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SENSATION FICTION

Part 1: Diaries, Notebooks and Literary Manuscripts of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was one of the most successful and controversial writers of her generation, rated alongside Wilkie Collins as the inventor of the sensation genre.

Braddon started writing in her teens but became an actress to support her mother and herself. This proved invaluable as she was able to experience a life barely glimpsed by most middle class Victorian women with much more sexual and social freedom. She met John Maxwell, a periodical publisher, in 1860 and lived with him for 14 years while his wife was locked in a Dublin asylum.

In 1862 she published Lady Audleys Secret which was an instant best-seller, with its tale of a beautiful blonde who commits bigamy, murders her first husband, deserts her child and plans to poison her second husband. In addition to being a founding work of sensation fiction, it also provides a powerful critique of patriarchal structures. It provoked a backlash from conservative Victorians who were shocked by the immorality of her fiction and accused Braddon of corrupting young minds.

Her second novel, Aurora Floyd, built upon this success, being published in 1863 following a popular serialization in Temple Bar. The novel portrays the dark undercurrents beneath an apparently normal marriage. It explores the way in which a dysfunctional relationship was maintained due to the pressures of Victorian Society and the fear of scandal. One reviewer writing in Frasers Magazine noted that "a book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel."

Later novels included an English adaptation of Flauberts Madame Bovary (The Doctors Wife, 1864), a novel set during the Paris Commune, and works of supernatural and detective fiction. Her portrayal of strong and assertive, if flawed, women has ensured that her life and work is now an increasingly popular area of study for all those examining nineteenth-century literature, culture and society.

She married Maxwell in 1874 when his first wife died, becoming stepmother to his five children and raising five of their own. She wrote prolifically, producing over 70 novels and many stories for journals.

Part 1 of Sensation Fiction is based on the Braddon Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. It includes:

- Seven substantial volumes of notes which Braddon used as a quarry for her writing. These include discussions of the philosophy of Plato, Kant and Nietzsche; extracts from writers that she admired from Horace and Shakespeare to Flaubert and Heine; plot summaries, book titles and some stories and plays; and notes on miscellaneous topics from African explorers and the colloquial Hindostani, to accounts of Florence and Venice.

- 25 volumes of diaries covering the period from 1890 to 1914.

- Letters to and from friends and acquaintances, including J M Barrie, Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, Walter Besant, Rhoda Broughton, Hall Caine, William Powell Frith, Thomas Hardy, Henry Irving, Henry James, Arthur Wing Pinero, Charles Reade, Anne Ritchie and Charles Wyndham.

- Literary manuscripts including examples of novels, short stories and plays for the full range of her career.

- Sketchbooks, photographs and illustrations for Braddons novels.

The Robert Wolff collection of Braddon materials forms the heart of the materials now held at Texas, but the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has continued to acquire letters and other manuscript material relating to Braddon when these have appeared in the sale rooms. All are included here.

This microfilm project aims to make both her work and life more accessible, opening up new areas of research into Braddon and her fiction.



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