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

One of the delights of studying sensation fiction is reading scandalized reviewers’ remarks about “unnatural” heroines and the questionable female novelists who created them. Traditionally scholars have cited such critical outrage as evidence of the cultural anxiety surrounding women’s agency. But Beth Palmer’s examination of “sensational authorial editorships” goes beyond previous studies to demonstrate how women author-editors manipulated these critical charges and turned them to their advantage (158). Focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat—sensation novelists who edited the Argosy, Belgravia Magazine, and London Society, respectively—Palmer shows how each woman performed a variety of public personae to navigate a male-dominated press and exercise greater autonomy.

Palmer challenges stock definitions of the sensation genre by situating it within the context of press culture. Rather than presenting sensation as a subversive fad of the 1860s, chapter 1, “A Different Context for Sensation: Serialization, Celebrity Culture, and the Feminist Press,” analyzes new conditions of the press in the 1850s that laid the foundation for Braddon’s, Wood’s, and Marryat’s sensational editorships. Palmer offers a solid overview of the rise of the celebrity editor, beginning with Charles Dickens’s editorship of Household Words and later All the Year Round. From these popular magazines, Braddon, Wood, and Marryat learned to create a “house style” that reflected their own celebrity characteristics. Samuel and Isabella Beeton’s editorship of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine provided a model for addressing both leisured readers and aspirational audiences. And feminist periodicals, including the English Woman’s Journal, Englishwoman’s Review, and most particularly the Victoria Magazine, offered a lesson in combining entertainment with politics. Palmer examines how these press developments created not only a genre for these sensational author-editors but also an audience they might address.

Chapters 2 through 4 offer case studies of how each author-editor defined and performed sensation to suit her agenda. While Palmer argues that all three women were invested in sensational performance, she is careful to note differences in each writer’s brand of sensation. For example, chapter 2, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Strong Measures,’” demonstrates how Braddon and her contributors used heightened language and rhetoric to align sensation with “what is exciting, modern, and challenging” (62). In contrast to Braddon’s unabashedly “strong measures,” Wood consistently associated feeling with authenticity rather than sensationalism. We learn in chapter 3, “Ellen Wood, Religious Feeling, and Sensation,” that Wood used the Argosy to refigure sensational discourse and establish its (and her own) respectability. Each chapter clearly demonstrates how the editor imprinted her style on every aspect of the magazine, from her own serialized fiction to her contributors’ texts. For example, chapter 3 analyzes the Argosy’s review section, “Our Log Book,” to reveal that it used a literary critical standard based on Wood’s definition of feeling. So readers of Wood’s fiction could expect other books to be judged by these criteria, and readers of the review section would learn how to appreciate Wood’s fiction according to this standard. Chapter 4, “Florence Marryat on Page and on Stage,” shows how Marryat negotiated her image as a woman editor in her correspondence with contributors and within the pages of London Society. By allowing herself to perform a variety of characters and caricatures in the magazine, Marryat mitigated contributors’ and readers’ potential difficulties in imagining a woman editor.

By highlighting the performative elements of sensation, Palmer persuasively argues that this genre offered women a “set of discursive strategies that they could transfer . . . into other cultural discourses and performances” (2). This approach allows Palmer to expand sensation’s reach beyond the 1860s. Just as chapter 1 stretched the parameters for sensation by identifying some overlooked predecessors, chapter 5 pushes the boundaries forward to “The New Woman, the Legacies of Sensation, and the Press of the 1890s.” Although Palmer is not the first scholar to draw connections between sensation and the New Woman, she offers...