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Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture

Andrew Mangham’s innovative text interrogates the trope of female incarceration in the sensation novels of the 1860s. Moving beyond Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980), Mangham turns his attention to the cultural and disciplinary intersections surrounding representations of the feminine in the period. As he observes, ‘‘by exploring the links between a number of Victorian disciplines, one learns a great deal about each one of those fields and the larger culture into which it was embedded’’ (3). Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture focuses on the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood, and Wilkie Collins. This is analysed in the context of historical, journalistic, scientific, medical, and legal disciplines. Mangham contends that academic interest in science in fiction in the nineteenth century has concentrated on canonical authors such as Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë, leaving ‘‘vital connections between non-fictional material and popular fiction largely unexplored’’ (3). This, he suggests, creates an unbalanced and elitist picture as the popular literature had the greater and more socially mixed audience. As Mangham himself states, ‘‘Braddon, Wood, and Collins have been chosen [ . . .] because they were the best-selling writers of their period’’ (3). The opening chapter, ‘‘Explosive Materials: Legal, Medical, and Journalistic Profiles of the Violent Woman’’ considers the connections between nineteenth-century ‘‘criminal trials of real women and emerging medical theories of psychosomatic female pathology’’ (3). ‘‘The Body in the Kitchen’’ features the trial for murder of Maria and Fredrick Manning (1849) and ‘‘Young Women and Adolescents: ‘The Mad Fury of that Lovely Being’’’ includes the 1863 story ‘‘The White Maniac: A Doctor’s Tale’’ (published in 1912), written by the little-known Australian crime writer, Mary Fortune or ‘‘Waif Wander’’.