Sons of Fire and A Lost Eden: Expectations of Narrative and Protocols of Reading in Mary Braddon’s Fin-de-Siècle Fiction

Abstract

Mary Braddon’s late fin-de-siècle novels Sons of Fire (1895) and A Lost Eden (1904) offer a very useful tandem study in plot devices and narrative structure that both reinforce and defy the usual expectations. Like her contemporary readership, later literary critics usually expect to read Braddon’s work as sensation fiction that includes a central puzzle involving secrecy, transgression, or crime. The two novels considered here align themselves with some of the expected conventions of Victorian fiction and of Braddon’s own best-known techniques of sensation writing, but they also anticipate and pioneer protocols of reading that sit well with later Edwardian and twentieth-century fiction. These protocols involve foregrounding different aspects and devices, such as promoting the sleuthing element rather than the criminal element and initiating the psychological explanation rather than the sensational one. It is possible to recognize Braddon’s late novels as experimental in a number of ways. They exploit Victorian sensationalist devices yet also anticipate future literary tastes for crime, thrillers, psychological narratives, melodramatic content, and borderline supernatural/Gothic elements (the latter explored as a ‘doppelganger’ plot inSons of Fire, for instance). In her fin-de-siècle fiction Braddon not only uses these devices but also builds in mechanisms that defuse and explain them, introducing and consolidating new modes in her writing with a much more psychologically driven, realist style. This occurs, for example, in the discovery of a first-person memoir in Sons of Fire that takes over the narrative and accounts for certain events and motives, as well as in the detective-fiction characteristics of the heroine’s sleuthing at the conclusion of A Lost Eden.