Lady Audley’s Secret Lecture Notes PDF

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Exploration of Lady Audley's Secret for Victorian module. Includes quotes from author and secondary resources that should be explored if deciding to use this novel in the final assignment. ...

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Lady Audley’s Secret LECTURE NOTES

Sensation fiction: Mary Braddon.

Social and Literary Causes of the Sensation Novel

The Newgate Novel The Condition of England Novel The Domestic Novel Melodrama Femininity and divorce The abolition of the stamp duty ‘In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral over villainy, on virtue printing paper in 1855 and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience(…) we come as close as it is normally possible for artto come journalism to the pure Tabloid self-righteousness of the lynching mob.’ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays (Princeton University Press,1957) p. 121  Notorious murder trials New weekly and monthly (often illustrated) literary magazines high-interest, serialised fiction to maintain a stable readership.

"What distinguishes the true sensation genre as it appeared in its prime during the 1860s is the violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary perception" (16). If we take the early novels of Collins as our locus classicus, we can see that the new subgenre indeed fused opposites, both possible and improbable, solidly English and yet exotic, sordid and yet respectable, refined yet violent, scientific and yet superstitious, documentary and yet far-fetched, realistic and yet romantic, rational and at the same time absurdist, but above all romantic and suspenseful, “a kind of civilized melodrama, modernized and domesticated — not only an everyday gothic, minus the supernatural and aristocratic trappings, but also a middle-class Newgate, featuring spectacular crime unconnected with the usual criminal classes.” Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: the Sensation Novel of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ, 1980) p. 16

W. Fraser Rae in his 1865 article ‘Sensation Novelists – Miss Braddon’ in the North British Review commented that: ‘Others before her have written stories of blood and lust, of atrocious crimes and hardened criminals, and these have excited the interest of a very wide circle of readers. But the class that welcomed them was the lowest in the social scale, as well as in mental capacity To Miss Braddon belongs the credit of having penned similar

‘Those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors...Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we [are] treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.’ Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 9 November 1865 p. 594

 THESE QUOTES WILL BE GOOD TO USE TO EXPLORE THE BOOK ENTIRELY. IT’LL DEMONSTRATE TO THE PROFESSOR THAT YOU HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED THEIR LECTURE AND SHOWN AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NOVEL AND ITS TIME.

 ‘What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshly and unlovely record.’  Since the advent of sensationalism, she argued, the heroines of English fiction have been:  ‘Women driven wild with love for the man who leads them into desperation...Women who marry their grooms in fits of sensual passion...who pray their lovers to carry them off from husbands and homes they hate...who give and receive burning kisses and frantic embraces, and live in a voluptuous dream...the dreaming maiden waits. She waits now for flesh and muscles, for strong arms that seize her, and warm breath that thrills her through, and a host of other physical attractions...Were the sketch made from the man’s point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England...that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food.’ Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s, 91 (1862), 569.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915) ‘Queen of the Circulating Libraries’  just look at the reviews! ‘Others before her have written stories of blood and lust, of atrocious crimes and hardened criminals, and these have excited the interest of a very wide circle of readers. But the class that welcomed them was the lowest in the social scale, as well as in mental capacity. To Miss Braddon belongs the credit of having penned similar stories in easy and correct English, and published them in

three volumes in place of issuing them in penny numbers. She may boast, without fear of contradiction, of having temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing-room.’ W.Fraser Rae, ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’ North British Review 43 Sept. 1865 105

“Braddon has brought in the reign of bigamy as an interesting and fashionable crime…an invention which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attraction of impropriety and yet loving the shelter of the law.” Oliphant (1867)

CHAPTER 7 ‘Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance...better the pretty influence of the teacups and saucers gracefully wielded in a woman’s hand, than all the inappropriate power snatched at the point of the pen from the unwilling sterner sex. Imagine all the women of England elevated to the high level of masculine intellectuality; superior to crinoline; above pearl powder and Mrs Rachel Levison; above taking the pains to be pretty; above making themselves agreeable; above tea-tables, and that cruelly scandalous and rather satirical gossip which even strong men delight in; and what a dreary, utilitarian life the sterner sex must lead.’

“Commentators were more worried about traffic in the other direction, and feared that the pernicious nonsense of sensationalism was passing from the parlour to the kitchen and turning the working classes into revolutionaries. In short, sensation fiction disturbingly blurred the boundaries between the classes, between high art, low art and no art (newspapers), between the public and the private, and between the respectable and the low-life or demi-monde.’ Pykett (1994) p. 9

Attributes of Sensation Novels bigamous marriages

‘Perhaps more so than for any other genre, Victorian criticism of sensation fiction fore-grounded the intersection of economic, gender, and aesthetic

misdirected letters romantic triangles  heroines placed in

concerns. From Henry Mansel in the Quarterly Review to Margaret Oliphant in Blackwood’s, critics in the high-culture periodicals decried the commodification of literature that appeared to accompany the emergence of sensation fiction; the danger sensation novels posed for women, who were exposed not only to expressly criminal behaviour but also to more subversive ‘unfeminine’ behaviour; and sensation’s danger to both writers and readers, whose talents and tastes would be compromised and degraded by a steady diet of ‘unwholesome’ literary fare.’ Solveig C. Robinson, ‘Editing Belgravia: M.E. Braddon’s Defense of ‘Light Literature’ Victorian Periodicals Review 28:2 (Summer 1995)...