Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ann Cvetkovich

Critical Essay by Ann Cvetkovich

SOURCE: “Detective in the House: Subversion and Containment in Lady Audley's Secret,” in Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 45-70.

In the following essay, Cvetkovich examines the subversive implications of the sensational novels' upper-class settings, particularly in Lady Audley's Secret.

Although it has received little attention from literary critics until recently, Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was one of the best-selling novels, not only of the 1860s but of the entire latter half of the nineteenth century. It is one of the most important novels of the sensation genre, which emerged as a successor to and composite of forms such as the gothic novel, the Newgate novel, and the stage melodrama.¹ The sensation novel is distinct as a genre from its precursors because its crimes and mysteries occur, not in foreign countries or wild landscapes, not among the lower classes or...
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