In reaction to this criticism, both Marryat and Robinson wrote letters to their publisher, Richard Bentley, urging him to grant them permission to give public lectures on women’s issues. In a letter dated July 5, 1878, Florence Marryat complained that she “so often applied to [Bentley] w/o success.”9 Though Bentley apparently had little regard for Marryat’s undertaking, she, like other women, made rigorous efforts to promote her message about oppressive marriage laws and the exploitation of women’s roles despite these unpopular views. Though Marryat and Robinson may be considered minor writers in a contemporary study of sensation fiction, they had a significant influence on women and the public during the nineteenth century. It was not, therefore, uncommon that their personal lives were publicized, usually by critics of sensation fiction who wanted to construct a scandalous image of these pioneering female novelists.
However, while the femme fatale, in my opinion, has been often misconstrued as a “conservative backlash” against the Women’s Movement organized by middle-class women in the 1850s, I am not interested in demonstrating how the femme fatale strengthens dominant ideology of the nineteenth century. Rather, I argue that the construction of the femme fatale offers an empowering new image of midcentury Victorian women, challenging readers’ dominant ideologies about women’s roles.
Sensation fiction establishes the femme fatale as a central motif of mystery and intrigue in the Victorian novel, making this feminine trope a cultural phenomenon. When novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, Emma Robinson, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon characterize the femme fatale, they similarly show that her parentage and poverty, which she cannot help, marginalize her from polite bourgeois society. For these very reasons, she threatens “external boundaries, margins, and internal structure” by mobilizing herself into respectable aristocratic homes (Douglas 115).