This chapter explores the effects of sensational narratives on the body of the author rather than the reader. In the previous chapter, I discussed Henry Mansel's depiction of the sensation writer as mechanical and profit-driven. He claimed that the spasmodic poet writes to gratify ‘the unconquerable yearnings of his soul’, while the sensation novelist writes for the purposes of ‘supply and demand’ (212). This more mechanical model of authorship was widespread across reviews of sensation fiction. For instance, the Saturday Review said that Collins had only ‘Mechanical talent’ and compared him to a cabinet-maker (249). Braddon was similarly accused of being ‘a novel-producing machine’ (‘Literature: Miss Braddon's New Novel’ 2). Another model of authorship plagued Braddon and other female sensation writers, one that was arguably even more damning. In contrast to the mechanical model was what we might call the knowledge model of authorship, which understood female authors’ work as the products of their dubious knowledge and experience. It can be summed up by Henry James's notorious assessment of Braddon: ‘She knows much that ladies are not accustomed to know’ (594). Oliphant also comments on Braddon's ‘bad’ knowledge, claiming that she must not know ‘how young women of good blood and good training feel’ (‘Novels’ 260). Implicit in this model is that the sensation author – and the female author especially – can only write through personal experience; her characters’ immorality therefore must reflect her own lived experience or, at the very least, her understanding of the world. Braddon, whose name was ‘a byword for all that was lauded and loathed about the female “sensation novelist”’, was particularly vulnerable to such criticism because her scandalous past as an actress and her relationship with her married publisher, John Maxwell, were well known to the public (Beller, ‘Popularity’ 245).

Yet Braddon responded to these models in creative ways. In The Doctor's Wife, she cannily pokes fun at the mechanical understanding of authorship via Sigismund Smith. Smith must write four stories a week for a public demanding ‘a continuous flow of incident’, so he writes what he calls ‘combination’ stories, stories that are combined, or stolen, from other writers (45).