor amateurs
who followed a calling: they could not be truly professional
because their womanly duties must always come first, and they
could not have a writer’s vocation because being a woman was in
itself a woman’s true vocation.
Another of Lovell’s ‘codes’ that has clearly played an
important part in the ‘reading out’ of women’s sensation fiction
and the New Woman writing is that of ‘address’: ‘Woman-to-
woman forms’, Lovell argues, ‘are not permitted to become part
of the general stock of “cultural capital”’ (1987:132). Although
neither the women’s sensation novel nor the New Woman fiction
is addressed exclusively to women, on the whole each assumes a
culturally constructed ‘feminine’ awareness in its readers, and
claims a privileged access to feminine interiority. Both are
deployed and perceived as feminine genres.
The single most important factor in the filtering out of these
women writers from the literary tradition is the gendered
discourse on fiction explored in Part I, which privileges gender-
neutral or ‘masculine’ forms. Throughout the nineteenth century,
debates about the novel seem to have been pervaded by a fear
that fiction might be inherently feminine, oscillating between the
constricted, aesthetically and intellectually limited, domestic
sentimentality of the proper feminine, and the promiscuous
profusion and abandoned sensationalism of the improper
feminine. The habitual association of the ‘lower’, deviant or
subversive forms of fiction with a negatively defined version of
the feminine played a crucial part in the production and
mediation of novels by both men and women. This association
was also instrumental in the contemporary marginalisation and

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 CONCLUSION

subsequent disappearance from the tradition of much fiction by

women.
The gendered discourse on fiction has proved remarkably
persistent. Nina Baym (1986), for example, has attributed the
absence of women novelists from the American canon—despite
the fact that ‘Commercially and numerically they have probably
dominated American literature since the middle of the nineteenth
century’ (64)—to ‘gender-related restrictions’ that do not
necessarily arise out of ‘the cultural realities contemporary with
the writing women, but out of later critical theories…which
impose their concerns anachronistically, after the fact, on an
earlier period’. Baym argues that some of the most influential of
these theories have been based on strongly masculine
assumptions, and cites as evidence Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of
Influence and Edward Said’s Beginnings. The former plots
literary history as an Oedipal drama in which sons struggle to
free themselves from their literary fathers, while the latter
rereads the history of nineteenth-century British fiction as a story
of ‘filiation’. The apparent persuasiveness of these models, even
to feminist critics (Bloom’s influence on the theory of literary
creation developed in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in
the Attic has been much discussed), thus served to counteract the
effects of the substantial work of recovering women writers
which was undertaken by feminist scholars in the 1970s. As Nina
Baymn writes, ‘just at the time that feminist critics [were]
discovering more and more important women [writers], the
critical theorists…seized upon a theory that allows the women
less and less presence’ (78–9).
The terms of the gendered discourse on fiction, and
particularly its privileging of the masculine, have not gone
unchallenged. From the late nineteenth century onwards,
feminists and their sympathisers have sought to redefine these
terms and appropriate them for their own ends. From Virginia
Woolf in the early years of the twentieth century to the French
theorists of the feminine, and writers such as the American poet
and critic Adrienne Rich, women have sought to revalue the
feminine, and to reclaim it as a cultural positive. Thus Virginia
Woolf (1966 II:204), in one of the earliest attempts to articulate
a positively evaluated feminine practice of writing, argues for the
‘difference of view, the difference of standard’ of women’s
writing (and, by implication, of women’s reading).

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 CONCLUSION

[I]n both life and art the values of a woman are not
the values of a man. Thus when a woman comes to
write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually
wishing to alter the established values—to make
serious what appears insignificant to a man, and
trivial what is to him important.
(Woolf 1966 II:145–6)

In this book I have tried to demonstrate that when readers and

literary historians apply this particular difference of view and
difference of standard (rather than that difference of standard
which masquerades as a universal), the women’s writing that has
hitherto been consigned to the dustbin of history can be relocated
in history and reinserted into literary history.
Clearly the feminist (and anti-feminist) debates of the later
twentieth century have been one important source of such a
‘difference of standard’. Current debates in and around feminism
have made visible the women writers whose work is the subject
of this book and have also provided the conditions for a more
sympathetic valuation of that work. The second-wave
revitalisation of feminist politics has made readers more
responsive to the political concerns of the New Woman writers.
Some of the fictional experiments of second-wave feminists
might also have created a climate in which readers are less likely
to dismiss New Woman fiction as merely inartistic propaganda.
Similarly, the feminist-inspired interest in the determinants and
effects of popular women’s genres has made literary historians
more alert to the aesthetic politics of the production and
consumption of bestseller fiction by and for women. It has also
made readers more inclined to look for, and discover, the possibly
subversive complexities which may be woven into the formulaic
surfaces of the women’s sensation novel.
Another important source of this changing viewpoint has been
the French theorists of the feminine, one of whose main concerns
has been difference in writing and the difference of women’s
writing. Although the theories of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
and Hélène Cixous (to take only the most prominent of the
French theorists) differ from each other in important respects,
each of these writers, at least implicitly, has exposed the
operation of a gendered discourse on and in writing, in which the
masculine is the privileged term. They have sought, in different

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 CONCLUSION

ways, to demonstrate how the linguistic and discursive systems

of western culture have systematically repressed, managed and
marginalised the feminine voice, the female body and women’s
experience. Each of them has also suggested different ways of
using and/or combatting this process. On the whole they have
been more interested in developing a feminine writing practice
than in re-examining the writing of the past. Nevertheless many
of their ideas provide interesting new perspectives on the
forgotten women writers of the nineteenth century whose work
has been the focus of this study, and on the gendered critical
discourse which was a key determinant of both the production
and the suppression of the women’s sensation novel and the New
Woman fiction.
The style, form and main concerns of the writers discussed in
this book, and also the discourse of the im/proper feminine, may
be interestingly reread through Kristeva’s concept of the
discourse of the hysteric. For Kristeva ‘femininity’ is a term
which evades definition; the feminine is a relational category
denoting what the patriarchal symbolic order marginalises.
Kristeva argues that because women write as outsiders from the
point of view of masculine-dominated patriarchal society, theirs
is a discourse of the hysteric, and their style is likely to involve
(as Ann Rosalind Jones glosses it) ‘repetitive, spasmodic
separations from the dominating discourse, which, more often,
they are forced to imitate’ (Jones 1986:363). Certainly the female
sensationalists and the New Woman writers have been treated
(and dismissed) as hysterics by a gendered criticism which has
relegated their writings to the realm of the improper feminine.
However, as I have tried to show throughout this study, not only
are both groups of writers formed by the discourse of the
hysteric, they also (to different degrees) interrogate this
discourse. They appropriate the concept of hysterical writing as
a way of finding a form in which to discuss and articulate
women’s experiences, desires and frustrations. In other words,
they do not simply repeat the discourse of the hysteric, they also
explore, exploit and develop it.
In Kristeva’s account, the marginality of woman’s social
position and her outsider relationship to the dominant discourse
also produce another significant point of difference: the absence
of a fixed and authoritative subject and speaking position. This
lack of fixity and authority was exploited in both the women

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 CONCLUSION

sensationalists’ and the New Woman writers’ use of the shifting

point of view, in the ‘inconsistency’ and moral ambivalence of
the sensation heroine, in the development of the feminine subject
in process, and in the more fluid styles of writing found in some
of the New Woman fiction.
As I have suggested in earlier sections, the ‘muted’,
marginalised voice which was assigned to the feminine by both
the nineteenth-century discourse on gender and the gendered
critical discourse sometimes made it difficult for women’s writing
to be heard. However, it also provided a way of undermining and
finding gaps in the dominant discourse. The muted feminine
voice offered a challenge for the woman writer to overcome if
she was to make herself heard on her own terms. The women
sensationalists and the New Woman writers both, on occasion,
rose to this challenge by developing the stylistic and linguistic
excess which I have noted at several points in this study. Writers
as different from one another as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and
George Egerton display the tendency to ‘mimic’ masculine forms
that Luce Irigaray has observed in women’s writing. In their
representation of women, and particularly of the female body,
both Braddon and Egerton, for example, mimic the specular
erotic gaze of masculine writing. In both cases, however, this is
taken to excess and becomes a distinctive feminine style, rather
than a mere imitation of the dominant masculine. Braddon’s and
Egerton’s use of the gaze in staging woman as spectacle thus
tends to destabilise, rather than merely repeat, the discourse it is
mimicking.
It is this idea of a distinctive feminine mode of writing, an
écriture féminine, which offers the most important ‘difference of
view’ and has provided perhaps the single most important
perspective through which to re-view the writers at the centre of
this study. I have not sought, nor would I wish to claim, that the
women sensationalists and the New Woman writers developed a
revolutionary écriture féminine a century before the French
theorists did. I would also want to avoid the biological
essentialism and bio-cultural (over) determinism which seem to
be a problematic aspect of some of the pronouncements of
Cixous and Irigaray. However, if the women’s fictions of the
1860s and 1890s have been erased from view by the operations
of a gendered critical discourse which has regarded them either
as failed or inferior versions of the dominant (masculine) forms,

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 CONCLUSION

or as examples of trivial or marginal feminine forms, then the

idea of an écriture féminine provides a very useful way of
bringing them back into view and arriving at a difference of
standard by which to re-view them.
When used flexibly and with due regard for the historical
specificities of both women’s socio-cultural position and of
genre, this concept of a feminine mode of writing enables us to
see the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman writing as
attempts to appropriate and transform the subjectmatter and
styles of fiction, and to extend the possibilities of particular
genres beyond their culturally ascribed limits. It also affords a
view of these much-decried women writers as experimenters in
form, style and/or subject-matter, whose work—even when it
falls back on devices of closure which reinforce traditional
gender stereotypes—can usefully be seen as oppositional
feminine forms, written in the margins of the dominant
discourse, produced by and engaging with the contradictions of
that discourse.
Whether as the result of a conscious resistance, or as a
consequence of the pressure of cultural and generic contradictions,
the women sensation novelists and the New Woman writers
refused or failed to stay within the culturally prescribed bounds of
proper feminine writing. As a woman ‘you are supposed’, as
Christiane Rochefort (1981) has observed, ‘to write about certain
things: house, children, love’ (373), and for the most part this is
what the writers I have examined did. However, they did so in
unusual, sometimes challenging and often unacceptable ways.
Stylistically, the female sensationalists and the New Woman
writers certainly did not remain within the culturally and
generically prescribed bounds of proper feminine writing. Their
excess, their emotionalism and sensationalism, their penchant for
melodrama and, in the case of some of the New Woman writers,
their intellectualism, took them beyond the confines of the proper
feminine of ‘women’s writing’, and into the domain of what Alfred
Austin designated the improper feminine, or what Hélène Cixous
has described as a feminine libidinal economy of writing. To a
large extent, Cixous’s concept of masculine and feminine libidinal
economies of writing repeats the terms of the gendered critical
discourse of the nineteenth century, but it does so in ways which
offer the possibility of rethinking that discourse. The crucial
difference, of course, lies in the different values attached to the

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 CONCLUSION

gendered terms: in the nineteenth-century discourse the masculine

is the positive term, whereas the feminine is the positive term in
Cixous’s model.3 Cixous’s feminine economy—the Realm of the
Gift which she elaborates in The Newly Born Woman—bears a
remarkably close resemblance to the domain of the ‘improper
feminine’ which Alfred Austin defines as ‘the feminine
element…unrestrainedly rioting in any and every area of life in
which an indiscriminating imagination chooses to place it’
(1869:468–9). It is precisely this lack of restraint and
‘indiscriminating imagination’ that Cixous values in ‘feminine’
writing (and urges upon women writers).
The Realm of the Gift is characterised by abundance,
generosity, openness and multiplicity. These are also the
characteristics of écriture féminine:

[Woman’s] libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is

worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without
ever inscribing or discerning contours… She alone
dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the
outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of
forelanguage. She lets the other languages speak—the
language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither
enclosure nor death.
(Cixous 1981:259–60)

Cixous’s masculine economy—l’Empire du Propre—is

structured around concepts such as property, propriety,
regulation, classification, systematisation and hierarchism; in
other words, around those terms which are the positively
evaluated masculine ones of the nineteenth-century gendered
critical discourse. The colonisation or enfeebling of this
masculine Realm of the Proper by the promiscuous disorder of
the improper feminine, or by that inferior, debased version of
the masculine economy which was the proper feminine, was
what Austin and others feared. Many of the contemporary
objections to the work of the female sensationalists and the
New Woman writers were rooted precisely in such fears about
this process of (supposed) contamination and colonisation.
Such fears have also, undoubtedly, played a significant part in
what we might call (without having recourse to anything so

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 CONCLUSION

crude as a patriarchal-conspiracy theory of literary history)

these writers’ prolonged period of suppression.
If a complex of thinking about gender and sexual difference
has effectively written these women writers out of history, then a
feminist awareness of this process and its categories enables us to
write them back into literary history. What we have seen at work
in the gendered critical discourse of the nineteenth century is a
desire to fix gender categories, particularly the feminine term. We
have also seen how the regime of the im/proper feminine worked
to define the feminine as either subversive or subordinate. The
contradictions in nineteenth-century conceptualisations of the
feminine rendered it an impossible, permanently unstable,
constantly shifting term. As a subordinate term the (proper)
feminine stood for order, control, regulation, propriety,
domesticity, the maternal, spirituality, morality, asexuality, and a
careful concern for minutiae. In its subversive form of the
improper feminine, it signified chaos, uncontrollability,
impropriety, sexuality, carnality, immorality, the non- or anti-
maternal, and a promiscuous profusion (and confusion) of
minutiae and detail. I have tried to show that, although they were
undoubtedly formed by this discourse of the im/proper feminine,
neither the female sensationalists nor the New Woman writers
were contained by it. Their negotiations or disruptions of its
contradictions are themselves contradictory and, on occasion,
contorted. This makes a smooth recuperation of their work for
feminism difficult (even if it were desirable), but it is also major
source of their interest to a late twentieth-century reader.

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 Notes

INTRODUCTORY NOTE
1 See, for example, Penny Boumelha’s (1982) rereading of Hardy in the
context of the fiction by women writers in the 1880s and 1890s.

PART I
1 See Pykett 1985.
2 See Showalter 1978a, Boumelha 1982 and Bjørhovde 1987.
3 This irruption of the feminine in the work of late nineteenth-century
male writers is explored in Boumelha 1982, Stubbs 1979 and
Showalter 1991.
4 See Hughes 1980 and Taylor 1988 for a discussion of the
sensationalists, and Boumelha 1982, Stubbs 1979 and Cunningham
1978 for the writers of the 1890s.
5 For example in Barry 1894.
6 The concept of negotiation, which is borrowed from cultural studies
(see Hall et al. 1980), is extremely useful for analysing the relations
between cultural products, ideologies and audiences. ‘The value of
this notion’, Christine Gledhill (1988) argues, ‘lies in its avoidance of
an overly deterministic view of cultural production…for the term
“negotiation” implies the holding together of opposite sides in an
ongoing process of give-and-take… Meaning is neither imposed, nor
passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between
competing frames of reference’ (67–8).
7 The Saturday Review’s polemic on woman gained even wider
currency with the publication of Modern Women and What is Said of
Them (1868), which reprinted thirty-seven essays from the Saturday,
including ten by Linton and ten by J.R.Green.
8 For a full and interesting discussion of the development of the
middle-class family in the early nineteenth century see Davidoff and
Hall 1987.
9 See Davidoff and Hall 1987 and Smith-Rosenberg 1985.
10 The importance of conduct books in constructing Victorian notions
of womanhood and controlling female behaviour is discussed

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 NOTES

(passim) in Armstrong 1987, Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1987 and

Strachey 1978:46.
11 See Geddes and Thompson 1889 and Allan 1869. The scientific
debates about the nature of woman are discussed in Conway
1980, Helsinger et al. 1983, Jacobus et al. 1990 and Russett
1989.
12 Krafft-Ebing (1892) and Ellis (1894 and 1895) both developed the
idea of an intermediate sex (the mannish woman) to account for
women’s deviation from conventional gender and sex roles.
13 See Bram Djikstra 1986:15.
14 It is materialist insofar as it sees the sensation novel as the product of
certain material conditions, and anti-materialist or idealist insofar as
it derives from a prescriptive view of art as transcending material
conditions.
15 See also ‘Novels of the day’, Fraser’s 1860. Tony Davies (1983)
writes interestingly about the phenomenon of railway reading.
16 The most prominent of the Spasmodic poets were Philip James Bailey
and Alexander Smith. They affected an amalgam of the styles of the
younger Romantics, producing an extravagant, egotistical poetry,
which was castigated by Arnold and the more austere reviewers of
Victorian poetry for its disorganised, sensuous, emotional and
formal excess. Jerome Buckley provides quite a lively account of the
Spasmodics in Chapter 3 of The Victorian Temper (Cambridge,
Mass., 1951).
17 See Kristeva 1974 and Moi 1985:163ff.
18 The fin de siècle revival of romance by male writers was another such
attempt. See Showalter 1991:78 ff.
19 D.H.Lawrence similarly claimed (in a letter to Sallie Hopkin,
December 23, 1912) that his fiction would ‘do my work for women,
better than the suffrage’ (Letters, 1979, 1:490).

PART II
1 This problem is discussed in Harris 1990:21.
2 Ray (1865) notes that sensation novels were sometimes
recommended as ‘good stimulants in these days of toil and worry
…well-fitted for relieving over-taxed brains by diverting our
thoughts from the absorbing occupations of daily life.’ (202).
3 Kalikoff (1986) discusses a variety of these forms and explores the
sensation novel’s links with them.
4 See Boyle 1989 and Altick 1970.
5 See Holcombe 1983 for details.
6 See Weeks 1981:20.
7 See the film and television journal Screen and also Gledhill 1987,
Kaplan 1987 and 1990, Kuhn 1985, de Lauretis 1984 and 1987, and
Pribram 1988.
8 See Kemble 1838.
9 Showalter (1987) suggests that this association of madness and the

211
 NOTES

feminine is endemic ‘within our dualistic systems of language and

representation’, and that ‘madness, even when experienced by men,
is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female
malady’ (3–4).
10 The resemblance between Braddon’s plot and a contemporary
case study of this condition has been much commented upon.
Showalter quotes from John Connolly’s Physiognomy of Insanity
the case of a ‘sensitive woman whose mother had been
insane…[and who] became deranged and melancholic almost as
soon as her poor little child came into this world of want’
(Showalter 1987:71–2).
11 The terms of this description closely resemble those in which M.
Héger recalled Emily Brontë: ‘She should have been a man—a great
navigator…’ (quoted in Gérin 1972:127).
12 The Medusan snakes are losing themselves in Aurora’s clothing
rather than turning outwards towards the spectator.
13 See, for example, Lady Audley’s Secret, pp. 294–5: ‘If Mr. Holman
Hunt could have peeped into the pretty boudoir I think the picture
[of Lady Audley in thoughtful pose before the fire] would have
been photographed upon his brain to be reproduced by-and-by
upon a bishop’s half-length. My lady in that half-recumbent
attitude, with her elbow resting on one knee, and her perfect chin
supported by her hand, the rich folds of drapery falling away in
long undulating lines from the exquisite outline of her figure…
Beautiful in herself, but made bewilderingly beautiful by the
gorgeous surroundings which surround the shrine of her
loveliness.’ The passage continues with an elaborate inventory of
the gorgeous objects.
14 This is a recurring situation in Braddon’s novels. Both Paul
Marchmont (JML) and Victor Carrington (RE) are feminised men
who seek to defend a version of the family which they identify closely
with their mother. While Robert Audley polices the (improperly)
‘feminised’ family to protect it from the criminality of Lucy, Paul
Marchmont and Victor Carrington turn to crime to wrest the family
from (what they perceive to be) usurping females.
15 The role and significance of the ‘household spies we call servants’
(AF:19) are discussed in Trodd 1989.
16 Hughes (1980) argues that ‘The unbeatable combination of sin and
sentiment, the unrestrained emotional wallowing, ultimately depend
on an unquestioning acceptance of conventional morality and
conventional standards’ (112).
17 Moretti (1988) argues that ‘moving literature’ always functions in
this way. ‘Tears are always the product of powerlessness. They
presuppose two mutually opposed facts: that it is clear how the
present state of things should be changed—and that this change is
impossible’ (162).
18 See Bakhtin 1963 and 1981.
19 See Bakhtin 1981 and 1984.

212
 NOTES

PART III
1 David Rubinstein (1986) suggests that the New Woman was first
named by Sarah Grand in the North American Review (1894).
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg attributes the title to Henry James in the
1880s. As was the case with the ‘fast woman’ and the ‘Girl of the
Period’ in the 1860s, the cultural image of the New Woman was
made and remade as stereotypes were constructed, exchanged and
recirculated in and between novels, short stories and newspaper and
periodical articles. The fact that the image of the New Woman
acquired a greater cultural force than some of the earlier
representations of modern woman may be attributed (in part) to its
proliferation and diffusion through a newly enlarged and more
powerful system of print media.
2 See (inter alia) Sarah M.Amos 1894, Blanche Crackanthorpe 1894
and Susan M.Jeune 1894.
3 See Frances Power Cobbe 1868.
4 It is interesting to compare this passage with Lawrence’s depiction of
Anna dancing to the moon in ‘Anna Victrix’ in The Rainbow. In fact,
both thematically and stylistically, The Wheel of God anticipates the
Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love. When read
alongside Egerton’s novel Lawrence’s fictions appear less stylistically
innovatory, and his representation of women less radically new, than
has sometimes been claimed.
5 See also ‘Her Share’.
6 See Bjørhovde 1987:142–5 and Showalter 1991:145ff.
7 See Cixous 1974 and Cixous and Clément 1987.
8 Showalter (1982) discusses this term, which she borrows from the
anthropologists Edward and Shirley Ardener.
9 See, for example, Claire Wills 1989.
10 Smith-Rosenberg (1985) points out that many nineteenth-century
medical men feared that hysteria might not be a disease at all, and
that ‘hysterics’ might simply be ‘clever frauds and sensation
seekers—morally delinquent and, for the physician, professionally
embarrassing’ (204). Showalter (1987) also writes extensively on the
moral management of female hysterics in the nineteenth century.
11 See Toril Moi 1985 and 1986.

CONCLUSION
1 I have borrowed these terms from Raymond Williams (Marxism and
Literature 1977), who uses them in a much more sophisticated way
in developing a model for analysing and accounting for ‘the dynamic
interrelations, at every point in the process, of [the] historically
varied and variable elements’ of a culture (121).
2 Charles Wood (1894) wrote that ‘No home duty was ever put aside
for literary labours’ (228), and Braddon’s son William Maxwell
(1938) affirmed that his mother ‘got through her immense amount of

213
 NOTES

work as if by magic. She never seemed to be given any time in which

to do it. She had…no part of the day to be held sacred from
disturbance and intrusions’ (281).
3 The feminine libidinal economy (as defined and used by Cixous) is
not necessarily connected to the female body, nor is it exclusively the
property of writing by women. However, it should be noted that
Cixous’ terminology is prone to some slippage between the
‘feminine’ and the biologically female.

214
 Works referred to

In the case of the novels of the 1860s and 1890s I give full
bibliographical details of the edition cited in the text. Wherever
possible I have cited editions that are currently in print. When
the first edition has not been used I give the date of first
publication in parentheses at the end of the reference. I have also
adopted this practice for other nineteenth-century texts of which
I do not cite the first edition. In the case of fictional works which
are referred to frequently, the following abbreviations have been
used in the text:
AF Aurora Floyd
BB The Beth Book
CUF Cometh Up as a Flower
D Discords
DD The Daughters of Danaus
DW The Doctor’s Wife
EL East Lynne
EV Eleanor’s Victory
G Gallia
HT The Heavenly Twins
JML John Marchmont’s Legacy
K Keynotes
LAS Lady Audley’s Secret
RE Run to Earth
RP Red Pottage
SMW The Story of a Modern Woman
TH Trevlyn Hold
WG The Wheel of God
YA A Yellow Aster

Unless otherwise stated the place of publication is London.

NOVELS OF THE 1860s

Braddon, M.E. (1987) Lady Audley’s Secret, Oxford, Oxford University
Press (1862).
—(1984) Aurora Floyd, Virago (1863).
—(1863) Eleanor’s Victory, Tinsley Brothers.

215
 WORKS REFERRED TO

—(1863) John Marchmont’s Legacy, Tinsley Brothers.

—(1864) The Doctor’s Wife, Tinsley Brothers.
—(1868) Run to Earth, Ward, Lock and Tyler.
—(n.d.) Henry Dunbar, Maxwell (1864).
Broughton, R. (1898) Cometh Up as a Flower, Macmillan (1867).
—(1967) Not Wisely but Too Well, Cassell (1867).
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) (1896) Under Two Flags, Chatto and
Windus (1867).
Wood, E. (1984) East Lynne, Dent (1861).
—(1893) Verner’s Pride, Richard Bentley (1863).
—(1895) Lord Oakburn’s Daughters, Richard Bentley (1864).
—(1886) Trevlyn Hold; or Squire Trevlyn’s Heir, Richard Bentley (1864).

NOVELS OF THE 1890s

Caird, M. (1894) The Daughters of Danaus, Bliss, Sands, Foster.
Cholmondeley, M. (1985) Red Pottage, Virago (1899).
Dixon, E.H. (1990) The Story of a Modern Woman, Merlin (1894).
Dowie, M.M. (1895) Gallia, Methuen.
Egerton, G. (Mary Chavelita Dunne) (1983) Keynotes and Discords,
Virago. First published in two separate volumes by John Lane:
Keynotes in 1893 and Discords in 1894.
—(1898) The Wheel of God, Grant Richards.
Grand, S. (1893) The Heavenly Twins, Heinemann.
—(1979) The Beth Book, Virago (1897).
Iota (K.M.Caffynn) (1894) A Yellow Aster, Hutchinson.

OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXTS

Unattributed periodical and newspaper articles are included under the
entry for the relevant journal.
Acton, W. (1857) The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive
Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life
Considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations.
Allan, J.M. (1869) ‘On the differences in the minds of men and women’,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society of London, vol. 7, pp.
cciv–ccxix.
Amos, S.M. (1894) ‘The evolution of the daughters’, Contemporary
Review, vol. 65, pp. 515–20.
Austin, A. (1869) The poetry of the period: Mr. Swinburne’, Temple
Bar, vol. 26, pp. 457–74.
—(1870a) ‘Our novels: the fast school’, Temple Bar, vol. 29, pp. 177–94.
—(1870b) ‘Our novels: the sensational school’, Temple Bar, vol. 29, pp.
410–24.
Barry, W. (1892) ‘The French decadence’, Quarterly Review, vol. 174,
pp. 479–504.
—(1894) ‘The strike of a sex’, Quarterly Review, vol. 179, pp. 289–
318.

216
 WORKS REFERRED TO

Besant, W. (1890) ‘Candour in English fiction’, New Review, vol. 2,

pp. 6–9.
Buchanan, R (1862) ‘Society’s looking-glass’, Temple Bar, vol. 6, pp.
129–37.
Caird, M. (1892) ‘A defence of the so-called “Wild Women”’,
Nineteenth Century, vol. 31, pp. 811–29.
—(1897) The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and
Destiny of Woman, Originally published in Westminster Review,
1888–94.
Christian Remembrancer (1863) ‘Our female sensation novelists’, vol.
46, pp. 209–36.
Cobbe, P.P. (1868) ‘Criminals, idiots, women and minors: is the
classification sound?’, Fraser’s, vol. 78, pp. 777–94.
Collins, W. (1858) ‘The unknown public’, Household Words, August
21, pp. 217–22.
Crackanthorpe, B. (1894a) ‘The revolt of the daughters’, Nineteenth
Century, vol. 34, pp. 23–31.
—(1894b) ‘The revolt of the daughters’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 35,
pp. 424–29.
(1895) ‘Sex in modern literature’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 37, pp. 607–16.
Crackanthorpe, H. (1894) ‘Reticence in literature’, The Yellow Book,
vol. 2, pp. 259–73.
Dallas, E.S. (1862) ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, The Times, November 18, p.
8.
—(1866) The Gay Science.
Drysdale, G. (1860) The Elements of Social Science.
Eliot, G. (1856) ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’, Westminster Review,
vol. 66, pp. 442–61.
Ellis, H. (1888) Women and Marriage; or Evolution in Sex.
—(1894) Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual
Characters.
Ellis, S. (1843a) The Mothers of England, their Influence and
Responsibility.
—(1843b) The Wives of England, their Relative Duties, Domestic
Influence and Social Obligations.
—(1845) The Daughters of England, their Position in Society, Character
and Responsibilities.
Ferrerro, G. (1893) The Problem of Woman from a Bio-Sociological
Point of View, Turin.
Fraser’s Magazine (1860) ‘Novels of the day: their writers and readers’,
vol. 62, pp. 205–17.
—(1863) ‘The popular novels of the year’, vol. 68, pp. 253–69.
Geddes, P. and Thompson, J.A. (1889) The Evolution of Sex.
Gosse, E. (1892) ‘The tyranny of the novel’, National Review, vol. 19,
pp. 163–75.
Grand, S. (1894) ‘A new aspect of the woman question’, North
American Review, vol. 158, pp. 271–6.
Greg, W.R. (1850) ‘Prostitution’, Westminster Review, vol. 53, pp. 448–
506.

217
 WORKS REFERRED TO

—(1859) ‘The false morality of lady novelists’, National Review, vol. 8,

pp. 144–67.
—(1862) ‘Why are women redundant?’, National Review, vol. 14, pp.
434–60.
Hansson, L.M. (1896) Modern Women, trans. Hermione Ramsden.
Hardy, T. (1890) ‘Candour in English fiction’, New Review, vol. 2, pp.
15–21.
Hutton, R.H. (1858) ‘Novels by the authoress of John Halifax’, North
British Review, vol. 29, pp. 466–81.
James, H. (1865) ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, November 9, pp. 593–5.
Reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 108–
16.
Jeune, S.M. (1894) ‘The revolt of the daughters’, Fortnightly Review,
vol. 61, pp. 267–76.
Kemble, J.M. (1838) ‘Custody of Infants Bill’, British and Foreign
Quarterly Review, vol. 7, pp. 269–411.
Krafft-Ebing, R. von (1892) Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial
Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instincts (first German edition
1886).
Lang, A. (1887) ‘Realism and romance’, Contemporary Review, vol. 52,
pp. 683–93.
Lee, V. (Violet Paget) (1885) ‘A dialogue on novels’, Contemporary
Review, vol. 48, pp. 378–401.
Lewes, G.H. (1850) ‘A gentle hint to writing women’, Leader, vol. 1, pp.
929–30.
—(1852) ‘The lady novelists’, Westminster Review, vol. 58, pp. 129–41.
—(1865) ‘The principles of success in literature (ii)’, Fortnightly Review,
vol. 1, pp. 185–96.
Linton, E.L. (1868a) ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, March
14, pp. 339–4.
—(1868b) ‘Feminine affectations’, Saturday Review, June 13, pp. 776–
7.
—(1868c) ‘La femme passée’, July 11, pp. 49–50.
—(1890) ‘Candour in English fiction’, New Review, vol. 2, pp. 10–14.
—(1891a) ‘The Wild Women as politicians’, Nineteenth Century, vol.
30, pp. 79–88.
—(1891b) ‘The Wild Women as social insurgents’, Nineteenth Century,
vol. 31, pp. 596–605.
—(1892) ‘Partisans of the Wild Women’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 30,
pp. 455–64.
London Review (1860) ‘Female novelists’, vol. 1, pp. 137–8.
McCarthy, J. (1864) ‘Novels with a purpose’, Westminster Review, vol.
82, pp. 24–49.
Mansel, H.L. (1863) ‘Sensation novels’, Quarterly Review, vol. 113, pp.
481–514.
Maudsley, H. (1874) ‘Sex in mind and education’, Fortnightly Review,
vol. 21, pp. 466–83.
Moore, G. (1976) Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals: A Polemic
on Victorian Censorship, ed. P. Coustillas, Sussex. This edition

218
 WORKS REFERRED TO

reprints Moore’s ‘A new censorship of literature’, Pall Mall Gazette,

December 10, 1884, and the ensuing correspondence, plus Literature
at Nurse (1885).
Noble, J.A. (1895) The fiction of sexuality’, Contemporary Review, vol.
67, pp. 490–8.
Norman, H. (1883) Theories and practice in modern fiction’,
Fortnightly Review, New Series, vol. 34, pp. 870–86.
Oliphant, M. (1856) The laws concerning women’, Blackwood’s, vol.
76, pp. 379–87.
—(1862) ‘Sensation novels’, Blackwood’s, vol. 91, pp. 564–84.
—(1863) ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, vol. 94, pp. 168–83.
—(1867) ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, vol. 102, pp. 257–80.
—(1896) ‘The anti-marriage league’, Blackwood’s, vol. 159, pp. 135–
49.
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) (1894) ‘The new aspect of the
woman question’, North American Review, vol. 158, pp. 610–19.
—(1895) Views and Opinions.
Parkes, B.R. (later Belloc) (1865), Essays on Women’s Work.
Ray, W.F. (1865) ‘Sensation novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British
Review, vol. 43, pp. 180–204.
Romanes, G. (1887) ‘Mental differences between men and women’,
Nineteenth Century, vol. 21, pp. 654–72.
Ruskin, J. (1880) ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ in Sesame and Lilies (1865).
Saturday Review (1860) ‘The literature of the social evil’, October 6,
pp. 417–18.
—(1868a) ‘Woman and her critics’, January 25, pp. 108–9.
—(1868b) ‘What is woman’s work?’, February 15, pp. 107–8.
—(1871) ‘The British mother taking alarm’, September 9, pp. 334–5.
Scott, H.S. and Hall, E. (1894) ‘Character note: the new woman’,
Cornhill, vol. 70, pp. 365–8.
Smith, A.P. (1894) ‘A reply from the daughters II’, Nineteenth Century,
vol. 35, pp. 443–50.
Smith, B.Leigh (later Bodichon) (1854) A Brief Summary in Plain
Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women,
Together with a Few Observations Thereon.
Stead, W.T. (1894) ‘The novel of the modern woman’, Review of
Reviews, vol. 10, pp. 64–73.
Stutfield, H.M. (1895) ‘“Tommyrotics”’, Blackwood’s, vol. 157, pp.
833–45.
—(1897) ‘The psychology of feminism’, Blackwood’s, vol. 161, pp.
104–17.
Taylor, H. (later Mill) (1851) ‘Enfranchisement of women’, Westminster
Review, vol. 55, pp. 289–311.
Walker, A. (1840) Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind,
Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce.
Waugh, A. (1894) ‘Reticence in literature’, The Yellow Book, vol. 1, pp.
201–19.
Westminster Review (1866) ‘Belles lettres’, vol. 20, pp. 269–70.
Wood, C. (1894) Memorials of Mrs Henry Wood.

219
 WORKS REFERRED TO

WORKS FIRST PUBLISHED AFTER 1900

Abel, E. (ed.) (1982) Writing and Sexual Difference, Sussex.
Altick, R.D. (1970) Victorian Studies in Scarlet.
Armstrong, N. (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction, New York.
—and Tennenhouse, L. (eds) (1987) The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in
Literature and the History of Sexuality.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1963) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans.
Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis.
—(1981) The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C.Emerson and M.Holquist,
Austin.
—(1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. H.Iwolsky, Bloomington.
Basch, F (1974) Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the
Novel, 1837–67, trans. A.Rudolf.
Baym, N. (1986) ‘Melodramas of beset manhood’, in Showalter, E., The
New Feminist Criticism.
Bevington, M.M. (1941) The Saturday Review 1855–1868:
Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England, New York.
Bjørhovde, G. (1987) Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the
Crisis of the Novel, 1880–1900, Oxford.
Boumelha, P. (1982) Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and
Narrative Form, Sussex.
Boyle, T. (1989) Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the
Surface of Victorian Sensationalism.
Brantlinger, P. (1982) ‘What is sensational about the sensation novel?’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, pp. 1–28.
Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination, New Haven.
Chodorow, N. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley.
Cixous, H. (1974) ‘The character of character’, New Literary History,
vol. 5, pp. 384–402.
—(1981) ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, in Marks, E. and Courtviron, I.,
New French Feminisms (1976).
—and Clément, C. (1987) The Newly Born Woman, trans B.Wing,
Manchester.
Cominos, P.T. (1963) ‘Late Victorian sexual respectability and the social
system’, International Review of Social History, vol. 8, pp. 18–48,
216–50.
Conway, J. (1980) ‘Stereotypes of femininity in a theory of sexual
evolution’ in Vicinus, M., Suffer and Be Still.
Courtney, W.L. (1904) The Feminine Note in Fiction.
Cross, N. (1985) The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century
Grub Street, Cambridge.
Cunningham, G. (1978) The New Woman and the Victorian Novel.
Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of
the English Middle Classes, 1780–1850.
Davies, T. (1983) ‘Transports of pleasure: fiction and its audiences in
the later nineteenth century’, in Burgin, V. and Kaplan, C.,
Formations of Pleasure.

220
 WORKS REFERRED TO

Djikstra, B. (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in

Finde-Siècle Culture, Oxford.
Edwards, P.D. (1971) Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation
Novel, Its Friends and Foes, St. Lucia, Queensland.
Ellis, H. (1933) Studies in the Psychology of Sex, New York. An earlier
version of this work was published in London in 1897.
Fahnestock, J. (1981) ‘Bigamy: the rise and fall of a convention’,
Nineteenth-Century fiction, vol. 36, pp. 47–71.
Feuer, J. (1984) ‘Melodrama, serial form, and television today’, Screen,
25:1, pp. 4–16.
Flint, K. (1986) The woman reader and the opiate of fiction’, in
Hawthorn, J., The Nineteenth-Century British Novel.
—(1990) Introduction to The Story of a Modern Woman.
Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans.
R. Hurley.
Fowler, B. (1991) The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic
Literature in the Twentieth Century.
Gawsworth, J. (Terence Armstrong) (ed.) (1932) Ten Contemporaries.
Gérin, W. (1972) Emily Brontë: A Biography, Oxford.
Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1978) The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination,
New Haven.
—(1988) No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Words, New Haven.
—(1989) No Man’s Land, vol. 2, Sexchanges, New Haven.
Gledhill, C. (1987) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama
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—(1988) ‘Pleasurable Negotiations’ in Pribram, E.D., Female
Spectators: Looking at Film and Television.
Hall, S. et al. (1980) Culture, Media, Language.
Harris, S.K. (1990) Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels:
Interpretative Strategies, Cambridge.
Helsinger, E.K. et al. (1983) The Woman Question: Society and
Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, three vols.,
Manchester.
Higson, A. and Vincendeau, G. (1986) ‘Melodrama: an introduction’,
Screen, 27:6, pp. 2–5.
Hirschkop, K. and Shepard, D. (1989) Bakhtin and Cultural Theory,
Manchester.
Holcombe, L. (1980) ‘Victorian wives and property: reform of the
married women’s property law, 1857–1882’, in Vicinus, M., A
Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women.
—(1983) Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s
Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England, Oxford.
Hughes, W. (1980) The Maniac in the Cellar: The Sensation Novel of
the 1860s, Princeton.
Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
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Jacobus, M., Fox Keller, E. and Shuttleworth, S. (1990) Body/Politics:

Women and the Discourse of Science.
Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act.
Jardine, A. (1981) ‘Pre-Texts for the “transatlantic” feminist’, Yale
French Studies, vol. 62, pp. 220–36.
Johnson, R.B. (1920) Some Contemporary Novelists (Women).
Jones, A.R. (1986) ‘Writing the body: towards an understanding of
l’écriture féminine’, in Showalter, E., The New Feminist Criticism.
Jordanova, L. (1980) ‘Natural facts: a historical perspective on science
and sexuality’, in McCormack, C. and Strathern, M., Nature,
Culture and Gender, Cambridge.
Kalikoff, B. (1986) Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular
Literature, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Kaplan, E.A. (1987) ‘Mothering, feminism and representation: the
maternal melodrama and the woman’s film 1910–40’, in Gledhill, C.,
Home Is Where the Heart Is.
—(1989) ‘The political unconscious in the maternal melodrama: Ellen
Wood’s East Lynne (1861)’, in Longhurst, D., Gender, Genre and
Narrative Pleasure.
—(1990) Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Kent, S.K. (1990) Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914.
Kersley, G. (1983) Darling Madam: Sarah Grand and Devoted Friend.
Kristeva, J. (1974) ‘La femme, ce n’est jamais ça’, Tel Quel, vol. 59, pp.
19–24.
Kuhn, A. (1985) Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and
Sexuality.
—(1987) ‘Women’s genres: melodrama, soap opera and theory’, in
Gledhill, C., Home Is Where the Heart Is.
Lauretis, T. de (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.
—(1987) Technologies of Gender.
Lawrence, D.H. (1913) Sons and Lovers.
Light, A. (1986), ‘Writing fictions: femininity in the 1950s’, in Radford,
J. (ed.) The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction.
Loesberg, J. (1986) ‘The ideology of narrative form in sensation fiction’,
Representations, vol. 13, pp. 115–38.
Lovell, T. (1987) Consuming Fiction.
Marcus, S. (1969) The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and
Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.
Marks, E. and Courtviron, I. (1981) New French Feminisms, Sussex.
Maxwell, W.B. (1938) Time Gathered.
Mitchell, J. (1984) Women: The longest Revolution.
Mitchell, S. (1977) ‘Sentiment and suffering: women’s recreational
reading in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, vol. 21, pp. 29–45.
Modleski, T. (1984) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies
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Moi, T. (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory.
—(1986) The Kristeva Reader, Oxford.
Moretti, F. (1988) Signs Taken For Wonders.

222
 WORKS REFERRED TO

Nield, K. (1973) Prostitution in the Victorian Age.

Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the
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Poovey, M. (1989) Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of
Gender in Mid-Victorian England.
Pribram, E.D. (1988) Female Spectators: Looking at Film and
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Pykett, L. (1985) ‘George Eliot and Arnold: the narrator’s voice and
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Radway, J. (1987) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and
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Rochefort, C. (1981) ‘Are women writers still monsters?’, in Marks, E.
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Rodowick, D.N. (1987) ‘Madness, authority and ideology: the domestic
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Rubinstein, D. (1986) Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation
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Russett, C.E. (1989) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of
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Schor, N. (1987) Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine.
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—(1982) ‘Feminist criticism in the wilderness’, in Abel, E., Writing and
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—(1985) Introduction to Red Pottage.
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Spencer, J. (1986) The Rise of the Woman Novelist, Oxford.
Strachey, R. (1978) The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s
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223
 WORKS REFERRED TO

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Tompkins, J. (1985) Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of
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Trodd, A. (1989) Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel.
Trudgill, E. (1976) Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and
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Tuchman, G. with Fortin, N. (1989) Edging Women Out: Victorian
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Vicinus, M. (1980a) Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age.
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Walkowitz, J. (1982) Prostitution and Victorian Society, Cambridge.
Weeks, J. (1981) Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality
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Williams, H. (1925) Modern English Writers: Being a Study of
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Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford.
Wills, C. (1989) ‘Upsetting the public: carnival, hysteria and women’s
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Wolff, R.L. (1979) Sensational Victorian: The Life and Work of Mary
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Woolf, V. (1966) ‘Women and fiction’ reprinted in Collected Essays,
vol. 2 (1929).

224
 Index

Acton, William, 15–17, 19; and Bloom, Harold, 203

Grand, 20; and proper body: and medical discourse, 95;
feminine, 15–17 and sensation fiction, 35, 79;
affectivity, 25, 27, 164–7; see also: spectacle; woman
containment, 164; Egerton, Boumelha, Penny, 41, 158
165, 173–4; Grand on, 175; lack, Braddon, Mary Elizabeth,
165; women, victim of, 178 83–113, 201; address, 32, 108;
angel in the house, 12, 16; in Lady amateur, 202; concealed pasts,
Audley’s Secret, 92 84; defies rules, 33; The Doctor’s
Armstrong, Nancy, 23 Wife, 112; and domestic
Aurora Floyd, 98–9; criminality, melodrama, 75; and domestic
87; discourse on women, 88; novel, 151; female body, 35;
girl of the period, 88, 112; feminine spectacle, 91–3,
improper feminine, 88; 97–102; femininity, 91–102;
marriage, 108–9; plot, 86–7; feminisation of heroine, 85;
sales, 7; secrets, 86; spectacle, gender boundaries, 102–3;
99–100, 105; stereotypes, gender and class, 107; hair, 98;
105–6; transgressive past, Henry Dunbar, 85; on heroines,
86–8, 102, 112–13 82; improper feminine, 84, 88,
Austin, Alfred, 24; and proper 92–3, 107; interest in, 198;
feminine, 25, 207–8; women interiority, 91–2, 101; John
and art, 9 Marchmont’s Legacy, 95–7;
madness in, 89–90, 93–6;
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 132, 134 marriage, 108–13; masculinity
Baym, Nina, 203 in, 102–4, 106–7; mimicry of
Besant, Walter, 39–40 masculine form, 206; mother,
Beth Book, The, 194; feminism, lack of, 86–7; and New Woman
180; and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, writing, 143, 151; plots, 85,
185–6; mother of Beth, 180; 110; points of view, 80–1;
proper feminine, 185–6; secret private female spaces, 91–2,
room, 183–6; spiritualising, 101; proper feminine, 84, 95–6;
186; woman artist, 178–80, Run to Earth, 85; secrets, 83–4,
183–6 86–7, 89, 91–2, 107, 110, 111;
Bethell, Sir Richard, 59 on sensation fiction, 53;
Bevington, Merle, 69 success, 6–7; suspicion, 111;
Blackstone, William, 57–8 techniques, 97, 108, 111–12,

225
 INDEX

118; voyeurism, 111–12; and Acts, 20, 151–3

Wood, 115; see also: Aurora Cornhill, 138–9
Floyd; Eleanor’s Victory; Lady Court of Divorce and Matrimonial
Audley’s Secret Causes, 61; and literature, 61
Brandtlinger, Patrick, 198 coverture, 58
British and Foreign Quarterly Cross, Nigel, 201
Review, 56 cultural authority and class, 38–9
Brooks, Peter, 74–5 and gender, 38–9
Broughton, Rhoda, 201; on culture, feminisation of, 23
marriage, 66
Buchanan, Robert, 22; female Daily Telegraph, 144–5
novel and realism, 25–6; on Dallas, E.S., 32, 82
sensation fiction, 30, 34 Darwin, Charles on women, 155
demi-monde, 64–5
Caffyn, K.M. see Iota detailism, 26, 27; and gendered
Caird, Mona, 144–8, 149, 177; discourse, 28; Schor on, 27–8
The Daughters of Danaus, 145–7; dialogism, 132–4
domestic duties, 146; domestic difference, 204–5; sexual and
space, 181; female self-sacrifice, nineteenth-century science, 13–14;
146; on marriage, 144–8; The and women’s writing, 4–5
Morality of Marriage, 144–5, Discords, 148, 165–8, 187–90
146; motherhood, 146, 149 discourse, gendered, x, 22–9, 32,
censorship, 37–40; Hardy on, 39; 36, 38–43, 196, 202–9
Linton on, 39 divorce, 20, 58, 61, 62; a mensa et
Chodorow, Nancy, 122; gender thoro, 58; a vinculo matrimonii,
categories, 161 58; courts, 61; laws, 55, 58–61,
Cholmondeley, Mary, 181–2 130; and sensation fiction, 20,
Christian Remembrancer, 8, 35, 54, 58
51–2 Divorce News, 61
circulating libraries, 30–1, 39, 193 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 155, 186–7,
Cixous, Hélène, 11, 166, 169, 172, 190–1
204–8; l’écriture féminine, 170–1; domestic duties, 146, 181–3; and
l’Empire du Propre, 208;
creativity, 181–3, 202
hysteria, 175; laughing Medusa,
domestic space, 125–7, 156
172; libidinal economies, 207–8;
Dowie, Ménie Muriel: characters,
the Realm of the Gift, 208;
150; eugenics, 150–1; Gallia,
writing and voice, 185
148–52; improper feminine,
class, anxiety about, 51; anxiety in
Wood, 116; in Braddon, 107; 152; liberal feminism, 153;
and cultural authority, 38–9; marriage, 148–52; motherhood;
and gender, 107; and proper 149; proper feminine, 152;
feminine, 189 readers, 151; ‘Revolting
Clément, C, 11, 16, 172; and Daughter’, 150; sexual conduct
hysteria, 175 151–3; stereotypes, 150–1;
Collins, Wilkie, 32; interest in, women and impossibilities,
198; on sensation fiction, 53 148–9; women redefined, 153
conduct books, 13, 16; and East Drysdale, George, 19; and
Lynne, 129; and Sarah Ellis, 16 George Egerton, 19–20;
Contagious Diseases and female sexuality, 17–18

226
 INDEX

East Lynne: address, 118–19; The Wheel of God, 165; on

conduct books, 129; women, 148, 165–76, 177,
confinement, 125–7; dialogism, 195; women’s writing, 168–9,
132–4; domestic space, 125–7; 187–90
double structure, 128; family, Eleanor’s Victory: impoverished
117, 121–2, 124–5, 127; past, 84; marriage, 109–11; and
female sexuality, 122–5; The Old Curiosity Shop, 84–5
feminine narrative, 119, 124–5; revenge, 85–6; secrets, 83, 84,
feminised male, 119–20; 110–11; separate spheres, 69
improper feminine, 130, 133; Eliot, George, 199–200; gender
Kaplan on, 121–2, 128, 132; neutral address, 3; on ‘lady
melodrama, 117, 122; middle- novelists’, 36; model for New
class dream, 117–18; morality, Woman writing, 194; and
134; motherhood, 120, 127–32; realism, 195; and womanliness,
Oliphant on, 117; patriarchal 160
family, 121; ‘phallic Mother’, Ellis, Havelock, 138; on women,
120, 127; plot, 117–18; 17
proper feminine, 124, 126, 130, Ellis, Sarah, 12, 16
133, 134; readers, 124, 127; essentialism, x, 5; biological, 156,
realism, 33; separate spheres, 206–7; in Egerton, 168, 170,
126; servants, 123–4, 129; 173; and Kristeva, 179; and
sexual power, 118, 122–5; New Woman writing, 193
subversiveness, 132–4; eugenics, 150–1
success of, 6, 117; evolutionists and woman, 12, 13,
technique, 118, 124, 132–3 155
écriture féminine: Cixous on,
170–1; and New Woman family, anxiety about, 51, 116,
writing, 5, 170–1, 206–9; 121; in East Lynne, 117, 121–2,
and sensation fiction, 5, 124–5, 127; in Lady Audley’s
50, 206–9 Secret, 105; patriarchal, 56,
Edinburgh Review, 47 121; and sensation fiction, 76;
Education Art of 1870, 193 and Wood, 116
Edwards, P.D., 47 female gothic, 6
effeminacy in art, 40, 42 female spaces, private, 91–2, 101
Egerton, George: affectivity, 165, female tradition, x
173–4; ‘A Cross Line’, 170–3; feminine: definitions
on Drysdale’s woman, 19–20; problematised, 10; feeling,
essentialism, 168, 170, 173; 174–6; French theories, 166;
feeling, 165; hysteria, 168–9, irruption of, 4; and New
172; on maternity, 167–8, 169, Woman, 139; and sensation
174; on men, 167, mimicking novel, 31, 32–5, 202
male, 206; nature, 166, 168; feminism,, 164; appropriation of
and the New Woman, 169; texts, 132; and hysteria, 172;
polyvocality, 195; primitivism, liberal, 149, 153; maternity,
166–7; proper feminine, 188–9; 149, 168; and New Woman,
sexuality, 167–8, 170–2; 137; and New Woman writing,
Showalter on, 171; spectacle, 156, 192, 198, 204;
173, 206; success, 7; True regenerative woman, 165;
Womanhood, 158–9, 166, 173; rhetoric and New Woman

227
 INDEX

writing, 192; second wave, ix–x, women, 206, 207; on fiction, x,

203, 204; sensation fiction, 22–9, 32, 36, 38–43, 196, 202–5;
48–51; and utopianism, 184; masculine privileged, 205; New
and womanliness, 158 Woman writing, 205; and
feminists: and gender, 10; liberal nostalgia, 43; realism, 196;
and maternity, 149; marriage, sensation fiction, 205; sexual
144; and New Woman writing, stereotypes, 43; and women,
156, 204 206, 207
femininity: in Braddon, 91–102; genre: concept of, 73–4;
contradictory, 165–6; as lack, historicised, 47–54, 73–82;
165; Linton on, 71–2; and New Woman writing, 202; and
madness, 89; and New Woman popular narrative forms, 73–82
writing, 5; and realism, 26, 40; Gilbert, S., 203
in sensational novel, 5 Girl of the Period, 20, 158, 200;
femininization: of culture, 23; of Aurora Floyd, 88, 112; defined,
heroine, 85; of masculinity, 69–71; on marriage, 69–70; in
149–50; and the novel, 9 New Woman writing, 150; in
Feuer, Jane, 97 sensation novel, 69
fiction: as feminised form, 22–9; Gissing, George, 3, 185, 186; on
feminine forms marginalised, sexual anarchy, x
36; gendered discourse, x, 22–9, Gledhill, Christine, 78, 197
32, 38–43, 196, 202–5; Gosse, Edmund, 36
improper feminine, 24–5, 202–3; gothic novel, 74
and men, 26; proper feminine, gothic romance, 77
24–5, 202–3; separate sphere, Grand, Sarah: and Acton’s woman,
39–40 20; domestic space, 156; feeling,
filiation, 203 174–5; gender, 157, 159;
Fortin, Nina, 36 hysteria, 174–5; male
Foucault, Michel, 13–14 characters, 155–6, 157;
Fowler, Bridget, 77 marriage question, 152–3, 157;
Fraser’s, 53–4 maternity, 157; Noble on, 41;
French literature, 37–8, 42, 195, proper feminine, 159; and
200; naturalism, 200; and New scientific discourse, 154–5;
Woman writing, 141 success, 7; womanliness, 159;
Freud, Sigmund: on hysteria, 142, see also: The Beth Book; The
181–2; Medusa’s head, 171–2; Heavenly Twins
Oedipal drama, 115, 121–2 Greg, W.R., 65
Gubar, S., 203
Geddes, Patrick, 13
gender: anxiety, x, 21, 23, 51; Hansson, Laura Marholm, 196
boundaries, 102–3, 138–42, Hardy, Thomas, 3, 200; on
159–60; categories, 10, 14, censorship, 39; anti-marraige,
19–21, 81, 82, 138–42, 153, 144; and New Woman, 160
156–7, 159–60, 161, 195, 200; Harlequin romance, 77
class, 107; cultural authority, Heavenly Twins, The: affectivity,
38–9; discourse on, 67–8; 175; condemned, 41; cross-
gender and writing, 3–10 dressing, 159; feminine and
gendered discourse, 202–9; feeling, 174–6; gender
detailism, 28; erasure of boundaries, 159–60; hysteria,

228
 INDEX

174–5; reviewed, 8–9; sales, 7; Jordanova, Ludmilla, 14

sexuality, 41; style, 9; True journalism: and prostitution, 62–5;
Womanhood, 160 and sensation novel, 54, 199
Higson, Andrew, 73
Hughes, Winifred, 47, 81 Kaplan, E.Ann, 121–2, 128, 132
Hutton, R.H., 26 Kemble, John, 56
Huyssen, Andreas, 22; on mass Keynotes, 148, 165, 169–73;
culture, 31 ‘clouds passage’, 170–3; effects
hysteria: Cixous and Clément on, on young, 8; success, 7
175; feminism, 172; and Freud, Kristeva, Julia, 178–9, 204–6;
142, 181–2; and gifts, 181–2; essentialism, 179; hysteria, 205;
Kristeva on, 205; and medical marginality of women, 32, 205–6
discourse, 175, 178; and New Kuhn, Annette, 79–80
Woman, 141–2
hysteria, literature of, 169–76; Lacan, Jacques, 122, 131; and
Egerton, 168–9, 172; Grand, lack, 165
174–5; and New Woman Lady Audley’s Secret: angel in the
writing, 168–9 house, 92; boudoir, 91–2;
criminality, 87; discourse on
improper feminine: and Aurora women, 88; and family, 105;
Floyd, 88; and Braddon, 84, 88, gender boundaries, 102–3;
92–3, 107; defined, 16, 209; improper feminine, 92–3, 107;
and detail, 27; and Dowie, 152; and madness, 89–90, 93–4, 95;
and East Lynne, 130, 133; plot, 85, 87, 89–90, 91, 103–4;
feeling, 27; and fiction, 24–5, proper feminine, 88, 90, 94–5,
202–3; and Lady Audley’s 104; representation, 33; sales,
Secret, 92–3, 107; madness, 92–5; 6–7; secrets, 86–7, 89, 91–2;
New Woman, 140; and New social mobility, 69; spectacle,
Woman writing, 19–20, 205; 91–3, 100, 161–2; success, 117;
and ornamental style, 28; transgressive past, 86–8, 92,
patriarchal family, 56; and 102
proper feminine, 56; and language, access for women, 180
sensation novel, 19–20, 34–5, Lawrence, D.H., 38, 166, 190–1,
50, 82, 84, 205 195
Infant and Child Custody Bill, 55 Lee, Vernon, 37
inheritance plots, 115–17 Leigh Smith, Barbara, 57, 58–60
Iota (K.M. Caffyn), 160–3; anti- Lewes, George Henry, 36
feminist, 159; True Light, Alison, 77
Womanhood, 162–3; Linton, Eliza Lynn: on censorship,
womanliness, 159 39; domestic ideal of woman,
Irigaray, Luce, 166, 169, 204–7 67–8, 70; ‘La femme passée’,
70; on femininity, 71–2; The
James, Henry, 132, 199; on Girl of the Period’, 20, 69–71;
Braddon, 154; on sensation on New Woman, 139–40; ‘Wild
fiction, 83 Women’, 139
Jane Eyre, 86 literary history, canonical, 3
Jardine, Alice, 179 literary market, 52; and sensation
Johnson, R.B., 196 fiction, 53
Jones, Ann Rosaline, 205 Lock hospitals, 152

229
 INDEX

Lovell, Terry, 200–1, 202; on New maternity, 55; Egerton on, 167–8
Woman, 138 169, 174; feminism, 149, 168;
Grand on, 157; and liberal
McCarthy, Justin, 55 feminists, 149; spiritualised,
madness: and femininity, 89; and 168; womanhood, 157; see
improper feminine, 92–5; in also: motherhood
Lady Audley’s Secret, 89–90, Matrimonial Causes Act, 54, 61
93–4, 95 Maudsley, Henry, 14
male writer: and realism, 37; and medical discourse, 175, 178; and
sensation, 32 female body, 95; see also:
manliness: British, 42–3; realism, medical science; scientific
193 discourse
Mansel, Henry, 30–1; attacks medical science and women,
sensation fiction, 51 13–17, 95; see also: medical
marriage: Anti-Marriage League, discourse; scientific discourse
144, 147; anxiety about, 51; in Medusa, 171–2
Braddon, 108–13; Broughton melodrama, 6, 207; and class, 117;
on, 66; Caird on, 144–8; as cultural field, 76–7; as
commercial metaphors, 65–6; cultural touchstone, 75; and
definition and sexuality, 143–4; East Lynne, 117, 122; erasure,
Dowie on, 148–52; and 116–17; and sensation fiction,
feminists, 144; Hardy on, 144; 53, 74–5, 199; social crisis, 75;
girl of the period on, 69–70; and Wood, 115–17
Grand on, 152–3, 157; and law melodrama, domestic, 6, 75,
reforms, 55; male anxieties, 114–18
109; mistresses, 64; in New melodrama, maternal, 128–9, 131–2,
Woman writing, 6, 143–53; 162–3
patriarchy, 56; prostitution, men: Egerton on, 167; and
64–5, 113, 162; Saturday literature, 3, 22, 26; marriage
Review on, 68; and sensation anxiety, 109; and New Woman,
fiction, 6, 20, 54, 55–61, 65–6, 160; New Woman writing on,
108–13; and sexual double 154; sexually diseased, 152–3,
standard, 18; sexuality, 143–4; 154–7; Spasmodic poetry, 31
Stutfield on, 144; Westminster menstrual cycle, 14
Review on, 65, 144–5; and Meredith, George, 3, 200
women, 55–61, 145; and Meredith, Owen, 16
women’s legal subjugation, mind/body dichotomy, 14–15
56–61; woman purchase, 145 mistresses, 64
Married Woman’s Property Act, 59 Mitchell, Juliet, 4, 175
Married Woman’s Property Bill, Modleski, Tania, 74
58, 61 Moore, George, 3, 200;
masculinity: in Braddon, 102–4, censorship, 38–9;
106–7; feminised, 149–50; and naturalism, 38
Grub St, 186–7; and mother, lack of, 86–7
naturalism, 28, 36; and realism, motherhood, 149; Caird on, 146,
40, 193 149; in East Lynne, 120, 127–
mass culture and women, 30–2 32; and liberal feminists, 149;
mass-cultural forms, 78–80, 111 and New Woman, 139; and
maternal custody, 55 sensation novel, 86–7;

230
 INDEX

self-sacrifice, 146; see also: 156, 192, 198, 204; feminist

maternity rediscovery, 198; feminist
mothering: female, 161; rhetoric, 192; form, 194–5; and
reproduction of, 163 French writing, 141; gender
Mudie’s, 39; see also: circulating anxiety, x, 21, 23; gender
libraries categories, 10, 14, 19–21, 142,
153, 156–7, 195, 200; gendered
naturalism, x, 28–9, 36; and discourse on fiction, x, 22–9,
decadence, 37; European, 195; 36, 38–43, 196, 205; girl of the
French, 37–8, 42, 195; and period, 150; heroines, 9–10;
masculinity, 28, 36; and George hysteria, 141–2; hysterical
Moore, 38; and New Woman literature, 168–9; ideologically
writing, 40–1 permissible, 197; improper
New Fiction Debate, 36–43 feminine, 19–20, 205; invasion
New Realism, 36, 196, 200 of fiction, 3–4, 9; James on,
New Woman, 20–1; as construct, 154; low form, 8; market-place,
137–8; Cornhill on, 138–9; 37–8; marriage, 6, 143–53;
described, 137–42; and melodramatic excess, 196–7; on
Egerton, 169; feminism, 137; men, 154; naturalism, 36, 40–1;
gender boundaries, 138–42; and New Woman, 201; plots,
hysteria, 141–2; improper 21; political, 204; proper
feminine, 140; Linton on, feminine, 19–20, 186, 187,
139–40; Lovell on, 138; and 194, 196, 205, 207; proto-
men, 160; and motherhood, feminism, 5; proto-modernist,
139; and New Woman writing, 195–6; prostitution, 154;
xi, 201; and political life, 139– Quarterly Review on, 27;
40; proper feminine, 138; readers, 194; and realism, 40–1
‘Revolting Daughters’, 20, 139, rediscovery, ix–x; reviewers,
146, 150, 158, 159, 200; and 8–9; ‘Revolting Daughters’,
sexuality, 140–1; spectacle, 138; 200; sales, 6–7; scientific
violation of feminine, 139; discourse, 154–5; and sensation
‘Wild Women’, 20, 139–40, fiction,
158, 200 5–6; and sexuality, 7–3, 10,
New Woman writing, 3–4, 177–8; 200; Showalter on, 192–3;
address, 32, 197, 202; aesthetic spirituality, 156; and Stead, 143
flaws, 192, 204; attacks on, style, 6, 194–7, 200, 206, 207;
40–1; authors, 40–3; biological subjects of, 6, 177–8, 188, 200,
essentialism, 156; bourgeois 207; success of, ix, 6–7; threat
order, 142; and Braddon, 143, to art, 8–9; ‘Wild Women’, 200;
151; controversy, 7–8; debate women misrepresented, 41–2;
on, 36–43; described, 5; and and Wood, 143
desire, 177–8; disappearance, Nightingale, Florence, 86–7
198–99; écriture féminine, 5, Nineteenth Century, 146
170–1, 206–9; Eliot as model, Nobel, J.A., 41
194; essentialism, 193; Norton, Lady Caroline, 55
established forms, 6; feeling, novel: and discourse of
168–9, 176; female forms, 6; containment, 57; fear of
feminine genre, 202; femininity, feminisation, 9; female and
re-inscription of, 5; feminism, realism, 25–6; and men, 3;

231
 INDEX

stratified, 193; and women, 4, improper feminine, 56; and

22–9; women marginalised, 193 Lady Audley’s Secret, 88, 90,
nymphomania, 15 94–5, 104; and New Woman,
138; and New Woman writing,
Oedipal drama, 203; and parental 19–20, 186, 187, 194, 196,
substitution, 115 205, 207; patriarchal family,
Old Curiosity Shop, The, 84–5 56; prostitution, 151–2; and
Oliphant, Margaret, ‘The Anti- representation, 40; and
Marriage League’, 144, 147; on Saturday Review, 67–8, 69–72;
East Lynne, 117; on literary and sensation novels, 19–20,
market, 52; on Married 35, 50, 82, 84, 205, 207; and
Women’s Property Bill, 59–61; servants, 124; and Trollope, 24
on Matrimonial Causes Act, 61; prostitution, 20; definitions of,
on sensation fiction, 48, 51, 53; 63–4; as image, 62; and
and unfeminine, 34 marriage, 64–5, 113, 162; and
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), New Woman writing, 154;
86, 139, 201–2; on divorce, 61 press reporting, 62–5; and
proper feminine, 151–2; Rose
Pall Mall Gazette, 38 on, 62; and sensation fiction,
pasts, transgressive, 84–5; in 20; as victims, 64; Westminster
Aurora Floyd, 86–8, 102, Review on, 65 Punch, 138
112–13; in Lady Audley’s
Secret, 86–8, 92, 102; see also: Quarterly Review, 27; and
secrets periodicals, 30
Patmore, Coventry, 12
patriarchal family: in East Lynne, Radway, Janice, 77–8
121; improper feminine, 56; Ramée, Marie Louise de la see
proper feminine, 56 Ouida
patriarchy, 56; marriage, 56; and Ray, W. Fraser, 9
transgressive women, 109 Reade, Charles, 32
penny dreadfuls, 53 readers: and mastery, 102; and
periodicals: and women, 13; and New Woman writing, 194; and
sensation novel, 30 sensation novel, 48–9, 79–80,
Police Reporter, 61 111–21
Pollock, Griselda, 101 realism: debates on, 25–9; East
Pre-Raphaelites, 98, 199; and Lynne, 33; Eliot, George, 195;
fantasy women, 101; and feminine, 26–7; feminine and
women, 150 lack, 26; and femininity, 40;
proper feminine, 12–13, 15, 63; gendered discourse, 196; male
Acton on, 15–17; and Alfred writers, 37; manliness, 193; and
Austin, 25, 207–8; Besant, masculinity, 40; and New
39–40; The Beth Book, 185–6; Woman writing, 40–1; rise of,
Braddon, 84, 95–6; class, 189; 25–6; and selection, 41; and
The Daughter’s of Danaus, sensation novel, 33–4; women,
147; defined, 16, 56, 209; and 25–7
Dowie, 152; East Lynne, 124,
‘Revolting Daughters’, 20, 139,
126, 130, 133, 134; Egerton,
146, 150, 158, 159, 200
188–9; and fiction, 24–5,
202–3; Grand on, 159; Rhys, Jean, 189

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Rich, Adrienne, 203 anxiety, x, 21, 23, 51; gender

Richardson, Dorothy, 196, 200 categories, 10, 14, 21, 81, 82;
Rochefort, Christiane, 3, 207 gendered discourse on fiction,
Rodowick, David, 116–17 x, 22–9, 32, 36, 205; girl of the
romances, readers of, 77–8 period, 69; and improper
Romanes, George, 165 feminine, 19–20, 34–5, 50, 82,
Rose, Jacqueline, 54; on 84, 205; interiority, 41;
prostitution, 62 invasion of fiction, 3–4, 9; and
Rubinstein, David, 198 journalism, 54, 199; literary
market, 53; literary sensation,
Said, Edward, 203 ix; Mansel attacks, 51;
Saturday Review, 11; on marriage, marriage, 6, 20, 54, 55–61,
68; proper feminine, 67–8, 69, 65–6, 108–13; and melodrama,
72; prostitution, 63–4; on 53, 74–5, 199; and mothers,
women, 67–8 86–7; Oliphant on, 48, 51, 53;
Schor, Naomi, 27–8 output, 201; periodicals, 30;
scientific discourse: New Woman plots, 5, 19–21, 74–5; popular
writing, 154–5; and sexual forms, 53–4, 74–5; production
difference, 13–14; and women, and distribution, 30–1; and
155; see also: evolutionists, proper feminine, 19–20, 35, 50,
medical discourse, medical 82, 84, 205, 207; prostitution,
science 20; readers of, 48–9, 79–80,
Scott, Sir Walter, 24 111–12; and realism, 33–4;
secret rooms, 183–6; see also: rediscovery, ix–x; and New
female spaces, private Woman writing, 5–6; revenge,
secrets, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 91–2, 107, 84–5; reviewers, 8–9; sales, 6–7,
110–11, 114–15 secrets, 83–4; separate spheres,
semiotic, 179–80 68–9; setting, 47–8; serial
sensational novel, 3–4; address, 32, publication, 30; sexuality, 7–8,
78, 177, 197, 202; anxieties 10, 34–5; Showalter on, 48–50,
about, 32; authors, 4; body, 35, 80, 83–4; social mobility, 69; 5
79; Braddon on, 53; Collins on, spectacle, 173; style, 6, 206,
53; commercial nature, 30–1, 207; subversive, 80; success of,
47; concealed past, 84–5; ix, 6–7; and Westminster
controversy, 7–8, 30–5, 51–4; Review, 51, 52
described, 5, 47–8; separate spheres, 12–13, 60, 68,
disappearance, 198–9; divorce, 69; and East Lynne, 126; of
20, 54, 58; domestic novels, 74; fiction, 39–40; and sensation
écriture féminine, 5, 50, 206–9; novels, 68–9
Edinburgh Review, 47; and servants, 129; in East Lynne,
established forms, 6, 53; fallen 123–4; proper feminine, 124
woman, 64; family and change, sexology, 20
76; female forms, 6; and sexual difference and science,
feminine, 31, 32–5, 202; 13–14
femininity reinscription, 5; sexual diseases, 151–3, 154–7
feminism, 48–51; fictional sexuality, 151–3; anxiety about,
representation, 33; heroines, 4, 51; definition and marraige,
5, 9–10, 49, 81–2, 85, 87–8; 143–4; Drysdale on, 17–18; in
historical analysis, 50–4; gender East Lynne, 118, 122–5;

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Egerton on, 167–8, 170–2; fear in Egerton, 158–9, 166, 173; in

of female, 15–16; in Grand, 41; Grand, 160; in Iota, 162–3
and marriage, 18, 143–4; and Tuchman, Gaye, 36, 193
New Woman, 140–1; in New
Woman writing, 7–8, 10, 200; utopianism, 184
representation of, 36–7; and
sensation fiction, 7–8, 10, 34–5; Vicinus, Martha: on domestic
and women, 8, 14–15 melodrama, 114; on
Showalter, Elaine: on The Beth melodrama, 75
Book, 184; on Egerton, 171; on Vincendeau, Ginette, 73
Gissing, x; on New Woman Vizetelly, Henry, 37–8
writing, 192–3; on sensation
fiction, 48–50, 80, 83–4; on
Waugh, Arthur, 40, 154
women’s writing, 177
Westminster Review, 51, 52, 56–7;
Smith, Alys Pearsall, 181 and marriage, 144–5; and
Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, 175 prostitution, 65; and sensation
Spasmodic poetry, 31 fiction, 51, 52; on women’s
spectacle, 178; in Braddon, 91–3, wrongs, 60–1
97–102, 105, 161–2; in ‘Wild Women’, 20, 139–40, 158,
Egerton, 173, 206; and New 200
Woman, 138; in sensation Wilde, Oscar, 171
fiction, 173; woman as Williams, Linda, 128
public, 67 Williams, Raymond, 199
Spencer, Herbert, 13; on women, Woman Question, 7
155 Womanhood, True, 157, 158–63;
Spencer, Jane, 23 Egerton on, 158–9, 166, 173;
Stead, W.T., 5; on New Woman Grand on, 160; Iota, 162–3;
writing, 143; and social change, and maternity, 162–3
41 womanliness, 158–63; constructed,
Stutfield, Hugh, 42–3; on 158; and feminism, 158; in
interiority, 20; on marriage, 144 Grand, 159; in Iota, 159
suffragism and ‘Wild Women’, 139 women: affectivity, 25, 27, 164–7,
Swinburne, Algernon, 24 173–4, 175, 178; angels in the
syphilis, 153, 154 house, 12, 16, 92;
characterised, 43; Cixous and
Taylor, Harriet, 56–7 Clément on, 11; containment,
Temple Bar, 9, 24 164; Darwin on, 155;
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 185 definitions challenged, 6;
Thackeray, W.M., 66 definition problematised, 10;
Thompson, J. Arthur, 13 and detail, 26, 27–8; discourse
Tillotson, Kathleen, 47 on, 54, 88; discourse of
Times, The, 32 containment, 56–7; domestic,
Todorov, T., 47 12–13, 125–7, 146, 156, 181–
Tompkins, Jane, 73 3, 202; domestic ideal, 67–8,
Trodd, Anthea, 83–4 70; and education, 14; Egerton
Trollope, Anthony, 24; and proper on, 148, 165–76, 177, 195;
feminine, 24 feeling, 164; gendered discourse
True Womanhood, 157, 158–63; and erasure, 206, 207;

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Havelock Ellis on, 17; marginalised, 202–3, 205; in

evolution, 12, 13, 155; nineteenth century, 3; survival
impossibilities of lives, 148–9; of, 200–1
inferior literature, 22, 30–2; women’s writings: Cixous on, 185;
irrationality, 164; and the law, and difference, 4–5; as
57–61; legal subjugation in difference, 4–5; Egerton on,
marriage, 55–61; as Madonna, 168–9, 187–90; erased, ix;
16; marginal position, 32, 205–6; feeling, 42; interiority, 40, 41;
and marriage, 55–61, 145; and intuition, 42; marginalised,
mass culture, 30–2; and medical 186–7; neglect, 199; Showalter
science, 13–17, 95; mind/body on, 177; see also: New Woman
dichotomy, 14–15; as mother, writing; sensation novel
12; misrepresentation in New Wood, Ellen (Mrs Henry), 6, 201
Woman writing, 41–2; and address, 32, 108, 118–19; and
periodicals, 13; and Pre- Braddon, 115; class anxiety,
Raphaelites, 101, 150; as public 116; domestic melodrama, 75,
spectacle,67; realism, 25–7; 114–18; family anxiety, 116,
redefined, 153; regenerative, 121; inheritance plots, 115–17;
165; as ‘relative creature’, 12; interest in, 198; Lord
reproductive function, 14; Oakburn’s Daughters, 114;
Saturday Review on, 67–8; manipulation of point of view,
scientific discourse, 155; self- 80–1; and melodrama, 115–17;
representation, 37; self-sacrifice, and New Woman writing, 143;
146; and sexuality, 8, 14–15; secrets, 114–15; servants in,
as spectacle, 54, 67, 91–3, 123–4; spectatorship, 111;
97–102, 105, 138, 161–2, 173, techniques, 118; Trevlyn Hold,
178, 206; subject of, 11–18; 115–16; Verner’s Pride, 116,
supra-rationality, 164–5; 123; see also: East Lynne
Westminster Review, 60–1; Woolf, Virginia, 183, 196, 200;
whore/Madonna dichotomy, revalues feminine, 203–4
168 writing: as career available to
women artists, 178–91, 192; women, 201–2; Egerton on,
Austin on, 9; The Beth Book, 168–9, 187–90; and gender, 3–10
178–80, 183–6; and domestic Wynter, Andrew, 150
duties, 181–3
women writers: language, 180; Zola, Emile, 37–8

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