Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture Sensational Strategies

Beth Palmer brings new perspectives to the study of sensation fiction in the Victorian period, a popular genre often involving narratives of crime and madness. By examining the self-conscious and complex ways in which Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat used sensation as both authors and magazine editors she re-works the conventional perspective that sensation fiction was a hackneyed, formulaic, and limited genre. Palmer offers a new, broadercontext for the phenomenal success of works like Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wood's East Lynne.The book also provides a larger context to this important relationship between sensation and the periodical by reaching back to explore the vital press conditions initiated byfigures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton in the mid-nineteenth century and by looking forwards to the New Woman writers of the 1890s to understand the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.