19th- and 20th-Century Detective Fiction Course Tutor: Dr Alison Moulds

Course Aims and Objectives This course will develop your understanding of detective fiction in its historical and critical contexts. We will explore the relationship between a range of novels and short stories by leading crime writers from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. 1. To develop critical skills in reading, discussing, and writing about detective fiction. 2. To examine the use of literary techniques in detective fiction. 3. To understand how the genre has developed over time.

Learning Outcomes By the end of the course you will be expected to: 1 Learning Outcomes By the end of the course you will be expected to: 1. Have an understanding of detective fiction in its historical and critical contexts. 2. Be able to trace themes across texts, recognising both similarities and tensions. 3. Be able to read more critically.    Assessment You will be asked to write a 500-word formative (non-assessed) assignment, followed by a 1,500-word assessed essay 

Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) Born 1835 in Soho, London. Her parents’ marriage broke down due to her father’s financial problems and she later lived with her mother. Aged 22 she began an acting career. She also started writing short fiction and poetry. By 1861 she was working as an editorial assistant to the publisher John Maxwell. The pair lived together, but he was married with five children. His wife was in a mental institution in Dublin. When Braddon moved in with him and became stepmother to his children, it was the subject of scandal. Lady Audley’s Secret was partially serialised in Robin Goodfellow and resuscitated in The Sixpenny Magazine. It was later published as a novel by William Tinsley. Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and he married Braddon. They’d had five children together. She wrote more than 80 novels in her lifetime, and died in 1915 at the age of 79. Over time, her writing gradually attracted less controversy.

Sensation Fiction: Key Features Thrilled the nerves and senses. Scandalous and dramatic plotlines: bigamy, adultery, crime, murder, insanity, family secrets, disguises. Bringing the Gothic into a domestic setting. Modernity – telegraphy, railways, divorce. Founding texts: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

Lady Audley’s Secret Helped establish the genres of sensation and detective fiction, both in their infancy. Attracted notoriety for its transgressive anti-heroine. Lady Audley has since been seen as a proto-feminist character. Written shortly after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1858). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved (‘The Bride’), 1865–6 Photo © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-the-beloved-the-bride-n03053

Critical Reception ‘Excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim… And as excitement, even when harmless in kind, cannot be continually produced without becoming morbid in degree, works of this class manifest themselves as belonging….to the morbid phenomena of literature.’ - Henry L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 1863. ‘To Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.’ - Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 1865.

Critical Reception ‘As every woman reader must have sensed, Lady Audley's real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative.’ - Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 1982. ‘Sensation fiction continually played on its central narrative features of disguise and secrecy in order to emphasize the instability of identity.’ - Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Introduction’ to The Law and the Lady, 1992.

Group Activity Themes and Features: Madness Gender and Identity Detection Country House Setting Read the set passage in light of the theme you’ve been given. Talk through the discussion prompts on your handout, making connections between the passage and other parts of the novel.