ABSTRACT
The sensation novel’s intense focus on marriage and domestic relations, on bigamy and adultery (or quasi-bigamy and adultery), and its extensive use of plots depending on missing wills and legal intricacies, may be seen as a fictional mediation of the heightened awareness, from the 1830s onwards – but particularly in the 1850s and 1860s – of the anomalies in women’s legal status, especially within marriage. As Justin McCarthy (1864) noted in his review of ‘Novels with a purpose’, ‘The institution of marriage might almost seem to be … just now upon its trial’ (40). The mid-Victorian contest over women’s legal status and identity, and the changing discourse in which it was conducted were important components of sensation fiction in general and the women’s sensation novel in particular.
