What was Sensational about the Sensational Novel? The

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What was Sensational about the Sensational Novel? The Sensation Novel’s Invasion of the Victorian Household

What was Sensational about the Sensational Novel?The Sensation Novel’s Invasion of the Victorian

Household

Kazumi Watanabe

Since the end of the last century, the new critical approaches has been made to Wilkie Collins. Before that “a modest but steady trickle of appreciations, analyses, and textual notes” had been produced but we had to wait a new full study of Collins, with a new study of “the sensa-tion novel,” of which Collins is considered one of the progenitors, till the arrival of a kind of new market in the last century centering around Collins and the sensation novel.1 This “market” seems an appropriate word because not only we are seeing a dark side of seemingly the most respectable class exposed in tabloids, a today’s version of sensational journalism, which has created considerable market, so that we feel the homogeneity with Victorian sensationalism which laid bare the criminal underworld below respectability. But also the sensational novelists are the most market-conscious, even equal to the journalist Dickens.

Though the myth that Collins lost his popularity during his lifetime has been demystified, it is true most of the sensation novels has been inaccessible, even forgotten.2 Some look for the reason in the change of the reading public and some say that they were marginalized “in the early years of the twentieth century, a period of aggressive canoniza-tion.”3 Whatever the reason, if we consider the sensation novel as the literary offspring of the Gothic novel, the sensation novel followed

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the same process of the Gothic, which had been almost forgotten more than a century.4 Moreover, the revaluation of the sensation novel can be summed up as Judith Wilt does for the Gothic revival. “The fascination lent itself partly to media analysis”: the sensational explosion today, though modest, is “sped by a new accessibility to the books . . . the pa-perback originals in this decade . . . And Freudian and feminist analysis offers provocative insight too into” this sensation novel. Though it does not assume the modifier “female” as the “female” Gothic, the sensa-tion novel is definitely “feminine” genre “not only because of its main writers and readers but because of its deep revelations about gender, ego, and power.”5 It is my purpose of this article to discuss the relation-ship between the sensation novel and the Gothic, especially the female Gothic, and what was sensational about the sensation novel by examin-ing contemporary reviews by Margaret Oliphant.

The evaluation of Wilkie Collins, which may more or less be appli-cable to the sensation novel as a whole, can be charted in a few aspects. First, T. S. Eliot’s classic appraisal of The Moonstone as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” has launched the study of the rela-tion between Collins and the detective novel.6 Second, there is a long line of studies to place his novel among the Gothic. Edith Birkhead writes that Collins “weaves elaborate plots of hair-raising events” in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. A comprehensive study by David Punter traces the Gothic in the sensation novel.7

Indeed, when we consider Collins’ skill in story-telling, we can-not ignore his early reading of the Gothic. There is a particular example which shows his story-telling skill and the Gothic influence at the same time. While he was eighteen, he wrote in a letter to his father:

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It turned . . . upon literature, and I sat with my back to the window, and my hand in my pocket, freezing my horrified auditors by a var-ied recital of the most terrible portions of the Monk and Franken-stein. Every sentence that fell from my lips was followed in rapid succession by—”Lor!”-”oh!” “ah!” “He! He!” “Good gracious!” etc etc. None of our country relations I am sure ever encountered in their whole lives before such a hash of diablerie, demonology, massacre, with their [?] and bread and butter. I intend to give them another course, comprising, The Ancient Mariner, Jack the Giant Killer, the Mysteries of Udolpho and an inquiry into the life and actions (when they were little girls) of the witches of Macbeth. . . .8

What is important about this letter is not only that he enjoyed his story-telling but also he enjoyed seeing his audience frightened by his story-telling. His later public readings and adaptations of his novels into plays show how Collins cared about the audience before him. However, before he started his literary career, he was highly conscious of his audi-ence and the market. As for the Gothic influence on Collins, any careful reader may perceive considerable indebtedness of his The Woman in White to the Gothic, especially Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: in characterization, possibly Udolpho’s Montoni split into Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, Emily St. Aubert into Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe, and Madame Montoni turns into Madame Fosco; the Castle Udolpho into Blackwater Park; the scene the villains force the heroines sign on a legal document, and so on.

The most predominant evaluation of Collins has highlighted that he was unconventionally sympathetic toward the socially oppressed, espe-cially in his treatment of women. Even relatively few earlier critics have pointed it out. Dorothy L. Sayers considers him “genuinely feminist”

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and Robert P. Ashley writes: “In his recognition of the unjust restrictions imposed on women by Victorian Society, his sympathy for the fallen women . . . Collins was ahead of time.” Philip O’Neill argues that Col-lins’ treatment of women “is an articulation of a very basic objection to the common representation of women in literature.”9

Considering the latter two critical stances toward Wilkie Collins, the Gothic side and the feminist side, it is not surprising to see that there appeared studies that revaluate him in relation to the “female” Gothic—a study of the female Gothic in the Victorian fiction by Alison Milbank and a full volume study of Collins by Tamar Heller.10 Though the both authors think the Radcliffean Gothic as paradigmatic of the female Gothic, what they regard as the female Gothic do not necessarily agree. From the start the genre, the female Gothic, is rather lax one. The term is first used by Ellen Moers and she defines it as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic.”11 The difference of the above two authors seems to come from not the question, “are male authors acceptable in the genre?” but “what side of the female Gothic should be stressed?”

Probably the notable example, the Radcliffean Gothic, can be di-vided roughly into two sides: first, a heroine’s imprisonment in a castle by a male oppressor; second, her self-willed liberation and later restora-tion of her house. The latter side may be called “travelling heroinism” according to Moers.12 On the one hand Heller highlights the former side of the female Gothic and sees in Collins’ novel the critique against not only the female subordination but also the oppression toward the lower class and the colonization. On the other hand Milbank highlights the emancipatory, “heroinism” side of the female Gothic and considers Col-lins as the “male” Gothic on the line of Godwin, Maturin, Lewis, and Sade. His treatment of the heroines, especially the sensational heroines,

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reassures “conservative values” by their failure to “defeat the power of patriarchal society.”13 However, Heller is not always supportive of Collins and also argues his ambivalent attitude.14 Heller sees Collins’ ambivalence in the incongruence of his ambition to be a professional, therefore “male,” writer and the marginalized “feminine” sensational genre. Collins is well-known not only for his provocative theme of his novel but also for the belligerent tone of his prefaces. But conversely his attitude toward critics underlines how he cared about his reputation.15

Then what concerns the contemporary critics about the sensation novel? We can trace the process of the sensational explosion in the re-views by Margaret Oliphant. In 1862, in her first anonymous review of the sensation novel, she treats mainly The Woman in White by Collins. While she considers “a new fashion” of novel writing as a “strange hybrid between French excitement and New England homeliness,” of the latter example she presents Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and she analogizes this literary “stimulant” with that of the past war across the Dover and the ongoing Civil War across the Atlantic, her real anxiety is not about the foreign.16 Though she praises the characterization of the most dangerous Count Fosco, who is “more Italian,” still, she is afraid that Fosco would be imitated by not so professional author as Collins:

Fosco is, unquestionably, destined to be repeated to infinitude, as no successful work can apparently exist in this imitative age without creating a shoal of copyist; and with every fresh imita-tion the picture will take more and more objectionable shades . . . Mr. Wilkie Collins has profited by his preparatory labours. He has improved upon all his early works to an extent which proves in only too edifying and complete a way the benefits of perseverance and painstaking. The very excellence of the result tempts us to an

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ungracious regret. Would that those memoranda by which future generations may trace “the steps by which he did ascend, “had but been less confidingly intrusted to the public! Such a disclosure of all the beginnings and early essays of a successful career is pos-sible only to literature.17

Her anxiety was partly correct but partly incorrect. While by mentioning the heroine of East Lynne in her review she anticipated what she would see, she didn’t foresee yet the real explosion.

By 1863 “most people have been in print one way or other” and “Out of the mild female undergrowth, variety demands the frequent production of a sensational monster to stimulate the languid life.”18 The characteristics of the sensation novel market had been established—the female writers, the female distressing heroines, and the female readers. Four years later, she expressed her anxiety more clearly:

The peculiarity of it in England is, that it is oftenest made from the woman’s side—that it is women who describe those sensuous rap-tures—that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eager-ness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food.19

The characteristics of this review are that Oliphant considered this phe-nomenon as the sensation novel’s invasion of a domestic domain and the consequent change of reading habit in a household. Before the invasion:

English novels have for a long time—from the days of Sir Walter Scott at least—held a very high reputation in the world, not so

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much perhaps for what critics would call the highest development of art, as for a certain sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness un-known to other literature of the same class.20

The “wholesomeness” of the novel increased the “perfect liberty of reading which is the rule in most cultivated English houses” and abol-ished “the domestic Index Expurgatorius as well as all public censor-ship.” However, the habit “to read and speak everything that comes in our way in the presence of jeunes gens” has:

so grown upon us that to change it would involve a revolution in all our domestic arrangements . . . We should have the nuisance of separating our children and dependents from our own amusements. We should no longer be able to discuss, as we do now continually, the books that we are reading and the thoughts we are thinking. This is a necessity from which we have been altogether free in the tranquil past.21

About forty years before across the Atlantic, a fiery Presbyterian min-ister said to his daughter: “You may read Scott’s novels. I have always disapproved of novels as trash, but in these is real genius and real cul-ture, and you may read them.”22 What a difference! We were thrown back to the age before Scott, the age of vulgar Gothic. Perhaps Collins was keen of perceiving these criticism and covertly satirizes them in his novel. A doctor and owner of a sanatorium for nervous invalids says:

Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life—but for that very reason, we don’t want it in books. The English novelists who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be

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admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing ex-actly two things for us, when he writes us a book. All we want of him is—occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us comfortable.23

What is important about his words is that these are directed in the sana-torium which imitates a tranquil house, to the women in the neighbor-hood, who are bored by their monotonous life in the house, and to the fallen heroine of the novel.

The house above signifies another feature of the sensation novel: the genre’s preoccupation of the place of incarceration. The place is not a castle, a charnel house, a prison, a monastery and so on like the Gothic but a lunatic asylum, a sanatorium and so on. Sometimes a lunatic asy-lum setting reflects the contemporary claim for its reform, as in the case in The Woman in White (though subtly) or Charles Reade’s Hard Cash. Even though there is not a social missionary claim, these places are sometimes used. The most conspicuous cases are Collins’ novel, Arma-dale, cited above and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. The heroine of Armadale incarcerates herself in the sanatorium and takes her life and Lady Audley is sent to a lunatic asylum and dies there.

In a way by making these heroines lunatic the reasons for their crimes are explained: they are villains, because they are mad. So the reader can differentiate him/herself from them and feel safe. However, the heroine of Armadale is falsely introduced as a patient of “domestic anxiety” to the women visitors so the novel implies that the same female visitors may become one of the patients in the sanatorium. Lady Audley is more disturbing. Ostensibly her lunacy is explained as hereditary like

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her mother, instigated by the aftermath of childbirth. At the same time the novel leaves the interpretation that she is not insane. The doctor con-sulted says:

there is no evidence of madness in anything that she has done . . . [The taints of hereditary insanity] May descend to the third genera-tion and appear in the lady’s children, if she have any. Madness is not necessarily transmitted from mother to daughter.24

But when he is informed that she killed her husband, which later turns out to be false, he diagnoses: “There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a life-time” (379). As Elaine Showalter argues “As every woman reader must have sensed, Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative.”25 So the phrase above is reversed: they are mad, because they are villains. Consequently, as Oliphant feared, if some readers imi-tate the characters in the sensation novel, they would be identified as mad.

There is another implication in the sensation novel: the reading itself makes the reader insane, so making insanity infectious. During de-tection Robert Audley, the hero of Lady Audley’s Secret thinks:

Why was it that I saw some strange mystery in my friend’s disap-pearance? Was it a monition or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link is woven out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crochets—the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? (254)

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Later Lady Audley accuses him as a monomania. As Jenny Bourne Tay-lor suggests, however, his reading of her insanity overcomes her reading of his insanity so he is free from the insanity. According to Taylor, Har-tright in The Woman in White who connects the Baronet, whom Anne Catherick mentions, with Laura’s fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde is infected by Anne’s monomania. He thinks “I had not the shadow of a reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to me by the woman in white. And yet, I did connect him with them.” It is not surprising that if the reader may have perceived these subtle implications, the reviewers used the words which have sanitary and disease analogies—wholesome, morbid, pure, diseased, pollution, fester, taint, unhealthy, epidemic, endemic and so on.26 Therefore, there are various sides of infection of the sensation nov-el. Because of its imitableness, the novel infects amateur writers. The criminal hero or heroine infects the reader. The character in the novel is infected by other characters. And if the novel invades the domestic do-main, it must be isolated so as not to infect other inhabitants.

It is notable, or ignoble, fact that while the sensation novel insis-tently depicts an aggressive heroine, a melodramatic turn, or what may be called providence, saves her as if the author suddenly remembered moral exigencies. Before the salvation the heroine often falls ill to lose her aggressiveness, as the heroine of No Name. As for the hero of The Moonstone he unconsciously commits theft so he can be free from crim-inality. These devises are reversed modes of infection to make the char-acters not them-selves and consequently save them. On the other hand, as I have suggested, the truly and never redeemed villainesses above are incarcerated in asylums. Here, the incarceration is literally to keep other characters from the criminal infection. The asylum is not the place of healing but it isolates the patient-villain(ess). From the reader’s point of

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view, this use of the place of incarceration means that it differentiates the reader from the character in the novel so that he or she can feel safe from the infection. The concern for the writer of the sensation novel was how to protect both the characters and the readers from criminal or fallen infection. It is of course wrong to assume that insanity or crimi-nality were thought to be infectious, but considering the contemporary concerns for infection centering around the sensation novel, they were, nevertheless, the diseases that should be isolated. Then the lunatic asy-lum symbolizes the space for all these diseases should be locked up.

The lunatic asylum settings are used in No Name and Armadale, Collins’ most sensational novels. However, as I argued elsewhere, there are other subtle devices for the space of incarceration other than a luna-tic asylum for the purpose of protection from infection. These devices are a body of a heroine and an ordinary house a heroine lives. As space the body and the house constitute surface and depth, inside and outside. Sometimes the one replicates the other and sometimes the one is de-scribed as though it replicated the other.27 In either case in the two nov-els the heroines are literally confined within her body or her house. One heroine is kept from contamination by the confinement. Another heroine is confined with her criminality. Yet, for the heroines the confinement does not necessarily mean suppression for the purpose of protection against infection. The confinement within the body or the house some-times leads to their present satisfaction or future redemption.28

Contrastingly, Collins’ next novel, The Moonstone, purposefully subverts his previous novels, which failed to attain the popularity of The Woman in White. The novel returns to the narrative method of The Woman in White. But the characteristic of the novel is that it is edited as presentable to a “family,” perhaps reflecting the contemporary anxiety about the sensational novel. To “domesticate,” or expurgate the sensa-

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tion elements out of the narrative, both the editor-hero of the novel and the characters who present their own narratives act as editors. Also, in the process they also manipulate suspense like the author by enclos-ing and disclosing their narrative. Thus, in a way, the sensation novel, whose invasion of the Victorian household frightened Oliphant, was “domesticated” by Wilkie Collins himself.29

Notes

1. The quotation is from Sally Mitchell, rev. of The Secret Life of Wilkie Col-lins, by William M. Clarke and In the Secret Theatre of Home, by Jenny Bourne Taylor, Victorian Studies 33 (1990) 344.

2. For the reception of Collins’ works from later in his lifetime to early in the 20th century, see Robert P. Ashley, “Wilkie Collins Reconsidered,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1950) 265-273. For the republication of the minor Victorian novel, including the sensation novel, see John Goode, “Minor Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Victorian Studies 11 (1968) 534-538. See also Sally Mitchell, introduction, East Lynne, Mrs. Henry Wood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1984) vii.

3. Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) 5. For the change of the reading public, see Mitch-ell, introduction, xi.

4. For the relation of the Gothic and the sensation novel, see, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982) 1-2, and Winifred Hughes, The Ma-niac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 7-8.

5. Quotations are from Judith Wilt, Ghosts of Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Law-rence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980) 3.

6. T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932) 464. For a comprehensive study of the detective elements in Collins’ fiction, see Robert P. Ashley, “Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1951) 47-60. Margaret Oliphant was the

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first who pointed out the connection between the sensation novel and what she called “detectivism.” See Margaret Oliphant [anon.], “Novels,” Black-wood’s 94 (1863) 168-170. For the detective elements in the sensation nov-el, see Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fic-tion from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976) 112-136.

7. Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (1921; New York: Russell, 1963) 225. See David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Long-man, 1980) 214-238. As he admits himself, however, Punter’s study of the period is highly selective, at the expense of the Brontës and the female sen-sation novelists.

8. Wilkie Collins, letter to his father, 25 August 1842, ALS Pierpoint Morgan Library; reprinted in Victor Sage ed., The Gothic Novel (London: Macmil-lan, 1990) 72.

9. Dorothy L Sayers, introduction, The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (London: Dent, 1944) vii, quoted in Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York: AMS, 1982), 26; Ashley, “Collins Reconsidered” 271; Philip O’Neill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (Totawa, NJ: Barns, 1988) 5. For a similar approach, see for example, Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

10. Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992), and Heller above.

11. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976; New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 90.12. See Moers, 122-140.13. Milbank, 15.14. Regrettably Heller almost never refers to Collins’ most sensational novels,

No Name and Armadale. Heller’s orientation may be made clear by the selection of her “female” Gothic—Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as Radcliffe’s novels. The novelists whom Milbank considers as the Victorian female Gothicists are Dickens, with Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë, and Le Fanu, with Uncle Silas and his short stories.

15. For this point, see Lonoff, especially 55-78.

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16. Margaret Oliphant [anon.], “Sensation Novels,” Blackwood’s 91 (1862) 565. In this review she also treats Great Expectations. For her critical stance toward the sensation novel, see Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Laut-erbach Sheets, and William Veeder, Vol. 3: Literary Issues of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 (1983; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) 122-145. For her adaptation of the sensa-tional elements in her novel, Salem Chapel (1862), see Anthea Trodd, Do-mestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989) 12-15.

17. Oliphant, “Sensation Novels” 568-569.18. Oliphant, “Novels” (1863) 168.19. Margaret Oliphant [anon.], “Novels,” Blackwood’s 102 (1867) 259. The

review treats Braddon, Broughton, Trollope, Reade, and others.20. Oliphant, “Novels” (1867) 257.21. Oliphant, “Novels” (1867) 258.22. Lyman Beecher to Catherine Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister) in

1822, quoted in Susan Belasco ed., Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographi-cal Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, (Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P, 2010) 255.

23. Wilkie Collins, Armada1e, ed. Catherine Peters (Oxford Oxford UP, 1989) 623.

24. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 377. Subsequent references to the novel will be to this edition, and will be included parenthetically in the article.

25. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977) 167.

26. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) 65. For the monomania in the two novels, see Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988) 11-12 and 105-106.

27. Though I don’t necessarily read Collins’ novels as the Gothic, I was highly inspired by the studies of the Gothic by Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick. For the reading of the surface, “Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96 (1981) 255-270; for the Gothic structure of in-

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side and outside, see The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980; rev. ed. New York: Methuen, 1986) 9-36.

28. See Kazumi Watanabe, “A Heroine Confined in the Past: A Reading of Wilkie Collins’ Armadale,” Reading: Journal of the University of Tokyo English Literature Society 16 (1996) 41-53 and Kazumi Watanabe, “No Name: An Opaque Body of a Heroine,” Reading: Journal of the University of Tokyo English Literature Society 17 (1997) 88-97.

29. See Kazumi Watanabe, “’This strange story of ours ought to be told’ Nar-rative and its Production in The Moonstone,” Reading: Journal of the Uni-versity of Tokyo English Literature Society 19 (1998) 26-33.

Works Cited

Ashley, Robert P. “Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1951): pp. 47-60.

Ashley, Robert P. “Wilkie Collins Reconsidered.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1950): pp. 265-273.

Barickman, Richard, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Belasco, Susan. ed. Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P, 2010.

Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. 1921. New York: Russell, 1963.

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. Ed. David Skilton. Ox-ford: Oxford UP, 1987.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nine-teenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): pp. 1-28.

Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. 1864. Ed. Catherine Peters. Oxford Oxford UP, 1989.

---. The Woman in White. 1860. Ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.

Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” Selected Essays. London: Faber,

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1932. pp. 460-470.Goode, John. “Minor Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Victorian Studies 11 (1968):

pp. 534-538. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Ha-

ven: Yale UP, 1992.Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder. Vol. 3:

Literary Issues of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883. 1983; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS, 1982.

Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fic-tion. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Mitchell, Sally. Introduction. East Lynne. By Mrs. Henry Wood. New Bruns-wick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1984.

---. Rev. of The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, by William M. Clarke and In the Secret Theatre of Home, by Jenny Bourne Taylor. Victorian Studies 33 (1990): pp. 344-345.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. 1976. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.Oliphant, Margaret [anon.]. “Novels.” Blackwood’s 94 (1863): pp. 168-183. ---. “Novels.” Blackwood’s 102 (1867): pp. 257-280. ---. “Sensation Novels.” Blackwood’s 91 (1862): pp. 564-584. O’Neill, Philip. Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety. Totawa, NJ:

Barns, 1988.Ousby, Ian. Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from

Godwin to Doyle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765

to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980.Sage, Victor. ed. The Gothic Novel. London: Macmillan, 1990.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsy. “Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the

Gothic Novel.” PMLA 96 (1981): pp. 255-270.---. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. Rev. ed. New York: Methuen,

1986.Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from

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Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977.Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation

Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. London: Routledge, 1988. Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. New York: St. Martin’s,

1989.Watanabe, Kazumi. “A Heroine Confined in the Past: A Reading of Wilkie Col-

lins’ Armadale.” Reading: Journal of the University of Tokyo English Lit-erature Society 16 (1996): pp. 41-53

---. “No Name: An Opaque Body of a Heroine.” Reading: Journal of the Univer-sity of Tokyo English Literature Society 17 (1997): pp. 88-97.

---. “’This strange story of ours ought to be told’ Narrative and its Production in The Moonstone.” Reading: Journal of the University of Tokyo English Literature Society 19 (1998): pp. 26-33.

Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.

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What was Sensational about the Sensational Novel? The