What is a Novel of Sensation?
The novel of sensation is a distinctive genre of Victorian fiction that emerged around the 1860s. It combines elements of Gothic fiction, melodrama, and domestic realism. These novels were designed to provoke shock, suspense, and emotional excitement in the reader. Their plots often revolved around guilty secrets, hidden crimes, madness, illegitimacy, bigamy, poisoning, and identity concealment, set not in castles or far-off lands but in middle-class homes and polite society.
This genre was particularly notable for its domestication of Gothic themes. It placed terrifying and scandalous events within the ordinary world of Victorian respectability, thus highlighting the hypocrisy and instability of bourgeois values.
Key Features of the Sensation Novel:
- Improbable and lurid plots often involving crime, betrayal, and secret pasts.
- Strong female characters are often either victims or dangerously subversive figures.
- Focus on domestic settings, bringing horror and suspense into familiar middle-class life.
- Themes of identity, madness, inheritance, and moral corruption.
- Narrative suspense, often through multiple narrators, diaries, letters, and legal documents.
- A critical view of social institutions like marriage, inheritance laws, and the justice system.
Notable Early Authors and Works
Caroline Clive (Mrs. Clive) (1801-73), who published Paul Ferroll in 1855 and Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife in 1860. Clive’s work is a precursor to sensation fiction, exploring guilt and hidden crime themes. Interestingly, she died sensationally herself—burned to death while writing in her boudoir.
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) is often considered the first true sensation novel. It features a complex plot involving madness, identity theft, wrongful incarceration, and a terrifying villain. Armadale (1866) and No Name (1862) – Further developed themes of inheritance and identity.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) – A quintessential sensation novel with bigamy, madness, and social climbing themes. The protagonist, Lady Audley, is a beautiful, manipulative anti-heroine. Braddon wrote over 70 sensation novels, many of which explore the dark underbelly of Victorian domestic life.
Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861)—This tale of adultery, disguise, and maternal suffering was immensely popular and widely dramatized.
Cultural and Literary Significance: The sensation novel brought taboo and criminal subjects into the mainstream and challenged Victorian ideals of purity and propriety. They blurred the lines between high art and popular fiction, influencing the development of: Detective fiction (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle), Psychological thrillers, and even modern soap operas and crime series. Sensation fiction also sparked debates about gender roles, sanity, and moral authority, especially since many were written by or about women.
Though often dismissed by critics in the 19th century as low-brow entertainment, the sensation novel has received renewed scholarly interest. It is now recognized as a critical reflection of Victorian anxieties about gender, class, law, and identity. It paved the way for modern thriller and detective genres, and its psychological and domestic themes can still be found in contemporary literature and media.
