ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the deployment of women’s hair in sensation fiction from the 1860s, and the contemporary critical response which it triggered. Victorian critics found the representation of hair in sensation novels excessive and exaggerated, and thought that it testified to the poor quality of both characterization and descriptive power in such fiction. I wish to reassess the validity of these claims, and suggest that in fact, hair was so central to both sensationalists and their critics because it shared many of the features which were conceptualized as the generic quiddities of sensation fiction. Representations of hair in the 1860s constituted not only an element but also an embodiment of the sensational. They often corporealized its subversive effect on traditional gender roles, its preoccupation with contradictions of prevailing versions of femininity, its constant negotiation and redefinition of feminine identity, its distrust of misleading appearances, its fascination with materiality, its topicality and its wide common denominator with the marketplace and contemporary habits of consumption.
