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Kate Mattacks’ “Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Secret: An Antifeminist Amongst the New Women” argues that a gendered vision of Braddon as a subversive and therefore feminist novelist may have propelled her into a canon of revived popular novelists but that this has also singularly failed to account either for the complexities of her sensation fiction or for the texts that followed. Correlating these shifts in three novels across Braddon’s long and prolific career, Mattacks analyses central ambiguities in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), One Thing Needful (1886), and The Fatal Three (1888). Read alongside archival evidence taken from Braddon’s diaries and letters, the expression of often contradictory or peculiarly tempered leanings and tactics in her fiction indicates that it is both difficult and reductive to align her descriptions of empowered women who practise self-containment with a feminist agenda. Heather L. Braun similarly juxtaposes Lady Audley’s Secret as arguably the most successful, infamous, and now most regularly taught novel by a female sensation novelist with Braddon’s experimentation with the genre of the vampire tale in “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896). In “Idle Vampires and Decadent Maidens: Sensation, the Supernatural, and Mary E. Braddon’s Disappointing Femmes Fatales,” Braun suggests that Braddon’s oeuvre accentuates a defining feature of both sensation and vampire stories by tearing down the generic divisions of romance and realism and simultaneously entertaining both supernatural and rational explanations for the delineated crimes and secrets. Yet Braddon renegotiates the desire for containment in a markedly ambiguous fashion that ultimately centres on the vampire at home.
Metaphors of vampirism in a domestic setting similarly inform Kiran Mascarenhas’ “John Halifax, Gentleman: A Counter Story.” Suggesting that the eponymous protagonist of Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) prefigures late-Victorian vampires, this chapter reads the novel as a carefully encoded critique of the capitalist self-help ideology it seems to endorse. While Mascarenhas thus intriguingly dissects an understory beneath the seemingly simple storyline, Ann-Barbara Graff’s “Annesley Kenealy and Sarah Grand: Biopower and the Limits of the New Woman” reads between the lines of the writing of diametrically opposite late-Victorian and Edwardian women writers to discover surprising affinities.