ABSTRACT
Cora Leslie, an American girl born in New Orleans but educated in England, has attracted the interest of Gilbert Margrave, a British engineer celebrated for inventing machinery to replace slave labor. Gilbert is not the only character unable to read the signs of Cora's racial ancestry. While American Tragic Mulatta narratives traditionally pivot on the mixed-race woman's discovery that she is not free, Braddon's story revolves around a more shocking secret: Cora does not know she is an octoroon. In American abolitionist texts, such as Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons", Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and William Wells Brown's Clotel, the Tragic Mulatta is a sentimental figure of true womanhood whose compromised bloodline prohibits her from marrying her white suitor. Although literary history has maintained a national divide between British and American sensation authors, the author argues that American abolitionist fiction gave rise to British sensation fiction.
