Violent Women and Sensation Fiction

Reviewed by: Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture, by Andrew Mangham; pp. 264. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, £50.00, $69.95. Andrew Mangham adds to the growing body of scholarship on gender and sensation fiction with this book. He treads familiar ground, relating women in the sensational novel to notions of dangerous female sexuality and its links to insanity, but he brings together considerable evidence to support his contention that insufficient attention has been given to the links between sexual disturbance (adolescence, suppressed menstruation, menopause) and the figure of the "insanely violent" woman in both mid-Victorian history and literature. One of the contributions of this book is its reading of several novels by now well-known sensation authors such as Wilkie Collins and Ellen Wood that have, as he points out, received little scholarly attention compared to the now paracanonical The Woman in White (1860), Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and East Lynne (1862). The first two chapters, which largely concentrate on historical and medico-juridical sources, use as foci several widely publicized mid-century murder cases—Sarah Minchin, Martha Brixey, Maria Manning, and especially Constance Kent—along with their literary echoes. Mangham shows the widespread nature of the belief that female adolescence was a period of emotional and mental instability for young women, when they were in a period of heightened vulnerability to insanity and liable to acts of rationally inexplicable violence. He points out that Collins's use of a nightdress as an evidentiary key [End Page 158] to solving the jewel theft in The Moonstone (1868) cites and reworks the attention to Kent's nightdress, which was missing and later discovered to have been bloodied and hidden. He unpacks the furor over the nightdress, which, a medical witness who had seen it indicated, was stained not from the murder but likely from menstruation. The press (and the witness) referred to this so elliptically it requires careful reading to bring this out, and Mangham makes a clear case. Collins, he argues, reverses the gender of the wearer of the missing nightdress and changes the crime in part as a commentary on the assumptions about the guilt of Kent, who was not convicted of the murder. (Years later, however, she came forward and confessed.) He also follows this thread of associations in Aurora Floyd (1863). The subsequent chapters concentrate on literary depictions of violent women. A chapter on M. E. Braddon discusses not only Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, but The Trail of the Serpent (1861) and John Marchmont's Legacy (1863). Adolescence was not the only period of danger in a woman's life: maternity and menopause offered different kinds of no less serious threats to sanity, as Mangham makes clear. A chapter on Wood considers violence associated with mothering, a theme that Mangham also treats at less length in other chapters. In addition to East Lynne, the chapter covers Danesbury House (1860), Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles (1862), Verner's Pride (1863), The Shadow of Ashlydat (1864), and Lady Adelaide's Oath (1867). The final substantive chapter addresses several Collins novels, principally The Woman in White, No Name (1862), and Armadale (1866). As might be suggested by such a long list, the readings generally serve more to accrue multiple examples of a particular theme or issue than to advance separate arguments about the novels as such; they thus accomplish well Mangham's principal aim of showing the centrality of a pathologized female sexuality to representations of violence in sensation fiction. The strength of Violent Women and Sensation Fiction is in the specifics, rather than in the overarching argument. The book feels a bit dated; it covers familiar ground from 1990s scholarship in its connection to medicine and its conclusions on gender and does not revise or provide new illumination of the existing framework for thinking about this body of work. The book is valuable, however, in giving attention to several texts that have not been treated at length (or at all) elsewhere. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction would have benefited from an

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