Ladies’ maids, governesses, and companions: serving women in the great houses of sensation literature
Date
2010-05
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Sensation fiction was a genre that emerged in England in the 1860’s and gained
immense popularity among a diverse readership. Novels in the genre featured dramatic
plots and “sensational” subject matter, including bigamy, madness, and murder, which
led scholars to dismiss sensation as lowbrow pop-fiction from the nineteenth century
onward. Only recently has sensation come under scrutiny as a genre that commented in
radical ways on Victorian institutions—particularly that of gender, and a woman’s place
in public and in the home. Many feminist academics have reapproached sensation,
regarding it as a bellwether for the changing role of women in literature; and most have
confined their investigation to middle-class women in sensation literature, whose
concerns are represented most obviously. This project, however, seeks to refocus the
gendered critique on figures of serving women in three iconic sensation novels: Wilkie
Collins’s "The Woman in White and The Moonstone," and M. E. Braddon’s "Lady Audley’s
Secret." Examining this figure complicates the idea of “women’s concerns” in the genre
by adding the issues of working-class women to those of the middle and upper-class. It
also reveals the complex ways in which sensational authors use the serving woman to
explore and, in some cases, subvert Victorian class anxieties.
Description
Keywords
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 1837-1915. Lady Audley's secret