Braddon and Sensation Novels Part II

On reading about Mary Elizabeth Braddon, I have been looking at some of her sensation novels.  She was one of the earliest who wrote in this genre, which she did partly for money and partly because it was a kind of writing she enjoyed.

Unlike some women writers, she had had a varied and somewhat difficult lifestyle.  Having been an actress, and having chosen to live as Maxwell’s mistress, and waiting several years before they could marry, she knew more about the seamy side of life than some authors like Jane Austen.  Austen was an intelligent and unprudish woman; she was not ignorant of the problems of the world or the hidden side of life…such as mistresses, drunkenness and so on that she wrote about gleefully in her juvenilia.  However compared with a girl like Braddon, coming along many years later, born into a fairly poor family, a girl who had had to go on the provincial stage, a “lady” like Austen was sheltered.

Braddon’s novels often tell the story form the man’s point of view and she’s capable of writing about life for young men, lounging around London, looking for amusement.  Knowing the world of publishing and writing for the magazines, and the stage, she was able to write confidently about people who are far from rich and comfortable and sheltered... who work at what the upper classes would call vulgar or seamy jobs.  She is able to write of a male world because, as a woman who had broken the social conventions, she had to live more in the world of men, than in the world of respectable females.  

In “The Doctor’s Wife,” she writes of a young man who makes a living writing thriller like stories for magazines... And her heroine’s family lives in lower middle class poverty, her father making a precarious living as a forger while claiming to be in the law.  In  ”John Marmont’s Legacy,” the heroine, Mary Marmont is living in a shabby flat in central London, among working class people, while her father ekes out a living as an extra on stage…

George Eliot too lived with a man she was not married to, and ladies (except for a few) did not visit her.  However Eliot was an intellectually minded woman and wanted to write novels that were ultra-serious and would not descend to “money making” fiction like sensation novels.