Literary Genres

Victorian sensation fiction was obsessed with women. Their bodies. Their secrets. Their marriages. Their crimes. Their silences. Emerging in the 1860s, sensation fiction brought scandal out of the shadows and into the drawing room. It invited respectable readers to thrill at adultery, bigamy, deception, and female transgression — all while insisting that such things were rare, shocking, and safely contained within fiction. Yet beneath the melodrama lay a deeper contradiction.