Reading sensation critically: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia fiction

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859), Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) were the earliest works to receive generic classification as sensation fiction. Although these novels were enormously popular with the reading public, Victorian critics were virtually unanimous in their disparagement of the upstart genre, denigrating it as a low-culture, commercialized product unworthy of literary merit.; Lady Audley's Secret was the work most responsible for securing Braddon's position among the defining sensation novelists of the Victorian period, and her name continues to remain inextricably linked with her first best seller. This study focuses on the ways in which Braddon labored in the 1860s and 1870s to transmute the sensation that initiated her career into a form worthy of critical recognition. I argue that Braddon's editorship of Belgravia provided her with a public and respectable platform from which to launch a defense of sensation fiction and its women readers.; I closely examine how seven of her novels serialized in Belgravia between 1866 and 1875---Birds of Prey, Charlotte's Inheritance, Fenton's Quest, The Lovels of Arden, Strangers and Pilgrims, Lost for Love, and Hostages to Fortune---fail to conform to the pattern of sensation fiction, revealing Braddon's experimentation outside the narrow boundaries to which she was restricted as a sensational novelist. While Braddon continues to draw upon the conventions of sensation fiction, she is never limited or dependent upon them; rather, she writes in a way not usually associated with the genre. An analysis of her fiction, its critical reception, and letters to her mentor Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton highlight her efforts to escape the negative associations of the sensation label that defined her as a writer in the Victorian period and that often continues to serve as a reductive index of her fiction.