ABSTRACT
In 1863, Henry Longueville Mansel, religious leader and Oxford professor, warned darkly that “sensation novels must be recognized as a great fact in the literature of the day, and a fact whose significance is by no means of an agreeable kind” (267). Sensation fiction was defined as a literary genre by 1860s critics in Britain, and the term, applied rather loosely to many enormously popular works, has stuck. The first and best-known sensation novels were Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) was also often included in the category. This chapter details the original critical response and definition of the genre, and discusses the development of the scholarship on this topic from its inception in the 1970s to the present. It then explores the continuing usefulness of “sensation” as a term going forward.
