Abstract
This short concluding chapter offers an examination of an 1891 work by Austin Fryers (William Edward Clery): a parody entitled A New Lady Audley. Whilst its publication at the end of the nineteenth century speaks to sensation fiction’s success at this time, it also represents a potential starting point for the neo-sensation novel. This chapter considers the ways in which Fryer’s Audley Court is associated with those key motifs and subgenres of sensation and neo-sensation fiction: with Gothic symbolism, crime and detection, a youthful heroine, traumatic events (though here recounted humorously), with history and its pervasive influence on the present, and with inheritance, and examines these various concerns in relation to the complex legacy of the Victorian sensation novel.
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- 1.
Fryers was the pseudonym of William Edward Clery (1861–1931).
- 2.
Archibald Balling Shepperson, The Novel in Motley: A History of the Burlesque Novel in English (Cambridge, 1936), p. 271.
- 3.
Sensation satires were not uncommon: Watts Phillip’s The Woman in Mauve, discussed in Chap. 1, represents an earlier example.
- 4.
Austin Fryers, A New Lady Audley (1891; Black Heath Editions [Kindle], 2014), loc.53. Subsequent locations given in parenthesis.
- 5.
Her name and profession also recall Sibyl Vane in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask (1866), which contains striking parallels with Braddon’s novel, also includes a former actress in the role of sensation (anti-)heroine.
- 6.
Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 28.
- 7.
Glennis Byron, ‘Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace’ in Justin Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, eds., The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 81.
References
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 2003. Lady Audley’s Secret. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
Byron, Glennis. 2012. Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace. In The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, 71–83. Abingdon: Routledge.
Fryers, Austin. 2014. A New Lady Audley. 1891; Black Heath Editions (Kindle).
Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holt, Victoria. 2013. Shivering Sands. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks.
Shepperson, Archibald Bolling. 1936. The Novel in Motley: A History of the Burlesque Novel in English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Cox, J. (2019). Conclusion: ‘Substantial Ghosts’—Sensational Continuities and Legacies. In: Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4_8
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