Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies by Beth Palmer (review)

Beth Palmer's Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture:Sensational Strategies is a significant addition to the field of Victorian popular culture and literature. Palmer examines the professional careers and editorships of three popular women writers: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry), and Florence Marryat. Her argument is that these writers' work in the periodical press allowed them to realize and hone their skills for sensational performance and to exert control over the shape, content, production, and dissemination of their literary works. Thus, Palmer considers not only these writers' sensation novels but also their other literary works and professional activities, exploring different applications of sensation and demonstrating its cultural connection to other genres and authors. Palmer's work contributes to the critical discourse on sensation in several important ways: by expanding the definition and complexity of the term "sensation"; by analyzing the periodical context of serial sensation novels; and by studying three women sensation writers' various applications of the mode.

This book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and conclusion. The introduction explores the practice of editorship and the conditions of the press, the sensation genre, and the concept of performativity, and it introduces the three women writers studied in the book. Palmer sets the stage for her argument that these writers' experiments with sensation in the periodical press allowed them to "explore, enact, and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy" (p. 2). It is a discussion that gestures, mainly through footnotes, toward the existing wealth of scholarship on women's periodicals and sensation fiction; however, it might have been helpful for Palmer to situate more clearly her argument against this earlier work, particularly Linda H. Peterson's Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (2009) and Deborah Wynne's The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (2001), which may appear to tread similar ground. The first chapter almost functions as a second introduction, delving into the conditions of the press in the 1850s and 1860s and documenting the trend towards serialized fiction, the rise of the celebrity editor, and the beginnings of the feminist press—factors that created a market in which Braddon, Wood, and Marryat could flourish. Palmer uses Charles Dickens and Mrs. Beeton as examples of mid-Victorian literary celebrities who created "writerly persona[s]" through tight control over their magazines and who served as models of authorship and editorship for others (p. 15). In this way, Palmer argues against the notions of sensation as an ephemeral fad of the 1860s or a genre that exploded upon the scene with little precedent, showing instead the necessity of considering transformations in literary genres in relation to the socio-political context in which they occurred. Although Palmer does not explicitly refer to feminist narratology, her approach is similar and may call to mind Robyn Warhol's insistence that for each text, "someone wrote it, someone who inhabited a particular culture at a particular time, someone who made certain choices among all the literary codes and conventions available to him or her within that culture and time."¹

The central chapters on Braddon, Wood, and Marryat are lucid, informative, and engaging. Perhaps the biggest strength of this work is its focus on three women writers who are known today primarily for their sensation fiction, but, as Palmer demonstrates, each developed a radically different style of sensation and used this mode to underpin her editorship of a popular Victorian magazine. In her chapter on Braddon, Palmer makes insightful connections to Dickens, arguing that Braddon learned from Dickens's example how to develop a consistent "house style," which, for Braddon's novels and editorship of Belgravia, was sensation. Moreover, Palmer suggests that this was a concerted and profitable stylistic choice, not a reversion from her elevated literary efforts because of time or financial pressure, as previous biographers have thought. The...