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This was often at the expense of more ambiguous, or self-consciously antisensational, writers on the one hand and of sensational writers who skirted subversive elements on the other. Not only did some of the most sensational writers ultimately reinforce domestic ideals by illuminating their significance through their absence; committed domestic, even didactic, novelists traded on the most successful sensational formulae. They did so partly to tap into a popular market but also to adapt such paradigms for different agendas, undercutting any easy identification of a specific genre with a specific ideology or doctrine. To complicate matters—and thereby enable us to look beyond fixed categories—the most prolific and popular writers of the time not only changed track more than once in adopting emerging subgenres and reacting to each other’s writing. They also transcended various lines of demarcation in order to capitalise on ambiguities, on ruptures of established plotlines that thereby create narrative tension.
As the individual chapters in this collection show, Oliphant and Yonge both drew, in a distinctly different fashion, on the narrative potential of literary sensationalism, whereas such a frequently typified sensation novelist as Mary Elizabeth Braddon displayed considerable ambiguity in her representation of the femme fatale, for example. Most importantly, as Gilbert stresses in her contribution to this collection, it is vital to acknowledge that there is virtue to reading Victorian literature that is not in direct relation to feminism and that this should not be the sole justification for reading women’s writing. Taking the versatile oeuvre of Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) as a case study, Gilbert’s discussion of “Feminism and the Canon: Recovery and Reconsideration of Popular Novelists” leads us through the last decades of “recovery work” to critique some of its impasses. Not only was the litmus test with which “forgotten” authors were first approached not very sensitive to begin with, but if this indisputably restricted early recovery tactics, Gilbert also reminds us how much more damaging the subsequent “theoretical turn” proved to be in bringing this unearthing to a temporary halt.