ABSTRACT
Elaine Showalter discusses both Lady Audley's Secret and Behind a Mask in her feminist criticism, arguing that sensation novelists, "made a powerful appeal to the female audience by subverting the traditions of feminine fiction". Braddon's and Alcott's texts reveals the resonances and traditions of women's writing on both sides of the Atlantic, and have received significant critical attention in recent years. Both texts have inspired critics to examine the figure of the dangerous and transgressive heroine as a challenge to and result of the limited opportunities and confining roles for women in the nineteenth century. With a transatlantic lens, Behind a Mask has been analyzed in relation to Victorian women's fiction; Christina Doyle compares it to Bronte's Jane Eyre, whereas Elaine Showalter writes that Alcott "drew heavily on her childhood reading of Jane Eyre, and on best-selling English novels of the 1860s such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins Armadale".
