Sammantha Graves

Reading Sensation Critically: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia Fiction Sammantha Graves

Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was the work mostresponsible for securing Mary Elizabeth Braddon'sposition among the defining sensation novelists ofthe Victorian period. Her name continues to remaininextricably linked with her first best seller. Thisstudy, however, offers a provocative new reading ofBraddon's fiction by focusing on the ways in whichshe labored in the 1860s and 1870s to transmute thesensation genre that initiated her career into aliterary form worthy of critical recognition. This book offers close readings of seven ofBraddon's novels serialized in Belgravia between 1866and 1875 that fail to conform to the pattern ofsensation fiction. An analysis of Braddon's fiction,its critical reception, and letters to her mentor SirEdward Bulwer-Lytton, highlight her efforts to escapethe negative associations of the sensation label thatdefined her as a writer in the Victorian period andthat often continues to serve as a reductive index ofher fiction. This study provides scholars and students with afuller sense of Braddon as a professional writer whoworked to redefine the sensation genre as bothartistic and instructive.