This project on Victorian sensation fiction and historical affects began when I discovered the sensation novels of Amelia Edwards over a decade ago. Edwards was well known to Victorian scholars as a travel writer and Egyptologist but not as a sensation author. When I read Edwards's popular Barbara's History (1864), I found it playful regarding its own generic classification. Barbara reads constantly and details her affective and melodramatic reactions to the narratives that she encounters. Yet the novel is also attentive to the pitfalls of using romantic novels as a guide for life and implies that Barbara feels too much, too deeply. When she attends the opera for the first time, she writes that the experience ‘carried me out of myself. I could not believe that all was not real’ (219). And she overreacts when she believes that her husband is hiding a secret mistress à la Jane Eyre (1847); she runs away and has a child on the continent, only to have her stern aunt chide her for being so ‘dramatic’ (448). When I first encountered this novel, I puzzled over how to categorise it, as it revels in the plotlines and affective language typical of sensationalism but is also critical of the genre and the reading practices associated with it.

Initially, I classified Edwards as an ambivalent sensationalist, placing her alongside Margaret Oliphant, a critic of the genre who wrote a sensation novel, Salem Chapel (1863), or Ellen Wood, whose Christian moralising worked to temper her sensationalism. Yet even ‘classic’ sensation authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins are generically playful, indulging in sensational plots and melodramatic language, only to question and critique such devices. Rather than see Edwards as anomalous, I came to see her work as characteristic of novels called sensational. It is this combination of detailed affective descriptions and self-reflexive commentary on reading, feeling and realistic representation that defines sensationalism. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), amateur detective Robert Audley insists, ‘I haven't read … Wilkie Collins for nothing’ (342). And Robert debates with George and Alicia about the ‘exaggerated’ pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lucy, a work of art that mirrors the exaggerated sensation novel (66). Robert finds ‘something odd about it’ and Alicia agrees, surmising that it is not a realistic depiction of Lucy, even if ‘she could look so’ (66).