Getting Away with Murder: Mary Braddon

Abstract

Sensation novels were a notorious literary genre of the 1860s, named for the furore they created, and their appeal, seen as visceral, depicting the worst of human nature. They drew on contemporary famous cases of murder and bigamy, and often retailed them in a narrative form remarkably prescient of modern crime writing: plot-driven, with relentless suspense. Such was created by the practice of magazine serialization, with its need for cliffhanger endings with each instalment, to keep the reader hungry for more. Sensation looked forward, but also back to the Gothic, using its dramatic set-pieces, like the trapped heroine, while also borrowing the Newgate novel’s crime content, used in a contemporary, realist setting.

[S]ince I’ve taking to writing novels, I don’t think I’ve a desire unsatisfied. There’s nothing I haven’t done — on paper. The beautiful women I’ve loved and married; the fortunes I’ve come into, always unexpectedly, and when I was at the very lowest ebb, with a tendency to throw myself into the Serpentine in the moonlight; the awful vengeance I’ve wreaked upon my enemies; the murders I’ve committed … I suppose it isn’t I that steal up the creaking stair, with a long knife tightly grasped and gleaming blue in the moonbeams that creep through a chink in the shutter; but I’m sure I enjoy myself as much as if it was.

Mary Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife 229–30