ABSTRACT
Rhoda Broughton's Cometh up as a Flower resonates with other and more famous sensation novels of the decade in telling the story of the motherless Nell Lestrange's courtship by one man and reluctant marriage to another, wealthier suitor after a forged letter breaks up her love affair. This chapter argues that Cometh up as a Flower participates in the sensational mode, but that it does so in order to challenge reader response. If the sensational mode can be understood as the disruption of realism by self-consciously dramatic paradigms, Nell as the first-person narrator frustrates her reader's expectations of the genre, reinstating sensational tropes within the context of an ultimately triumphant domestic realism. The combination of humility and penetrating intelligence frames the discussion of Nell's reading of the Bible as she waits to die. Nell's strategy of referencing the sensational mode only to collapse it ensures that the reader's suspense is sustained until the end.
