SOURCE: "Sensation, Sex, and the 1860's," in The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women's Reading, 1835-1880, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981, pp. 73-99.

In the essay that follows, Mitchell explores the ways in which sensation novels—particularly George Meredith's Rhoda Fleming and Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies—reflect and react to changing roles for women in the Victorian period.

The literary phenomenon of the 1860s was the sensation novel.¹ Sensationalism meant excitement, secrets, surprises, suspense; it meant strong emotion aroused by strong scenes, violent death by murder, train, fire, and poisons ranging from chloroform to nightshade; and it meant continual shocks provided by violating decorum. One critic in 1863 complained that eight of the twenty-four recent novels he was reviewing were about bigamy,² and his selection did not include some entries by leading novelists, such as Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt (Argosy, 1865-66; 3 vols. 1866) or William Makepeace Thackeray's Phillip (Cornhill, 1861-...