Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction: 1855-1890

Of our contemporary school of lady novelists of the sensational kind, commencing with Miss Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood (whose earliest works already date more than a quarter of a century back), continuing with Mrs Riddell and Miss Rhoda Broughton, and culminating in the writer who calls herself ‘Ouida’, much need not be said. They have unquestionably acquired and perfected the art of enthralling the reader’s attention and keeping it captive: in that art less skilful, if more moral, writers might do well to take a lesson from them. In all or most of their books, the views of life are distorted, the whole atmosphere is oppressive and tainted, the sentiment false, the style tawdry and slipshod. As well might a reader pluck one of the poisonous fruits of French fiction (some ‘scrofulous French novel’, such as Mr Browning describes, and such as Westgate [character in the novel] snatched from Hebe’s hand and flung into the fire), as gather one from any of these trees, loaded with apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.

On 2 November 1899, about eighty people gathered in the Church of Our Lady, Grove End Road, the small Catholic church in St John’s Wood, that respectable suburb of North London. They had come to pay their final respects to Florence Marryat (b. 1833), novelist, journalist, spiritualist, actress, lecturer, singer, teacher, who had, as The Era noted, ‘in the course of a busy career … produced something like seventy novels and works of travel’ and in doing so had ‘obtained a very wide popularity’. Amongst those paying their respects were Marryat’s children and grandchildren, her old servant, Selina Nicholls, and a small collection of celebrities: the actor and satirist, George Grossmith, the novelist Annie Thomas, the playwright Arthur à Beckett, and members of the D’Oyly Carte opera company, with whom Marryat had once performed. The tributes were led by The Times, who recalled Marryat’s ‘dual capacity’ as novelist and actress, her ‘dramatic instinct’, and her hallowed status as a daughter of the much-loved novelist Captain Frederick Marryat R. N ‘from whom it may be presumed that she inherited her literary talents’. But The Times also expressed the thoughts of many when it suggested that if Marryat were remembered at all (which seemed unlikely) it would be solely for her ‘great industry’, which characterized her whole life, rather than for her literary endeavours. Whilst it was true that Marryat’s novels – apparently produced ‘without any great effort on her part’ – had enjoyed ‘a great deal of popularity’ in their time, the novelist herself had always recognized their ephemerality, being fully conscious that she lacked her father’s claims to permanent greatness. She would not expect or want anything more.

Ellen Wood is best remembered for her novel East Lynne, which began its serial publication in the New Monthly Magazine in January 1861 at the beginning of the sensation boom which followed the response to Wilkie Col-lins’s The Woman in White (serialized in Dickens’s All the Year Round from 26 November 1859). The serialization of East Lynne also overlapped with the appearance of that other classic of the sensation novel, Mary Elizabeth Brad-don’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which began its incomplete serialization in Robin Goodfellow from 6 July to 28 September 1861, and subsequently re-ran in the Sixpenny Magazine between January and December 1862. Like The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, East Lynne was a Victorian sensation and a sensational best-seller. Indeed, it was one of the most successful novels of the nineteenth century, going through five editions in the year in which it first appeared in three-volume form and accumulating British sales of around half a million copies by the end of the century. In the latter part of the twentieth century, following the revival of interest in nineteenth-century women’s writing in general and the sensation novel in particular, there were several new editions of this novel aimed both at students and the more general reader. In the nineteenth century East Lynne was also a much borrowed item in the circulating libraries from which many middle class readers obtained their leisure reading material. (Readers could visit these libraries in person or place orders by post, and the number of volumes they could borrow at any one time depended on the level of subscription they paid.) In addition, dramatic adaptations of the novel were a staple of the English popular stage repertoire well into the twentieth century (although, as several of her obituarists lamented, Wood never received a penny from these dramatic adaptations owing to the vagaries of the copyright laws). Wood’s best-seller also enjoyed a similar success in north America, where several publishers brought out pirated editions of the novel. It was also translated into numerous other languages. The success of East Lynne laid the foundations of Wood’s career as popular and prolific author, although none of her subsequent novels matched the sales figures of her first success: St Martin’s Eve, for example, had sold about 31,000 copies by the time of Wood’s death, 90,000 copies by the end of the nineteenth century, and around 190,000 by the early 1920s.

Felicia Mary Frances Skene was born to Scottish parents in Aix-en-Provence, France, on 23 May 1821. She was the youngest of seven children. Her father, James Skene, was a cultured gentleman and member of the Scottish Bar who enjoyed literature and the arts and spent much of his leisure time sketching. A close friend of Sir Walter Scott, he figures in the fourth canto of ‘Marmion’ and in the Dedicatory Episde of Ivanhoe. Felicia’s mother, Jane Forbes, was the daughter of Sir William Forbes, sixth baronet of Pitsligo; Frances Power Cobbe described her as ‘a tall, dignified Scotchwoman, with frank and pleasant manners’. Both the Skene and the Forbes families had Jacobite connections. Through his marriage to a Miss Moir, James Skene’s father came to possess the Bible used by Charles I at the time of his execution.

Given the large amount of work that has been undertaken in recent years on forgotten novelists from the mid-nineteenth century, it is remarkable that the work of Mary Cecil Hay (1839–86) has escaped notice. Born on January 10 1839 in Shrewsbury, the daughter of Thomas William Hay and Cecilia Carbin, Hay published a considerable number of novels and short stories in the 1870s and 1880s. Although her reputation was inferior to that of better known sensation writers such as Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins, it was enough to sustain several editions of her work and attract notice in a range of publications. Describing her death on 24 July 1886 after a ‘long illness’, The Athenaeum expressed its regret at the passing away of ‘the well-known novelist’ and described Hay as ‘an excellent and charitable woman who worked exceedingly hard’. Much of Hay’s work appeared in both three-volume and one-volume form, as well as being published in the Family Herald, The Argosy, and The Belgravia, and she enjoyed considerable popularity in the United States and Australia.

The novels of Dora Russell, with Beneath the Wave notable among them, are best understood as leading examples of a type of women’s sensation narrative prevalent in Britain from the earlier 1870s, which I would like to call ‘newspaper fiction’. In his diatribe on the sensation fiction boom of the early 1860s, the Reverend H. L. Mansel had coined the term ‘Newspaper Novel’ as a stick to beat authors for (allegedly) recycling the sordid affairs recounted in those newspaper columns devoted to the divorce and criminal courts. Here, however, I intend something rather different. For my purposes, ‘newspaper fiction’ is a complex concept deriving from, but by no means narrowly limited to, the print context in which stories like Russell’s initially appeared – syndicates of cheap provincial weekly news miscellanies. In spite of their number and variety, these venues provide specific indications of the cultural identities of the communities of readers who constituted Russell’s principle audience – identities which can be charted in terms of regional, social, religious and political affiliations, as well as by gender. At the same time, the format of the local weekly paper must be seen as having an impact on the narrative form and content of the fiction appearing in its pages. As noted in a contemporary review of Beneath the Wave, writing regularly in measured weekly instalments tended to favour the mechanics of enigma and suspense: