Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (review)

I find the publication of Beyond Sensation and the project that it represents particularly gratifying because when I discovered Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861) as a graduate student in the 1980s and even when I published a book on Victorian sensationalism in the 1990s, I never imagined that Braddon could be worthy of a collection devoted entirely to her work. Instead, I felt the need to justify my interest in her most notorious novel by situating it within the broader context of debates about women's popular culture and the history of mass culture more generally. It was the reception of Braddon's novel as much as the text itself that drew my interest, and I summarized the plot for my readers because I didn't expect them to have actually read Lady Audley's Secret. A generation of predominantly feminist scholarship has, however, brought new visibility to Lady Audley's Secret, which is now read with considerable frequency not just in the bedroom or the conference room but in the classroom, thanks to new editions from publishers such as Penguin and Oxford World Classics. Not content with this level of success, however, the editors of Beyond Sensation seek to "explode the predominating conception that Braddon's work is summed up in this single novel" (xxi), and they take the ambitious step of recommending the entire oeuvre of this immensely prolific writer as a valuable object of study.

This collection thus, as Lyn Pykett suggests in her afterword, "marks a kind of coming of age in Braddon studies" (277). Indeed, the editors have shrewdly framed the collection with Pykett's excellent remarks and James Kincaid's equally astute foreward in order to underscore their project's interventions. I would endorse Kincaid's claim that "Perhaps no novelist has been more dramatically or successfully rediscovered, and this volume builds on that strength, both demonstrating it and providing the finest body of work on the novelist we have" (xii). If nothing else, Beyond Sensation will perform a valuable service by introducing its readers to novels, plays, and short stories that even critics familiar with Braddon don't know. Moreover, the cumulative force of the collection's varied readings offers emphatic evidence that Braddon should be read not only because of her immense productivity and popularity but also because of her powers as a writer. In addition to creating new models of author-based criticism that are informed by the demands of cultural studies, Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie also remind us of the ongoing value of focusing on the individual author.

Which is not to say that the collection ignores Braddon's best-known novel, with its seemingly endless capacity to fascinate readers and critics alike. Beyond Sensation begins with a cluster of essays on Lady Audley's Secret, demonstrating the many different critical approaches the novel invites, and how easily it connects with the historical issues of its time. The enclosure acts, debates about women and the law, advertising and consumer culture, and the country estate are explored in essays by Elizabeth Langland, Gail Turley Houston, Katherine Montweiler, and Haynie, respectively. Lillian Nayder's attention to Braddon's seemingly casual references to the Indian Mutiny are a reminder that her prose, especially the comments of her worldly wise narrator, is a valuable archive of Victorian history. Read together, these essays also show that the debates about whether Lady Audley's Secret is subversive remain lively, although the collection commendably does not remain confined to such debates but, in its best moments, displaces them in favor of showing that the complexity of Braddon's writing can't be reduced to a simple either/or. The essays on Aurora Floyd (1863), particularly Tromp's compelling reading of the infamous scene in which the heroine whips the stable worker...