The Sensation Novel In Lady Audley's Secret

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time in which several transformations occurred in England at social, economic, and political levels. During Queen Victoria’s reign that lasted 64 years, from 1837 to 1901, society in general adhered to a strict moral code and values that praised hard work, honesty, sexual propriety, and thrift. The life of the queen regnant, her personal morality, and prudishness influenced her subjects to imitate her, and she became a role model for the British people and the world. During this century, another major economic and political change occurred in England that transformed the country and positioned it at the center of the world: The Industrial Revolution. With the development of innovative technological

Due to this mass production, periodical publications like magazines and newspaper also took advantage of this and started to distribute serialized fiction on a weekly or monthly basis. One of the genres that developed thanks to the advances in printing methods was the Sensation Novel. The genre became a success because of its portrayal of the anxieties of the Victorian period: bigamy, murder, madness, and loss of identity, among other controversial subjects. One of the finest examples of the Sensation Novel is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In her text, she develops several anxieties of her time such as the pollution of the sacred space of the home and loss of identity as results of the Industrial Revolution and the changes it brought to the social structure and the concepts of class and gender. In fact, Braddon portrays in Lady Audley’s Secret atypical types of women in the female characters of Lady Audley, Alicia Audley, and Clara Talboys that contrast with the model of the Victorian woman proposed by John Ruskin in an excerpt of “Of Queens’