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Mary Elizabeth Braddon |
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On 9 November 1865 the young Henry James published an essay in The Nation titled "Miss Braddon." The occasion was the runaway success of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's fifth novel, Aurora Floyd (1863). James placed Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which established her fame nearly overnight, as "sensation novels." Such works, pioneered by Wilkie Collins but written by Braddon and others as well, constituted an innovation in the form of the Victorian novel. Critic Patrick Brantlinger describes this innovation as a combination of the verisimilitude and contemporary setting of domestic realism with the melodramatic plot structure of Gothic romance. As James puts it in his review, sensation novels "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors." In addition to mixing realism and romance, these novels implicitly critique mid-Victorian society because they are peopled with characters who, though outwardly respectable, harbor a secret criminality.
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