While I have discussed Margaret Oliphant's role as a critical reviewer of sensation novels, this chapter explores her surprising foray into sensationalism, Salem Chapel. I read Salem Chapel alongside Wilkie Collins's Armadale, focusing on their depictions of public and private feelings. Characters in each novel fantasise about the idea of a private body, immune to social forces and community gossip, yet these texts consistently collapse the public and private, showing that the body, like the home, is leaky and permeable to the eyes and affects of others. For instance, town gossips are often humorous characters in Victorian fiction, but in Salem Chapel, Oliphant depicts the local gossip, the young, disabled Adelaide Tufton, as frightening in her ability to pry information out of vulnerable townspeople. When Mrs Vincent insists on making her usual house calls despite the fact that her daughter, Susan, is assumed to have scandalously run away with an older man, she knows that she must face Adelaide. She tells her maid, ‘I must go out, Mary…. I must do my duty if the world were all breaking up’ (250). When she arrives at the Tuftons’ home, she is confronted with Adelaide's discerning eyes:

This moment sets up the various conflicts that I trace throughout this chapter. Sensation fiction relied upon a kind of voyeuristic pleasure, associated as it was with the ‘satisfaction or thrill of seeing’ (Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings 24). In the case of Mrs Vincent, as with many sensational heroines, her body risks revealing these secrets, as her ‘suspense and excitement seemed to ooze out unawares’, a compelling description of the ways in which affects can be unwillingly transmitted. Yet Oliphant constructs this scene from the perspective of Mrs Vincent rather than Adelaide, and so what might have been an exciting moment of disclosure is instead written as one of anxiety and vulnerability.