Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (review)

Beth Palmer’s study of women sensation writers who were also editors of monthly magazines is an important contribution to the history of Victorian fiction and print culture as well as to women’s studies. Arguing persuasively that the role of sensation author-editor has been insufficiently examined, Palmer offers a performative analysis of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat, demonstrating their indebtedness to precursor Charles Dickens and their impact in turn on New Woman writers. Palmer’s firm command of scholarship on Victorian periodicals and sensation fiction and her use of new archival sources further enrich this clearly written and always interesting book.

Braddon broke out as a best-selling sensation writer with Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Wood with East Lynne (1862), and Marryat with Love’s Conflict (1865). Their authorial fame positioned them to become editors, respectively, of Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society, since their recognizable names could help attract subscribers. Just as Dickens had done in Household Words and All the Year Round (this last home to crucial sensation serials such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White [1860] and The Moonstone [1868]), they had the opportunity to further publicize their names and arrange contents of each issue to enhance their own and others’ serial sensation fiction and further shape their public author-editor persona. If in tracing the complementarity of sensation fiction and surrounding magazine contents Palmer follows the lead of Deborah Wynne in The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (2001), Palmer expands Wynne’s work through her explicit focus on the author-editor function (different from either the author or editor function alone) and gender. Braddon’s, Wood’s, and Marryat’s author-editor personae were complex performances that mediated the conflicting demands of feminine decorum and notoriety, of domesticity, and of professional and public authority. Palmer draws upon Judith Butler and Lynn Voskuil in order to argue that these female author-editors signaled their self-consciousness about performing sensation through exaggeration born of repetition or the ironizing of conventions. But the press was also “their stage, and imagining it as such allowed them to exert authority in a male-dominated magazine market” (1). Hence the press and sensation, both as performance and empowering idiom, were mutually constitutive.

Palmer’s chapter on Braddon is the strongest of her three case studies. In Educating the Proper Woman Reader (2004), Jennifer Phegley traces the ways in which Braddon’s Belgravia signaled to women readers that they were empowered to develop critical agency and choose what they read. Palmer excavates Braddon’s complementary but more aggressive strategy for elevating her and her signature genre’s legitimacy. Rather than seeking to veil or defend sensation as editor of Belgravia, Braddon augmented it, contributing several sensation serials, putting the stamp of her own style on the journal (as had Dickens with his magazines), and even commissioning George Sala to refute Margaret Oliphant’s 1867 critical attacks in Blackwood’s on Braddon and sensation fiction. Simultaneously her own serial Dead Sea Fruit (1867–69) fully maintained its sensational tropes and effects while stepping up the velocity of its complex plot in ways that deepened rather than distracted from characterization (a common criticism of sensation fiction)—a parallel means of defense through performance of fiction writing. Even Braddon’s own sensational illustrated poems at the time flaunted rather than retreated from sensationalism: the Melusina-figure of “Lusignan” (1867) recalled Lady Audley and was shown bare-breasted and serpentine, both monstrous and seductive.

Palmer’s chapters on Wood and Marryat are also highly effective. If the account of Wood’s conflation of Christian evangelical piety and blatant sensation is familiar, Palmer points out how readily the evangelical emphasis on feeling could blend with sensation and the commodification of literature that intensified sensation in the cause of moral elevation. And she demonstrates how the far more transgressive Marryat, who was divorced by...