SOURCE: Morris, Virginia. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Most Despicable of her Sex.” In Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction, pp. 88-104. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

[In the following essay, Morris explains how detective fiction mirrored Victorian attitudes and conventions regarding crime, as writers struggled to move from a stance of empty moralizing to a deeper understanding of the social and psychological roots of criminal behavior, particularly among women.]

The women who shoot, poison, stab, steal, and blackmail their way through the sensation novels of the 1800s changed the nature of crime and criminals in Victorian fiction. These women are more ambitiously independent and less sexually repressed than traditional heroines, and their criminality is pervasive, violent, and even bizarre. Like comparable characters in other Victorian literature, they reaffirm the nineteenth-century precept that female sexuality and criminality are inextricably intertwined. But they also introduce the revolutionary idea that women are capable of committing almost any crime to achieve their personal goals. Ironically, those goals are almost always highly conventional: romantic happiness and financial security through marriage.

While the criminal women in sensation fiction are assertive and aggressive, they are rarely monstrous, although Margaret Oliphant and her contemporary literary critics persistently labeled them as bestial and inhuman.¹ They do not kill (or try to kill) children or old ladies; instead they kill able-bodied men and women who threaten their plans or their well-being. Nor despite their overtly aggressive behavior, are many women in sensation fiction “masculine” in the pejorative sense that the term is applied to unconventional women. Rather, they are charming and beautiful—and sometimes quite sexy. This combination of apparent loveliness and masked threat was the most radical feature of the genre not only because it confronted the fantasy of the “angel in the house” directly but because it confirmed the worst fears of a society reluctant to admit that women were not adequately protected by the legal system and equally reluctant to change the status quo.

The audience for sensation fiction was predominantly middle class or aspiring middle class and overwhelmingly female. The unparalleled success of the genre strongly suggests that these readers clearly enjoyed being shocked and appalled—within certain well-defined parameters, of course. They relished details of the exotic, the daring, the bizarre—excitement often supplied by accusations against women in widely reported criminal trials of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s as well as in the fiction. But the readers also came to recognize, if they had not already known, that spouse abuse or the threat of public disgrace could make a woman desperate enough to consider murder.

Partly new novels of manners and partly tales of terror, the sensation novels provided a unique blend of realism and melodrama at a time when the pervasive extent of crime in Victorian society was being explicitly reported in the press.² Despite their conventional, if often hollow, romantic endings, most sensation novels accurately depicted the details of Victorian society, including the overwhelming extent to which women were dependent on the authority of men and the rage which women's attempts to gain legal and economic rights evoked. Yet they shifted criminal activity from the working and indigent classes where much of it occurred to the middle and upper classes. There was no particular shock, and not much interest, generated by a housemaid killing her illegitimate baby; that was commonplace and comprehensible. And it was easy for readers to maintain a self-satisfied distance from these girls whom they expelled from their employment and ignored on the streets. In contrast, the machinations of the rich and well-born added a savory touch to violence. When a lady killed her husband, a rich girl horsewhipped a stable boy, or a clergyman's adoring daughter incited her father to murder her unfaithful lover, that was simultaneously a source of titillation and admiration.

Yet even as they described crime among the affluent and the socially prominent, the novelists deftly avoided highly sensitive issues as well as the sexual candor characteristic of contemporary French fiction. I have uncovered no novels, for example, in which middle- or upper-class women murder their illegitimate children and none with explicit incest. Such shocking crimes were too direct an assault on the Victorian obsession with family for the novelists to risk. Furthermore, few unmarried women kill. Because one underlying assumption in these novels was that passion motivated violent crime, women who were presumed sexually inexperienced could not feel passion intense enough to drive them to murder. A similar lack of candor linked married women's violent crimes to unsatiated lust or unintentional bigamy more frequently than to actual adultery or illegitimate children.

Nor were the sensation novelists any more inclined than the authors of more traditional fiction to have their guilty women end up in a courtroom. It was perfectly all right to ask readers to believe that women murdered; many were apparently happy to have their worst fears confirmed. It was quite another to flout what the fiction's audience knew, that middle- and upper-class women were rarely caught up in the criminal justice machinery, seldom convicted, and never executed. But the novelists also avoided court trials because they preferred extrajudicial resolutions where fictional women inevitably suffered stringent, sometimes self-inflicted punishment, often in marked contrast to male characters of comparable guilt.

For instance, Philip Sheldon, the grasping and murderous antagonist of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance, literally gets away with murder as he grows enormously rich at others' expense. He pays no penalty for his crimes because he is never caught and has no conscience to bother him. But women characters are destroyed for a single crime: Sylvia Perriam in Braddon's Taken at the Flood dies a miserable, lonely death for committing her aged husband to an insane asylum and pretending he was dead so she could bigamously marry her lover, and Honora Grace in A. M. Meadows's The Eye of Fate is incarcerated in an insane asylum for killing the man who had rejected her. While neither woman is sympathetic, neither is more culpable than Sheldon. And although Braddon makes Sheldon's success a clear and damning miscarriage of justice, she does not permit any of her guilty women to escape punishment as she does him. This curious inversion of real life—where men were more apt to be imprisoned or executed than women—underlines the highly conventional moral tone of a genre widely condemned as disreputable and immoral.

Finally, there is a striking disparity in the motives of the privileged women who commit crimes in sensation fiction—except in response to physical abuse—and the motives of less affluent women who in real life were more apt to be violent, or at least to be arrested for violence. Repeatedly, in fiction, the urgency to maintain her reputation and the security that reputation provides drive an otherwise conventional woman to crime more often than need or greed. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in Lady Audley's Secret, the archetypal sensation novel, where maintaining the secrets of the past are Lucy Audley's motive for murder: The men she attacks know or suspect the truth about her and threaten to expose her. The same motive holds true in novels and stories where women are set up as suspects in murder cases and ultimately cleared—like Aurora Floyd in Braddon's eponymous novel, or Kate Gaunt in Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt, or Grace Dunbar in Conan Doyle's “The Adventure of Thor Bridge.” The presumptive motive is fear that their extramarital liaisons will be exposed.

In some sensation novels, a woman's ambition for money, power, or a particular man makes her turn to the efficiency of murder rather than relying on the more insidious, but more ladylike, psychological emasculation characteristic of more conventionally destructive women. In A. M. Meadows's Ticket of Leave Girl, Wilkie Collins's The Legacy of Cain, and several of Braddon's later novels, women commit murder without the slightest qualm and acknowledge their guilt only when confronted with incontrovertible evidence. Should someone else be punished in their place, their only response, we are led to believe, would be a sigh of relief. Unsympathetic and ultimately unsuccessful, these women nonetheless demonstrate one of the cardinal principles of the sensation fiction genre: women are capable of calculated and violent action when it serves their purpose.

The other direct assault sensation fiction made on its chauvinistic and xenophobic readers was that the guilty women were clearly and undeniably English. Unlike Dickens, whose killers were Europeans, or Conan Doyle, who was partial to Americans, Australians, Russians, or almost anyone “foreign,” Braddon, Reade, Collins, and their colleagues had no reservations about hiding a criminal mind behind a pretty English face. Blonde curls and large blue eyes do not necessarily signal placidity and compliance any more than an elevated social position guarantees compassion and tolerance. In fact, after reading a few Braddon novels, the reader grows very wary of beautiful rich women.

No novel about female violence made a more dramatic impact than Braddon's first best-seller, Lady Audley's Secret (1862). Lucy Audley's violations of Victorian moral and legal codes in her quest for emotional and financial security are monumental: when her first husband, George Talboys, disappears, leaving no word of his plans or whereabouts, she abandons her child, assumes a false identity, gets a job, and marries Sir Michael Audley bigamously. When Talboys returns, she fakes an obituary, stages her own funeral, attempts murder, and commits arson. The reader must marvel at her energy and ingenuity.

Elaine Showalter suggests that Lucy nearly gets away with her treachery because her innocent looks place her above suspicion.³ Yet her skills at dissembling learned as woman/wife make her capable not only of deception but of putting her own happiness and success above all other considerations, legal or moral. In addition, Lucy Audley combines classically feminine assets—a beautiful face and an outwardly gentle manner—with a distinctly unfeminine one—her resourceful mind. To be sure that no reader misses the point that Lucy is guilty, Braddon uses the admittedly clichéd but extremely effective device of describing her portrait, stressing the strange, almost demonic, quality of her beauty while hinting at a sinister aspect of its loveliness: “Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of color as if out of a raging furnace. Indeed the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the red gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing colors of each accessory of the minutely painted background, all combined to render the first effect of the painting by no means an agreeable one” (chap. 8).⁴

Robert Audley, a dilettante obsessed with his uncle's wife and his friend Talboys's second disappearance, has the most visceral reaction. For him, the portrait stirs subconscious images of Lucy as a predator and helps convince him she is guilty of some horrible if undefined evil. It also strengthens his resolve to make her pay for her sins—if only he can find out what they are. He dreams of her as a mermaid, “beckoning his uncle to destruction” (chap. 27) and as a Medusa, whose golden ringlets change into snakes and crawl down her neck, threatening the dreamer himself (chap. 13). These conventional Victorian images of feminine power and masculine dread tell the reader as much about Robert Audley as they do about the woman he sees as the personification of evil. But in this context, the golden web of Lucy's hair evokes not only the insidious destructive power that her nephew fears but also the obsession with being rich that has motivated her dishonest marriage.⁵

Lucy Audley's crimes are of two kinds: the careful, crafted deceits which create her new persona and bury her past, and the spontaneous, violent actions to get rid of the two men—George Talboys and Robert Audley—who can destroy her. She pushes Talboys down an abandoned well and leaves him to die. To cover up that crime, she sets fire to the inn where Audley is staying while he investigates her past. Her motive each time is self-defense, but what she is protecting is not her life but her reputation. That reputation as an innocent, helpless, and virtuous woman is what insures her social position and her hard-won security. She threatens, she uses physical force in wanton disregard for human life, and she believes she has committed murder but feels no remorse. As a killer, however, she is a failure; neither man dies. So why does Braddon punish her? Why does Lucy Audley die in an insane asylum? And why, for many readers, does she get what she deserves?

The answer lies in Lucy's refusal to accept her plight as a poor daughter, an abandoned wife, or a penniless governess, when everything she has learned teaches her that a woman's success is measured by an affluent marriage. The bigamy (with its overtones of sexual excess) which is her undoing enables her to marry well and achieve the financial security that neither her father nor Talboys provided. The luxury she craves is guaranteed by being a rich man's wife: having expensive clothes, sumptuous surroundings, a life of ease. She has no objection to marriage, no ambitions for a career, no wish to be independent. She relishes her new position and swears that her strongest desire is to be Sir Michael's faithful and devoted wife.

Robert Audley, as he tightens the web of evidence in which he plans to trap her, is frightened by her violence but absolutely repelled by her resourcefulness in deceiving all of them for so long. Putting her at the end of a long line of deceitful women, he recalls “the horrible things that have been done by women since that day upon which Eve was created” and shudders at Lucy Audley's “hellish power of dissimulation” (chap. 29). Not content with comparing Lucy's behavior to the mythic evil of Eve and the legendary crimes of Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine de Médicis, and the Marquise de Pompadour, Robert Audley also invokes the contemporary personification of feminine deceit, Maria Manning, who had been Dickens's source for the murderous lady's maid in Bleak House.

Audley's reaction echoes both the general Victorian dread of women's demonic powers and the inescapable seductive appeal of a woman like Lucy.⁶ Young Audley's growing revulsion at and vindictiveness toward his aunt's behavior are fueled by his initial attraction to her, and the intensity of his hatred is set against the adoration he would have felt had she been as sweet and docile as she seemed. It is very much to the point that the once-assertive woman he ends up marrying meekly abandons her independence for domestic bliss, exactly as everyone thinks Lucy has done.

Lucy, after all, is correct in her assessment that a woman's security is determined by how well she marries, but ironically neither of Lucy's husbands defends or protects her when she is in need and neither assumes responsibility for the events which precipitate her self-protecting violence. Talboys abandons her and their child, penniless, without warning or explanation. He sends no word for three years. Yet it never occurs to him that he has done anything wrong or that she will not be waiting patiently when he returns. Later, Sir Michael walks away from her when her bigamy is revealed, all his “love” gone. The anguish he feels is for himself, not for her, though her plea for forgiveness makes clear that she anticipates the grim fate which awaits her.

The other men in the novel are no more protective. Lucy's father is an incompetent drunk; Robert Audley is a vindictive meddler who can never keep his motives straight; and Luke Marks is a shiftless, ruthless blackmailer who knows no murder has been committed and yet profits from Lady Audley's dread of discovery. No one forces her, of course, to use violence to cover her deceits, as no one had forced her to measure success in materialistic terms. The reason she is punished so cruelly is that she has somehow bested men—or so they believe. Braddon implies that they do not want justice as much as they want revenge.

When Robert Audley confronts Lucy with the results of his investigations, he calls her “an artful woman … a bold woman … a wicked woman.” He concludes this diatribe with an accusation that would be ludicrous if he were not so serious: “If this woman of whom I speak had never been guilty of any blacker sin that the publication of that lying announcement [of her own death] in the Times newspaper, I should still hold her as the most detestable and despicable of her sex—the most pitiless and calculating of creatures. That cruel lie was a base and cowardly blow in the dark, it was the treacherous daggerthrust of an infamous assassin” (chap. 29).

And he is not finished: “Do you think the gifts which you have played against fortune are to hold you exempt from retribution? No, my lady, your youth and beauty, your grace and refinement, only make the horrible secret of your life more horrible” (chap. 29). After Lucy's confession of bigamy and hereditary insanity (purportedly the real secret she is trying to hide), Audley finds a convenient Victorian way to punish her without involving the judicial system, and without exposing her—and more importantly, his family—to the scandal of a trial.⁷

The doctor he engages insists that Lucy is not mad, yet he warns that she is dangerous. Convinced that no court in the country would convict her of either George Talboys's or Luke Marks's murder on the basis of the available evidence, he nonetheless arranges for her to be confined in a madhouse for the rest of her life. His reason? He believes—because she does not take the trouble to hide her animosity toward him, as a true lady would—that she poses a threat to society at large, the one charge that the narrator never makes and that none of Lucy's actions support. Elaine Showalter thinks that Braddon introduces madness to prevent Lucy from being tried, convicted, and executed for murder. In that way, Braddon could “spare her women readers the guilt of identifying with a cold-blooded killer.”⁸ That reading ignores the fact that Lucy could not have been brought to trial without some conclusive proof of her guilt in Talboys's second disappearance. Further, Victorian judicial history suggests that even though Lucy was responsible for Luke Marks's death, she probably would not have been tried, even more probably would not have been convicted, and certainly would not have been executed for killing a man of his class and reputation. Had she been found guilty of either arson or bigamy, the court in all probability would have committed her to an insane asylum just as Audley does.

Rather, Braddon used the insanity device because it allows Lucy Audley to be locked up—not for murder or bigamy or arson but for daring to assert some control over her own life. Her punishment enabled Robert Audley to demonstrate the authority over women that he believes men should have. By labeling Lucy “insane,” he can reaffirm that sane women are dependent and need his help in dealing with the problems in their lives. There is, as well, an inescapable connection between Audley's telling himself that Lucy is insane and his letting her step-daughter believe that Lucy has been guilty of some outrageous but unspecified sexual indiscretion. Insane women and promiscuous women fit his, and his society's, perception of deviant female behavior. Women who throw men down wells, set fire to hotels, and try to strangle people with their bare hands do not fit any comfortable Victorian's idea of how a woman would behave.

Braddon's most serious limitation in depicting Lucy Audley as a criminal is that her perspective is not consistent. Not only does she switch the protagonist of the novel from Lucy to Robert Audley partway through the story, but also her narrator's original sympathy for Lucy gives way to open antagonism. As a result, the narrator's comments are ruthless and sometimes incredible in their criticism; yet Braddon surely intended the final scene between Lucy and her “judge and jailer,” Robert Audley, to rouse the reader to profound pity for the woman. Lucy's description of George Talboys's goading and tormenting makes her violent response to him perfectly understandable, perhaps even forgivable. The disproportion between the harm she has actually caused and the punishment she suffers is enormous. The gravest injustice of all is that Robert Audley makes no attempt to have her released from the asylum when he discovers that George Talboys is not dead. He is instead confident that “it may be some comfort to her to hear that her husband did not perish in his youth by her wicked hand” (chap. 38).

Lady Audley was Braddon's first big success, but it was not her last. Prolific and inventive, she changed her themes and her characters to keep pace with the demands of popular fiction while continuing to create women who were violent or incited violent actions in others. Whether those books were formulaic tales like Taken at the Flood (1874) or powerful analyses of destructive emotions like Joshua Haggard's Daughter (1876), Braddon used the serious social and moral issues implicit in crime to produce a radical if circumspect attack on Victorian self-esteem. In the latter novel, a clergyman, his daughter, and his much-younger bride are caught in a web of jealousy, wife abuse, and subliminal incest which results in the murder of the daughter's fiancé and the consequent deaths of Haggard and his wife. Naomi Haggard, whose jealous fury provokes her father to murder, single-mindedly devotes herself to sustaining her father's saintly reputation, although she is fully aware of his guilt and her own complicity. Braddon makes clear that appearance and reality are not the same, that corruption can flourish beneath a respectable facade.

The growing frankness with which Braddon and her contemporaries describe sexual feelings (though not actions) demonstrates the liberating effect of a decade of sensation novels on English fiction. Though still far more discreet than Zola in Thérèse Racquin (1869) or Nikolai Leskov in “Madame Macbeth of Mzinsk” (1865) in acknowledging the power of love and hate to beget violence, Victorian novelists were increasingly candid in pointing out the consequences of frustrated emotions in otherwise quite ordinary women (and men).

Oliver Madox Brown is a case in point. In The Black Swan, he describes Gabriel Denver's infidelity and his wife's murderous rage as the direct consequences of sexual and emotional frustration.⁹ Early in the novel Brown uses conventional imagery to describe the outraged and threatening Dorothy Denver: her teeth glisten in a dark-complected face, her deep-set eyes, “glittering with the revengeful reckless light of madness,” make her look diabolical, and the overall impression is that of “an enraged venomous snake” (chap. 1). As the novel unfolds, though, Dorothy becomes less a symbol of evil and more an obsessed woman determined to punish the lovers for her private agony and public embarrassment.

Denver himself recognizes the legitimacy of Dorothy's rage, not only in feeling guilty about the passion he cannot control but also about the hollow emptiness in the life they had shared as man and wife. He freely admits that he married Dorothy for her money and held her at arm's length until she abandoned any attempts to please him or to break through his reserve. “What psychologist,” Denver muses, “can fathom … the soul of a neglected woman, hardened into strange formations of dull, callous feeling?” (chap. 4). As a result, the more Denver's active hatred for his wife becomes apparent, the more ambivalent the reader becomes about his motives for loving Laura and about Dorothy's justification for wanting to punish them. It is enough, in James Ashcroft Noble's words “to leave a sense of jarring discord between our judgment and our emotions.”¹⁰

An abandoned woman, far from home, without the comfort of children, family, or friends might, in a more conventional novel, have taken to her bed with an attack of brain fever. But not Dorothy Denver. Before she finally sets fire to the ship on which they are traveling and precipitates all their deaths, she threatens to murder both her husband and his beloved Laura. “I could have struck a knife into your hearts!” she shouts at him. “I'll strangle you in your sleep!” (chap. 1).

Dorothy's rage does not make her a heroine, even in an unconventional sense. Physically and morally unattractive, she is a cold-blooded killer, outraged that she does not live long enough to see her enemy die. Indeed she becomes nearly hysterical as the weakened and dehydrated Laura goes on breathing: “Not dead yet? is she always to live on and make my eyesight a curse to me? What have I done to kill and destroy her, that she still lingers there like a starved snake? Oh God! if it's useless after all, and I've given my soul to hell and my body to death only to be cheated! I'll strangle her sooner myself” (chap. 8). This otherwise ordinary Englishwoman commits a crime of such magnitude, of such reckless disregard for the lives of innocent sailors, of such total destruction, that the reader is jolted by the import of her dying words: “I told you you should learn what a woman's love turned to hatred could do” (chap. 8).

Brown is morally conventional in having the guilty Dorothy die a miserable death: the “burning” triggered by the madness of drinking sea water is a none too subtle reflection of her burning hate and the burning ship. It suited Victorian sensibility that she destroys herself by the violence she uses against others. But the novel's jarring power comes from the explosion of emotions which escape from her tightly reined control, a control which Dickens feared because it was so vulnerable to stress, and Eliot advocated because women without it were destructive. Brown's novel is not a plea for more liberal divorce laws nor a moral judgment on loveless marriages and infidelity, but an examination of the internal and external forces which can unite to drive usually conventional, even ordinary, women to gruesome crimes.

Helen Mathers, another popular late-Victorian novelist who regularly cast women criminals as major characters, is the author of a particularly sympathetic and sensitive examination of intertwined passion and guilt: Murder or Manslaughter (1885). The novel, which foreshadows the tragedy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, tells the story of the hapless Beryl Booth. Charged with murdering her husband because of the rumor that she was having an illicit love affair at the time of his death, Beryl initially confesses. Lacking the will to defend herself in court because she believes herself responsible for his death, she only reluctantly agrees to allow Hugo Holt, the man she loves, to mount a daring refutation of the charges. Then, when he seems to have convinced the court that the death was a suicide, she cries out that the defense is a lie, that she did meet her lover in the garden, that she meant “to take a human life,” and that she deserves to die. The jury, taking her at her word, convicts her and she is sentenced to hang.

She holds herself at fault on two counts: before her husband's death she had confessed to him her passionate attraction to the brilliant attorney, and she had bought the poison her husband drank, intending to take it herself because she could think of no other escape. In her own mind she is as guilty as if she had stabbed him through the heart, although she knows perfectly well that Holt's suicide defense is sound. The underlying issue, as it so often is in novels with women killers, is the guilt attached to extramarital love, even when that love is unconsummated. On that subject Mathers is brilliant, both in evoking the lovers' awakening mutual passion and in dissecting Beryl's obsessive self-denial, initially resisting the truth about her feelings and then rejecting the physical and emotional fulfillment of a love affair because she has internalized the moral values of her time and place.

Like the most perceptive novelists of the period, Mathers is candid about women's craving for satisfying emotional (and romantic) relationships, men's profound chauvinism, and the trap a hollow marriage becomes for women who crave more than financial security and social position. What is more unusual is that moral rectitude is not the only reason Beryl Booth resists adultery; if it were, the modern reader would be less touched by her struggle. Rather, as a woman who has established her own persona through popular success as a painter, she refuses to become any man's mistress. She knows all too well that Holt has no intention of creating a scandal or risking his own reputation by leaving his wife to live openly with her. In fact he says as much. Yet he begs her to do what he will not, to move into the demimonde. And she resents it.

Other evidence of the novelist's serious purpose is found in Mathers's creative use of standard sensation novel devices. For instance, the painting in Lady Audley's Secret which suggested some sinister force behind a benign facade is hard to take seriously as character development. But when Beryl Booth, desperately unhappy, paints a domestic scene labeled “Deserted,” with her husband hovering between sleep and death while she herself watches impassively from the doorway, there is little doubt that the work echoes the turmoil in her own mind. And when the painting is used during her trial as evidence that the murder was premeditated, the reader can quarrel only with the interpretation. That it reveals something about the psychological state of its creator is never in doubt.

Similarly, the recurrent references to physical abuse are not used for shock effect; in fact, violence never actually occurs. Instead the threats of violence comment on the dynamic of a romantic relationship in which a man (in this case Hugo Holt) expects to have his own way and is denied. On two different occasions he threatens to beat Beryl for resisting his advances. The suggestion, of course, is that he could force her to bend to his will. And though he never strikes her, there is an element of real menace in his words, a threat that grows out of his frustration, that seems to him within the limits of tolerance, and is kept in check only by his own force of will.

Finally, the opposition between a virtuous woman and a shameless adventuress, which is so often the centerpiece of nineteenth-century fiction, is given an ironic twist in Murder or Manslaughter. The “guilty” woman is not temptress but tempted. Her husband is so obsessed with his scientific investigations that he has little time for her, though she is eager to be a good wife. Her lover importunes her to no avail. She believes her friends when they insist that men have all the pleasures in love and women all the penalties. And Holt's wife is dull and shallow by comparison with the object of his desire: “Serenely unconscious of rivalry, but fully aware of her advantages, which included her house, her diamonds, her gaieties, her children, and, last of all, her husband, Mrs. Holt looked exactly like what she was—a handsome, well-meaning, good sort of second rate woman” (chap. 37).

But Mathers, like her heroine, was finally a woman of her time, and, in the crunch, virtue, not independence, was the theme she chose to stress. Nowhere is this clearer than after Edmund Booth's death when betrayal is no longer a bar to Beryl's liaison with Holt. Yet Beryl craves punishment, either overtly, for murder, or more ineluctably by running away after she is cleared. Who, the frustrated reader wonders, could have blamed her for staying and taking her chances at happiness with Holt? Yet for all its moralizing, the denouement is more intellectually satisfying than the resolution of Eliot's Middlemarch, wherein Dorothea's second marriage reduces her to conventional wifehood. Beryl Booth refuses to yield either body or soul, so although she is lonesome, she is free.

The excesses of sensation fiction had been unfairly maligned and its contributions correspondingly ignored until renewed interest in popular literature, specifically what Victorian women read and wrote, prompted reexamination of the texts.¹¹ It remains a valid criticism that the frequency with which women are guilty of violent crime stretches the truth, as does the emphasis on the criminality of the middle class. Yet only a hypocrite or a fool would deny that crime was omnipresent in the Victorian world or that it was often engendered by the moral and legal rigidity on which that society prided itself. In the interest of either good taste or good sales, the novelists avoided Kate Webster and her crime (chopping up her employer and cooking the pieces) and the more horrible aspects of baby-farming and infanticide which were all too frequent in working-class and impoverished environments and which contemporary journalists described in gory detail. Similarly, they ignored incest and other sexual “perversions” like homosexuality and sadomasochism. Rather, the crimes the novels describe addressed timely issues. For instance, some of the women killers are truly evil, and their crimes show a malevolence that goes far beyond the bounds of rational behavior. Yet because they maintain an aura of gentility and decorum, they are protected, if only temporarily, from suspicion. Just as emphatically as the novelists wanted to show women capable of anything including murder, they wanted to expose the hypocrisy of equating conventionality with moral virtue.

As a result of its candor and boldness, the sensation genre exerted a strong influence on Victorian fiction at large, although many contemporary novelists declared themselves appalled and shocked by its style and subjects. George Eliot, for instance, believed her own account of the situations which provoked women to violence, and the cultural imperatives that kept them from it, was more honest than what Braddon or Collins had to say. But between Hetty Sorrel (in 1859 before the sensation era began) and Gwendolen Harleth (after it had begun to wane in 1876) an enormous change occurred in Eliot's—and in society's—conception of the kind of woman who could commit murder.¹²

Notes

1. Margaret Oliphant, “Novels,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 102 (September 1967): 257-80. See also Leslie Stephen, “The Decay of Murder,” Cornhill Magazine 20 (December 1869): 722-33, and A. Innes Shand, “Crime in Fiction,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 148 (August 1890): 172-89.

2. See Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (New York: Viking Books, 1989) for a discussion of the influence of mid-century crime reporting on the plots and language of the emerging sensation novel.

3. Showalter, Literature of Their Own, 165ff.

4. Despite the fact that later in the novel Braddon refers to William Holman Hunt, an artist who often used doubling images on his paintings, to reassert the portrait's depiction of Lucy's dual personality, there is no Hunt work as evocative of the sense of feminine evil that Braddon is trying to create as either Rosetti's painting of Lucrezia Borgia (1860-61) or Burne-Jones's of Sidonia von Bork (1860).

5. Gitter, “Power of Women's Hair,” 943.

6. For a Victorian reaction to Lady Audley, see Shand, “Crime in Fiction,” 188. Audley is labelled a “moral monstrosity,” but Braddon is praised for her readability and credibility. “We are inclined to accept all she writes as gospel. If it is not true it ought to be, so great is the air of vraisemblance.”

7. The novel reflects the ability of families with the financial or social resources to block or manipulate police investigations and “spare” their women the public disgrace of judicial proceedings. Constance Kent's case provides an interesting illustration. Whatever his motive, Kent's father kept the local police from investigating the scene of the crime for several hours, joined them in their examination of the physical evidence, and was made privy to their findings and suspicions (see Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 118 and passim, for discussion of the details of the case). When Constance was not indicted—although she was the prime suspect—he promptly sent her to a convent school in France where she was kept, under a false name, for three years. His machinations put Robert Audley's behavior in Braddon's novel in perspective.

8. Showalter, Literature of Their Own, 166, argues persuasively that Audley was not insane and that her guilty “secret” was that she was a highly competent and assertive woman clever enough to hide her brains behind her physical charms.

9. The Black Swan, in Brown, The Dwale Bluth, vol. 2 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876). To get the novel published the first time (as Gabriel Denver in 1873), Brown mitigated Denver's guilt by changing the vengeful wife to an unloved fiancée and added a happy ending, but retained his candid description of the powerful physical attraction between Denver and Laura Conway and the destructive fury of the abandoned woman.

10. James Aschcroft Noble, Morality in English Fiction (Liverpool: W and J Arnold, 1887), 53.

11. See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860's (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), and Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel, for perceptive reassessments. In this context it is interesting to read George Eliot's “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 66 (1856): 442-61.

12. The puzzle that women criminals posed for nineteenth-century novelists and their audiences is encapsulated by E. S. Dallas's The Gay Science (1866), an exposition and critique of the science of criticism. Before he tackles the way women are described in contemporary novels, Dallas defends sensation fiction as legitimate literature, observing that it differs from respectable literature “solely in the relation of the characters pourtrayed [sic] to the actions described,” and insisting that neither the serious novel's emphasis on the control a character exerts on his circumstances nor the sensation novel's suggestion that character is controlled by event is wholly true or wholly false. He attacks the grounds on which sensation fiction is damned: “To show man as the sport of circumstance may be a depressing view of human nature; but it is not fair to regard it as immoral nor to denounce it as utterly untrue” (xvii).

    When he turns to a discussion of the feminine influence which “pervades” literature, he forgets his own observations about veracity and the mirroring of society. Novelists “deny truth” if they make women central to the action because that is not the way things are, he says. He sees no irony in his own observation that the first appearance of a woman in literature—Eve in the Garden of Eden—is also the first instance of unfeminine behavior. His eventual point, however, is a reluctant acknowledgment that by concentrating on women, especially women of action, the novelists became increasingly interested in the private individual rather than a larger-than-life character, not only as hero(ine) but also as villain(ess).