Conclusion: ‘She Has Got a Murderess in Manuscript in her Bedroom’

Abstract

In 1866, an anonymous essayist in the Saturday Review presented an overview of Sensation fiction at its height of popularity. In the course of his argument he discusses the creators of ‘Homicidal Heroines’ like Lady Audley, not dissolute or abandoned women, but clever and respectable governesses, bluestockings and curate’s wives. Nor were they necessarily uncommon: his own household might well contain an aspiring Queen of Sensation.

The young lady who is kind enough to teach one’s daughters French and music looks and talks like an ordinary being, but it is very likely if we only knew all, that she has got a murderess in manuscript in her bedroom, at the elaboration of whose career she is working all her spare hours, and through the vivid delineation of whose amatory and homicidal performances she hopes herself to attain to literary fame. It is difficult to believe how anybody who is to all outward appearance so harmless, and who takes her meals with such regularity, can be engaged in the manufacture of all the frightful sentiments and harrowing plots to the production of which she retires, for anything we can tell, when the music-lessons and the French are over for the day …

A quiet man thinks all this very terrible, and opines that the book must have been written by a she fiend. Nothing of the kind. It has been written by the wife of the curate in an adjoining parish, or by a clever governess, or an amiable blue-stocking, whose time hangs heavy on her hands, and who composes this sort of thing when she is tired of composing hymns.

‘Homicidal Heroines’, Saturday Review 7 April 1866: 403–4