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THE FALSE CLUES OF INNOCENTSENSATIONS: ABORTINGADULTERY PLOTS IN RHODABROUGHTON'S NANCY (1873)Tamara S. WagnerPublished online: 01 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Tamara S. Wagner (2013) THE FALSE CLUES OF INNOCENTSENSATIONS: ABORTING ADULTERY PLOTS IN RHODA BROUGHTON'S NANCY (1873),Women's Writing, 20:2, 202-218, DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2013.773774

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Tamara S. Wagner

THE FALSE CLUES OF INNOCENT

SENSATIONS: ABORTING ADULTERY

PLOTS IN RHODA BROUGHTON’S

NANCY (1873)

Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) was published when sensational representa-tional strategies had become a staple of popular fiction and Broughton hadestablished herself as a writer of sensational material. Broughton was keenly awarehow the reception of her books was reflective of changing times and marketingstrategies, yet with its pointedly anti-sensational, innocuous heroine, Nancy wasto be her most misunderstood book. The novel aborts an adultery plot that seems atfirst inevitable, and which nonetheless provides occasion for titillating the reader.It tracks emotional turmoil, plays with short-circuited plot lines and exposes socialexpectations of unequal marriages. In creating an anti-heroine who transgresses theexpected paradigms of Victorian sensation fiction, Nancy formed a catalyst forBroughton’s complicated relationship with literary sensationalism.

Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) tracks the heroine’s emotionally, and indeedphysically, intense experience of a strained marriage. It is a marriage ofconvenience, at least for 19-year-old Nancy Grey, who is at first completelytaken aback when her father’s former school friend proposes to her. Contraryto what society*and the reader*might expect, however, the marriageultimately works. The novel evokes, but only to dismiss, cliched plot lines ofconcealed or suppressed adulterous desire and sensational scandals. All thesame, it is structured on the short-circuited plot lines. As a result, the narrativeis riveted through by false starts and climaxes, by moments of suspense andmounting tension that have a tendency to collapse into an equally intensedisappointment. Misleading clues point at a typical adultery plot, to which theyoung wife of an older husband is, according to the conventions of sensationfiction, expectedly driven. The usual scandal, however, never takes place.Meanwhile, the heroine’s jealousy is incited by rumours of her husband’s past,which turn out to have been red herrings as well. So, if there are clues for thereader to decipher, they are false, and so are both the social and the narrative

Women’s Writing, 2013

Vol. 20, No. 2, 202�218, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2013.773774

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conventions that seem to indicate inevitable transgressions. No crime is everdetected, no scandal created, yet they are continually anticipated, as much bythe reader of sensation fiction as by several bystanders in the text itself.Throughout her novels, Broughton flirts with common plot structures andespecially with sensational depictions of adultery. But as her flirting heroinesare shown to be trapped precisely by expectations raised by a society with alimited imagination and an even narrower moral sense, Broughton developsand continues to revise her own brand of sensationalism. With Nancy, shetransgresses genre paradigms by creating her most innocuous heroine. To playwith, but then abandon, the seemingly inevitable adultery plot is a narrativelyand socially radical move.

Published when sensational representational strategies had become a stapleof popular fiction, sensation novels were swamping the market, and Broughtonhad established herself as a writer within this marketplace, Nancy explodedthe genre’s confines. The novel takes narrative transgression to a new level,but it does so not by offering more controversial social transgression, moreharrowing crimes or even more complex mysteries, as might perhaps beexpected. Instead, it continues what has been termed Broughton’s ‘‘eroticsensationalism’’,1 but deploys it as part of its misleading clues. While retainingthe effects of intensely experienced sensations, centred on amorous passion(and related emotions such as jealousy or feelings of rejection), it refuses tosupply the expected adultery or even to let the heroine desire it or grasp itspossibility. The avid reader of sensation fiction stands exposed: as jumpingeasily to conclusions and relying on the familiar formulas that the authorsubverts. Nancy, therefore, is more than just a neglected novel by a oncepopular novelist whose minor works have remained sidelined even as her firstsensational successes have begun to receive more attention. A closer look atBroughton’s treatment of sensational strategies hence at once demands andhelps to facilitate a careful reassessment of Victorian sensationalism.

Beyond the expected sensations

It has become a literary truism that the mid Victorian sensation craze extendedwell beyond ‘‘the sensational sixties’’ and comprised a surprisingly varied set ofauthors, books and even moral or ideological agendas.2 Stretching across muchof the nineteenth century’s second half and the first two decades of thetwentieth century, Rhoda Broughton’s extensive output of fiction has beenpredominantly, if not exclusively, considered part and parcel of the craze.Although current reassessments of her cultural significance are slowlyexpanding along the lines of similar reappraisals of the now canonicalsensational women writers Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs Henry (Ellen)

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Wood, Broughton’s reputation has continued to rest firmly on her first twonovels: Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867) and Cometh Up as a Flower (1867). Bothwere serialized in the Dublin University Magazine, edited by the successfulsensation novelist J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Broughton’s uncle by marriage), in themid 1860s, and subsequently published in volume form in 1867. Within these‘‘two immensely popular and critically divisive ‘sensation’ novels’’, ShirleyJones has remarked, Broughton ‘‘made a dramatic entry onto the literaryscene’’.3 Through their simultaneous appearance, ‘‘the peculiarities ofBroughton’s style were clearly and doubly established with the public’’.4

Recent ‘‘recovery work’’ has largely persisted in concentrating on her earlyworks and identifying her with sensation fiction.5 Testifying to increasinginterest in reading, evaluating and teaching Broughton, Cometh Up alone hasbeen republished twice within the last 10 years.6 Her one-volume fin-de-sieclenovels as well as her supernatural tales*until recently ‘‘oddly ignored’’,despite the fact that they do ‘‘everything feminist critics want women’s ghoststories to do’’, as Nina Auerbach has put it7*are now receiving moreattention, yet it is a critical interest that already brings certain expectationswith it. Not all of Broughton’s novels do what critics want them to do, andhence her deliberate toying with narrative conventions still makes herreassessment problematic or, at best, piecemeal. In particular, her experimentswith anti-sensational plots or heroines have been pushed aside, regardless ofthe fact that what was outrageous*and hence, in market terms, successful*in the 1860s had quickly become outmoded. Broughton self-consciouslyengaged with these shifts.

Broughton was keenly aware how the reception of her books was reflectiveof changing times and marketing strategies. The fin-de-siecle New Womanwriter Mary Cholmondeley remembered Broughton remarking: ‘‘‘I beganmy career,’ said she with a joyful snort, ‘as Zola, I finish it as [the religiousdomestic novelist] Miss Yonge; it’s not I that have changed, it’s my fellowcountry-men’’’.8 W. Somerset Maugham was likewise to record thisdistinction in one of his short stories, recalling

Miss Broughton telling me once that when she was young people said herbooks were fast and when she was old they said they were slow, and it wasvery hard since she had written exactly the same sort of book for fortyyears.9

In his 1901 study of once popular authors who were rapidly going out offashion and lapsing into oblivion, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into CertainPopularities, E.A. Bennett tellingly diagnosed Broughton as, ‘‘perhaps, thetypical novelist of our domesticity’’.10 Her recent Foes in Law (1900) was anovel, Bennett maintained, ‘‘which, without harming him, might divert an

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archdeacon’’.11 By the 1900s, Broughton had become a model domestic writerfor a critic who treated domesticity*and domestic fiction*dismissively.Broughton continued publishing until 1920, but Bennett’s summary of her‘‘typical’’ work 20 years earlier already highlights shifts in readerly and criticalanticipations. Literary critics and cultural historians have continued to stress‘‘the polarities of her contemporary reputation’’ and a ‘‘similar contrariness’’in biographical accounts.12 Yet the classification of Broughton’s fiction wasinterestingly diverse, even contested throughout her career. It defies an easysplit into ‘‘fast’’ early experiments and works that were out of step with thetimes.

Margaret Oliphant, having defined and denounced ‘‘Sensational Novels’’ inher influential article in the May 1862 issue of Blackwood’s,13 commented onBroughton in 1867 that there was an odd disjunction between her evocation ofsensuality and her ‘‘free-spoken heroines’’: ‘‘intense goodness follows theintense sensuousness’’.14 Oliphant was troubled by the detailed descriptions ofphysical sensations, descriptions that have since become regarded as ‘‘the mostinnovative feature of Broughton’s sensation fiction’’.15 Tamar Heller hasargued that Broughton’s ‘‘detailed, ideologically complex depiction of thefemale body and its desires’’ makes her writing so appealing and shouldguarantee critical reassessments in the wider context of transgressive Victorianwomen writers.16 Having quickly attained a ‘‘reputation as a naughty goodread’’,17 Broughton’s novels also always sold well. Broughton herself,however, was sensitive to critics’ allegations of immorality, indecency orvulgarity. Increasingly, she attempted to rework sensational narrativeparadigms, if not to distance herself entirely from the controversial genre.While she played with common plots as early as Cometh Up*in which adulterynever takes place, but is certainly desired by the heroine*she engaged withcliches and expected plot lines more and more critically.

In aborting the expected adultery plot, while nonetheless providingoccasion for titillating the reader, Nancy formed a catalyst for Broughton’scomplicated relationship with literary sensationalism. None of her worksinclude the elements of detection that characterized a growing number ofsensation novels at the time. Instead, the crimes or transgressions that arefeatured in her fiction (if they feature at all, and are not just hinted at assomething foiled or averted) have to do with private life and emotional ratherthan social upheaval. They usually are crimes of passion. As Jones has pointedout: ‘‘Adultery, or the possibility of it, is the most common ‘crime’ featured inher novels. Mysteries are always mysteries of the heart’’.18 In her introductionto Cometh Up, reprinted as part of the series Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction,1855�1890, Heller has succinctly described Broughton’s brand of sensation-alism as characterized by ‘‘erotic candour’’.19 In the process, Broughtoncontinually ‘‘raises the spectre of adultery’’.20 She flirts with its possibilities

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and the expectations readers bring with them in the wake of the mid-centurysensation craze. Although times (and literary markets) indisputably changedbetween the 1860s and the 1920s, turning the once outrageous writer into anold-fashioned, ‘‘slow’’ figure of the past, her novels of the early 1870s alreadyexhibit a conscious move away from sensationalism. The opening of Red as aRose Is She (1870), her third novel, warns that ‘‘those who enjoy the flavour ofviolent immorality, will be disappointed’’, but so will those ‘‘who love aviolent moral, or violent judgement for sins and follies*a man struck dead forsaying ‘damn,’ or a woman for going to a ball’’.21 While retaining her interestin women’s desires and without making her novels any less controversial,Broughton became more self-reflexive and experimental. She dared toconfound readers’ expectations by experimenting with alternative plotdevelopments that went counter to sensational paradigms.

With its pointedly anti-sensational heroine, Nancy was to be her mostmisunderstood book. The novel’s bending of genre boundaries hinges onits refusal to provide a transgressive anti-heroine. This familiar figure ofnineteenth-century popular fiction embodies Victorian sensationalism’s con-troversial highlighting of women’s desires and physical urges, as well as, morefrighteningly perhaps, their intellectual ability to engage in criminal schemes.The most famous example of a sensational villainess’s detailed thoughts andemotions is probably Lydia Gwilt’s embedded diary in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale(1866). But sympathetically described transgressive anti-heroines are also atthe heart of the most successful female sensation novels of the 1860s. Theseinclude novels as different as Wood’s East Lynne (1861), in which a divorcedmother infiltrates the household in the disguise of a governess to her ownchildren, and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), with its murderousbigamist who has likewise abandoned her baby.22 Illicit desires, or at leastinadvertent entanglements in adulterous affairs, similarly drive the heroines ofCometh Up and Not Wisely. In pointed contrast, Nancy charts in intimate detailthe fluctuating sensations of an outspoken, lively young woman who fails tocommit the transgressions that narrative conventions demand of her.

The narrative situation is in itself unique, an experiment with first-personand present-tense narration that Broughton was to continue in a number ofworks throughout her prolific career as a writer. Nancy filters emotionaltension through the stream of consciousness of a blatantly, almost blandlyinnocent, and yet refreshingly unconventional heroine, who also doubles as afirst-person narrator. The exclusive use of the present and present progressivetenses heightens the immediacy of the evoked sensations, reminding us that thedefining characteristics of sensation fiction include elements of style, as well asof content. In a recent essay, Anna Despotopoulou has suggested that thisstylistic choice of present-tense narration alerts the reader to a speeding-up ofevents, experiences, and emotional ups and downs*of sensation itself.23

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Modernity, Despotopoulou argues, heightened or quickened ‘‘female bodilyand emotional experience’’.24 The resulting enhancement of the sensuous, of aparticularly ‘‘erotic’’ sensationalism, however, is not the only effect of thisstylistic technique. It also facilitates a questioning of expected developments,of what seems the inevitable outcome of, it turns out, misleadingcircumstances. In Nancy, the immediate sharing of perceptions, thoughts andemotions between the first-person narrator and reader registers the reactionsof a startlingly innocuous young woman conceived in deliberate contrast to thesensational figure of the transgressive villainess. In providing insight into themost intimate thoughts and sensations of an inadvertently compromisedheroine, of a woman wrongfully suspected of adulterous desire, the textexposes just how prejudiced society’s expectations are.

Readers, then as now, were notably troubled by Nancy Grey’s inability torealize even the possibility of adulterous desire. The Pall Mall Gazette refused tobelieve in such innocuousness altogether, referring to the heroine’s ‘‘sheer andincredible obtuseness’’.25 Although the novel was more favourably receivedand mentioned in several periodicals that praised Broughton’s ‘‘flesh andblood’’ heroines,26 reviewers did not realize how she was trying to make apoint both about readers’ and about society’s expectations, including those ofunsympathetic reviewers. Nancy had been intended as a deliberate departurefrom, and, to an extent, as a rewrite of, her earlier work, as Broughton was topoint out in a letter to her publisher, Richard Bentley: ‘‘The Pall Mall is mostunfair. Is it not singular that ‘Nancy,’ so much the purest in tone and so muchthe most inoffensive of my stories, should be more violently reviled than any ofits predecessors?’’27 Authorial fallacy aside, what the novel effectively lays bareis precisely the limited imagination of such readers as the Pall Mall reviewer.

In a succinct overview of Broughton’s changing oeuvre, Heller has termedNancy a ‘‘decorous rewrite of Cometh Up’’.28 Indeed, if both novels fail todeliver the expected adultery, they differ in that the earlier, much better-known novel dwells on unfulfilled adulterous desire, whereas its ‘‘rewrite’’makes the most of the absence of any such desire. Broughton knew she wasdefying genre paradigms and was going to disappoint readers. Ironically,Nancy’s vitality, her simultaneous failure to be prim in her ‘‘inoffensiveness’’,did not escape the censure of sarcastic reviewers either. On the one hand, the‘‘inoffensive’’ and the ‘‘pure’’, as Broughton styled it in her defence, did notbelong in the sensational narrative that readers had come to expect fromBroughton’s books. On the other hand, the heroine’s outspokenness*on the‘‘foolhardy fertility’’ of British households that results in large families like herown, for example, or on a presumably decrepit general from India, ‘‘an oldIndian’’ probably accompanied by ‘‘[h]is harem [. . .] of half a dozen oldWampoos’’*mainly accounted for repeated allegations of vulgarity.29 Theincongruity, however, was deliberate. In contradiction to the logic of many a

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mid Victorian sensation novel, Nancy’s strong emotions, bluntness andaltogether unconventionality, her tomboyish behaviour as she romps with‘‘the boys’’, especially her younger brother Bobby, do not automatically makeher an adulteress, bigamist or murderess. Broughton is less invested inensuring that her heroine is not dull than in showing that a lively young womanneed not be a sensational transgressor. Emotional intensity need not beequated with illicit desire.

As Sally Mitchell already suggested in an intriguing 1977 article onrecreational reading for mid Victorian middle-class women readers thatconsiders Broughton’s books as examples of ‘‘the popular emotional novel’’,such fiction relies on the realization of daydreams, and those daydreams caninvolve a wide range of desires or ambitions.30 Of Broughton’s novels it hasoften been remarked that her subject matter is ‘‘nothing but love’’,31 althoughmore recently critics have disputed this single-mindedness. Her novels mightbe ‘‘only nominally about love’’32 or, alternatively, ‘‘Broughton’s explorationof the conventions of romance in life and fiction is part of her social com-mentary and not in opposition to this’’.33 Nancy details a strained marriage,while exposing society’s sordidness in expecting the worst and trading onsensational scandal. Simultaneously, it asserts not merely the heroine’sinnocuousness, but also an unlikely happy end. It concludes with a neatdomestic reconciliation scene. This showcases how Mitchell’s useful, ifproblematic, caution that ‘‘it is improper (as well as fruitless) to deal inwholly intellectual terms with novels which were written for an emotional*rather than an intellectual*response’’ can prove invaluable in a reassessmentof such openly recreational fiction.34 Instead, Mitchell persuasively argues thatthe underpinning daydreams can be of different kinds.35 They do notnecessarily involve illicit desire and need not be about romance at all, withouttherefore necessarily preaching conventionality or undercutting the validity offemale desire. Defeating expectations of adultery in Nancy shows precisely this:that the heroine*as well as the novel’s implied reader*has quite differentdesires than acerbic critics (such as the Pall Mall reviewer) or, indeed, societyat large might assume.

‘‘What a hateful mind you must have!’’: sensational vantagepoints and the limits of innocence

Nancy flirts with various genre paradigms with the intention of exposing theseassumptions. Nancy Grey is neither a marriageable young lady of romanticfiction nor a suppressed transgressive sensational anti-heroine in the making.She is in a transitional state, at the cusp of sexual awakening. But as Broughtonhighlights this inbetweenness, she does so very deliberately, without lapsing

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into conventional stereotyping. At times, the imagery is almost parodic. Thescene in which Nancy first encounters her future husband is emblematic of hershifting status: she is precariously poised on top of a garden wall after herbrother Bobby has taken away the ladder, leaving her no choice but to leap intothe open arms of her father’s former school friend. Nancy describes the leapwith blunt self-irony: ‘‘With arms extended, like the sails of a windmill, I hurlmyself into the embrace of Sir Roger Tempest’’ (23). Despite this sarcasticundercutting of sexual allusion, the scene is rich in metaphorical suggestive-ness. Nancy is suspended between the walled-up garden that represents herchildhood and the possibilities of sexual desire. It is a dangerous position thatcarries all the allegorical potential of a sexual fall. But Nancy lands safely in thestrong arms of a man who is to become her legitimate husband, and whosephysical strength accentuates his comparative youthfulness: he is ‘‘morevigorous, more full of healthy life than two-thirds of the puny youth, nourishedon sherry and bitters, of the present small generation’’ (57). At 47, Sir RogerTempest is physically attractive, exhibiting a mature virility. Yet in stressingthe mature man’s manliness, the novel does not simply render such maturitydesirable; it does so with a pointed awareness of its unexpectedness. What ismore, this revision of the cliched unequal marriage between a decrepit oldsuitor and an inexperienced young girl is complicated by Nancy’s repeatedassertion that she wishes her own*stern, aloof, almost indifferent*fathercould have been more like the general. ‘‘How I wish that you were my fatherinstead!’’, Nancy exclaims early in their relationship, and she is surprised SirRoger does not agree as wholeheartedly as she expects (45). This deliberatecomplication of the rewritten ‘‘May�December’’ marriage*a marriagebetween partners of different ages*adds a significant twist to the novel’saborted adultery plot.

As Kay Heath has pointed out in her study of the emergence of midlife inthe course of the nineteenth century, ‘‘May�December’’ marriages wereregarded as problematic in Victorian Britain. In popular fiction, such apresumably unequal match regularly featured as a kind of ‘‘justification’’*sensational descriptions of ‘‘punishment’’ notwithstanding*of unhappiness inmarriage and consequent divorce, adultery, bigamy or, at the very least,concealed desire for extramarital love.36 While shattering expectations ofNancy’s supposedly predictable leanings towards any available younger men,Broughton’s novel not only asserts her heroine’s innocence, but also suggeststhat comparative youthfulness has not necessarily the advantage. Thetomboyish young woman may regard her father’s friend as a potentiallybetter paterfamilias than her father, but she converses with her husband’sdashing young neighbour as if he were one of her many brothers, totallyoblivious to the conclusions at which this conceited man*and society atlarge*might automatically arrive. While indicting readers’ expectations of

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sensationalized adultery, this absence of illicit desire makes the heroine neithervacuous nor obtuse (as the Pall Mall reviewer would have it). Instead, Nancy’sdetailed experience shows how there can be different kinds of intenseemotions that need not be illicit, including seemingly unlikely marital love.Narrative tension at the same time arises from misleading interpretations*onthe part of the reader and of an obtuse, narrow-minded society. Scandal iscontinually anticipated. It hangs over the narrative, generating varioussensational effects, even as it ultimately refuses to materialize.

The novel’s opening is emphatically mundane, deliberately devoid ofsensational material. The description of the dull country house is couched inthe light-hearted tone of a young woman who is content still to romp in theschoolroom. Nancy is one of six children, ranging from age twelve to theirearly twenties. While their childhood home is overshadowed by their pompouspatriarchal father, they enjoy riotous fun among themselves. The first chaptersees this close, but unsentimentalized sibling group engaged in amateurcookery on their old school desks, thankfully escaping a formal ‘‘adult’’ dinnerwith their parents and a visitor*a general who went to school with theirfather. Although the ‘‘old General’’ turns out to be vigorous and emphaticallyvirile, Nancy is understandably taken aback by a sudden offer of marriage. Theage difference is accentuated*if not exaggerated*by the young Greys’conviction that the rich general might have come to adopt one of them, mostlikely Barbara, the eldest and prettiest sister. In pithily comical scenes, Nancynever realizes how her references to Sir Roger as a better father or her openacknowledgement that she originally ‘‘had as much idea of marrying you [SirRoger] as of marrying father’’ embarrass him (62). In one of the retrospectivecomments that are worked into the novel, occasionally to rupture theimmediacy of the heroine’s fluctuating sensations with a pointed self-irony,Nancy shows that her at times comical innocuousness has made way for asadder maturity: ‘‘Looking back with mature reflection at this speech, I thinkthat it may be safely reckoned among my unlucky things’’ (62). Such ‘‘unluckythings’’ are expressive of an unconventional straightforwardness that exposessociety. As Nancy later asserts to the insinuating villain of the novel, theironically named Frank Musgrave: ‘‘I have always lived with people who spoketheir thoughts straight out!’’ (187). There is no disguised mercenaryspeculation in Nancy’s acceptance of the financially advantageous match.Nor does she conceal her wish that her marriage might be good for hersiblings, that her dream husband would have ‘‘to give the boys a helping hand’’(25), or that she would ‘‘rather marry him [the general] than be an old maid’’(20), even if such statements do ‘‘not sound very lady-like’’ (25).

Her reactions to the swift courtship are more complex. Chagrin at being sofast and so simply ‘‘disposed of’’ is revealingly couched in narrative terms:‘‘This is my wooing: thus I am disposed of. Without a shadow of previous

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flirtation with any man born of woman*without any of the ups and downs,the ins and outs of an ordinary love-affair’’ (63). The ‘‘ordinary love-affair’’ ofromance fiction never takes place, just as the adulterous entanglement that isexpected of sensational writing is short-circuited. There are plenty ofopportunities for exciting ‘‘ups and downs’’ nonetheless. Nancy is an importantmarriage novel that unsentimentally delineates the stark realities anduncomfortable truths of an at least initially loveless marriage. The prevalentsense of unease is poignantly evoked, but the immediacy of the present-tensenarrative is infused with a startling self-irony. In part, this is the result of thecomplex narrative situation itself. As retrospective knowledge is worked intothe portrayal of Nancy’s immediate thoughts and perceptions, it manifests itselfas foreboding (when Nancy hints at her elder sister’s death, for example) or ashindsight (as in the acknowledgement of the ‘‘unlucky things’’ she innocentlyexpresses). It also introduces additional self-irony, which is, however, aninherent part of the present-tense Nancy, too. The day before the wedding, forexample, she asserts that she is ‘‘limp, lachrymose, and lamentable’’ (68). Thealliteration as well as the choice of words conveys a curious detachment thataccentuates the sense of unreality she feels at the sudden transition from beingone of the youngsters comfortable in the old schoolroom to a married woman.There is nothing disguised about her unease and her unhappiness about leavinghome. Her distress is exacerbated by her brothers’ blunt references to the agedifference between her and her husband. They suggest that she ‘‘will be takenfor a good little girl making a tour with her grandpapa!’’ (69). One of thebrothers, nicknamed ‘‘the Brat’’, points out that Nancy looks like a brat in herwedding dress: ‘‘I am not half such a brat as you are! You look about ten yearsold!’’ (69). Nor is there any sentimentality about the leave-taking. But thereader knows Nancy’s genuine distress and subsequent homesickness from herstream of consciousness, which belies her reactions to ‘‘the boys’’. Similarly,the boys’ jocular remarks anticipate society’s judgement of the young bride,yet precisely as they light-heartedly joke about her youthfulness*and howbadly matched she seems to be with the old general*they clearly see nothinginherently suspicious, or potentially sensational, in the arrangement. Suchmarriages were, of course, by no means uncommon, although in fiction theywere interestingly less likely to work, often serving as a pretext for sensationalplot lines.37

The honeymoon is an expected crisis or rather, in this case, it is ananticlimax that partly foils expectations of a cataclysmic catastrophe. Home-sickness and boredom, not sexual trauma or disappointment in her husband,make the young bride admit to herself after one week of marriage that: ‘‘Thereis no use denying it, I hate being married!’’ (81). The sheer dullness and fatigueof travel through places for which the tomboyish, unsentimental and

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unintellectual young woman simply does not care makes her long for thefamiliar occupations of her protracted childhood:

And all through Crucifixions, cathedrals, table d’hotes, I have beendeadly, deadly homesick*homesick as none but one that has been amember of a large family and has been out into the world on his or herown account, for the first time, can understand. (76)

But if Nancy is slowly awakening to the desires, as well as the difficulties, ofgrowing up and becoming a woman, it is not through an illicit affair with thedashing young fellow who makes himself all too eagerly available. FrankMusgrave, a young man who owns the estate adjacent to Sir Roger’s, happensto be abroad as well, and makes himself useful by escorting the young brideduring her husband’s daily nap time. This indication of Sir Roger’s decliningage belies the insistence on his virility in the earlier chapters, while Nancy’syouthfulness is highlighted by her longing for her brothers and sisters. But sheis excited neither by the sightseeing nor by the possibilities of adulterousflirtation that seem to be offered as the natural consolation for a young womanmarried to a man twice her age. She rather dislikes the affected Musgrave and,contrary to readerly expectations, a dull honeymoon does not automaticallydrive her into the young man’s arms. To Musgrave’s hilariously delineatedannoyance, she fails to get any of his hints. Instead, his anger, just as hisassumption of sentimentality, makes her laugh (109). Far from suggesting anunbelievable innocuousness on Nancy’s part, the failure of the expectedadultery plot to develop marks out Musgrave as conceited, and readerlyexpectations of sensational scandal as equally ridiculous.

This does not mean, however, that there are no sensational elements ortransgressive characters. Piqued by Nancy’s indifference, Musgrave plotsrevenge, in which he is more successful than in his ridiculed attempts to induceNancy to fall in love with him. He systematically incites her jealousy of afashionable widow, Mrs Huntley, by hinting at ‘‘a certain little history, whichit seems you have not been told’’ (186). Sir Roger, it seems, was acquaintedboth with Mrs Huntley and her husband in their past*and Musgrave, ofcourse, makes the most of the fact that there is a ‘‘past’’ of which a 19-year-oldgirl cannot know anything: ‘‘‘you are*what did you tell me? nineteen?*It isto be supposed’*(with a rather unlovely smile)*‘that your history is yet tocome; and he is*forty-seven!’’’ (187). Mrs Huntley was badly treated by herhusband; Sir Roger was helpful; and so it is rumoured that there was an affairand she ‘‘threw him over’’ (188). The flirtatious widow at first sight seems atypical sensational anti-heroine, complete with a dark, or at least suspiciouslychequered, past, a young child she does not care about and a number of would-be lovers, including Nancy’s elder brother Algy. She is a mere stereotype,

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however, and pointedly uninteresting as such. The novel’s focus instead restson Nancy’s distress, her fluctuating emotions, as she confronts socialconventions and especially society’s eager expectations of the worst. Moreupset by ‘‘Algy’s increasing besotment [sic] about Mrs Huntley, and consequentslight estrangement from me*(to me a bitter thing)’’ (233), Nancy repudiatesMusgrave’s repeated hints at an ongoing affair between her husband and MrsHuntley: ‘‘‘I hate your hints! I hate your innuendoes!’ I say, passionately’’(187). Nancy’s openness and rejection of anything underhand, including bothpolite conventionalities and innuendoes, renders his scheming almost comical,yet this does not make her entirely impervious to his insinuations.

Despite his ridiculed self-assurance, Musgrave succeeds in two parallelrevenge plots: he manages to estrange Nancy from her husband (albeit notpermanently) and he makes Nancy’s sister, Barbara, fall in love with him sothat he can reject her. The truly good, self-sacrificial sister dies as Nancy’sdouble. The embodiment of another extreme, she is the opposite of theflirtatious widow and likewise a stereotype. Nancy is literally caught upbetween these extremes, neither the blandly angelic, virtuous woman who diesof a broken heart nor the scheming, unscrupulous anti-heroine. Yet society(as well as, it is implied, readers of sensation fiction) prefers to conceive ofwomen in such oppositional, easily stereotyped terms. When Musgraveroughly tells her*and the word ‘‘roughly’’ is repeated a few times*that hedesires her and expects her to wish for this, Nancy is appalled that he reads heras if she were that ‘‘sort of woman’’: ‘‘How shameful of you! [. . .] What sortof women can you have lived among? What a hateful mind you must have!’’(241). This does not merely indict the conceited young man. ‘‘What a hatefulmind you must have’’ is also directed at a society that is self-defined by bothrigid conventionalities and sensational delight in scandal involving those whotransgress them. The exposure is extended to the sensational reader as well.

This implicit critique of the sensation genre and its readership achievesadditional urgency when Nancy painfully becomes aware of the limits ofinnocence: ‘‘One does not get such a character for nothing. I have always heardthat, when such things happen to people, they have invariably brought them onthemselves’’ (248). Her confrontation with Musgrave, in which she rejects hissardonic advances, is the most violent scene in the novel. It is an eye-openerfor Nancy and, as such, a turning point in the narrative. Part of the scene isobserved by a notorious gossip, who reads the visible signs of Nancy’semotional turmoil according to the standards of expected social scandal. As SirRoger returns from a lengthy stay at his estates in Antigua*a commonoffstage place in nineteenth-century literature, to which characters canconveniently be sent so that havoc can take place in their absence*she failsto refute the scandalous rumours. The resulting estrangement from herhusband is evoked with an emphasis on Nancy’s intense sensations. She is

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plagued by jealousy of Mrs Huntley, a jealousy that bespeaks her growinglonging for a husband whom she seems to have begun to appreciate too late,while it also showcases how her straightforwardness has turned into a prevalentsense of suspiciousness. Her shame and disgust, moreover, make her lie ratherthan admit to having been accosted by Musgrave, and the result is the minutelydetailed tension between husband and wife as neither dares to speak out. Theunconventionally outspoken young woman has been silenced.

Although no sensational transgression takes place, there is a poignantevocation of intense emotions, of sensations in the narrator/protagonist and inthe reader. ‘‘[D]riven out of all moderation by disgust and exasperation’’ byMusgrave, Nancy rather melodramatically asserts that she ‘‘feel[s] as if a slughad crawled over me!’’ (246). Emotions spin out of control; the sense of warringsensations is overwhelming: ‘‘My brain is a black chaos of whirling agonies,now together, now parting; so that each may make their separate sting felt,and, in turn, each will have to be faced’’ (247). More intense, because moreprotracted, however, is the representation of the strained marital relationship.Nancy either broods alone or sits silently next to her husband. Clocks areticking; anxieties are rising. Repeatedly, Nancy sums up and thereby heightensthe tension by asserting that she ‘‘cannot bear the suspense’’ (300). This is at theheart of the novel’s sensationalism. The emphasis is on emotional effects, evenif the cause of nerve-wracking suspense might be mere fabrication.

The novel’s main twist, however, is not just that the marriage works afterall, but that there is genuine love between the unequally matched couple.When Nancy first warms to her husband, she only acknowledges that thehoneymoon ‘‘really has not been so bad!’’ (105). When Sir Roger intercedeswith her father at an embarrassing moment, he presents ‘‘an arm of friendlystrength [. . .] a friendly voice’’ (132) and, with disarming honesty, she tellshim: ‘‘I like you!’’ (133). Yet, from the start, she struggles againstexpectations, including those of her brothers. As she adds in parentheses:‘‘(Oh, why, why did I ever laugh at him with them? What is there to laugh atin him?)’’ (121). This straightforward acknowledgement of her growing‘‘liking’’ is in stark contrast to her later prevarications. But if this shows howher outspokenness has been compromised, conversely, Nancy’s fierce jealousyis a symptom of (if not the reason for) this liking turning into love.Simultaneously, she is intensely self-conscious because her distress after herconfrontation with Musgrave has been observed and misinterpreted. While thisself-consciousness nearly ruins her marriage, it also presents a parodic versionof precisely such a misreading of false clues. The resolution scene, in which theterse silence is broken and Nancy ‘‘confesses’’ what really happened at herinfamous encounter with Musgrave, culminates in Sir Roger’s pointedlyanticlimactic exclamation: ‘‘And is that all?’’ (411). The shattering of

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expectations always includes those of the protagonists, as well as of the readerand of a gossipy society.

Nancy questions social and narrative conventions. It plays with theexpectations readers bring to a sensational text, and especially a text thatcertainly evokes sensations. To an extent, Broughton seems to have it bothways, reminding us that the Victorian sensation genre was as much defined bystylistic features as by its subject material. While granting emotionalexcitement, the novel presents the heroine’s innocuousness and its frequentlyquestioned (within the novel, as well as by its critics) believability as a centralconcern, and a way to assess and critique society. This redeployment ofsensational representational modes compels a revision of critical expectationsthat have long been limiting discussion of the Victorian craze for sensation, andespecially of women writers participating in this phenomenon. Broughton, infact, does something very intriguing in substituting for the already clichedfigure of the transgressive, yet sympathetically described anti-heroine a younginnocent who is by no means dull, timid, insensitive or without passion. Inthis, the novel defies the genre conventions of nineteenth-century literarysensationalism, while producing a subversive social critique*an importantfeature of the sensation genre as well. But the critique fascinatingly works byasserting an innocence that is ultimately retained in the face of society’sconventionality. What is more, a reader who expects adultery, who comes tothe novel with an expectation of, even a desire for, such a plot line, is likewisethe subject of this critique. In other words, to expect the worst of everyone isexposed as a social as well as a narrative convention. Nancy is a self-reflexivesensation novel that simultaneously trades on and eschews the genre’sparameters.

Notes

1 Tamar Heller, ed., introduction, Cometh Up as a Flower, by RhodaBroughton, Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855�1890, vol. 4(London: Pickering, 2004) xxxiii� l.

2 Cf., for example, Andrew Maunder’s introduction to the recent seriesVarieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, 1855�1890. The series includes avolume dedicated to the sensation debate at the time, followed by a set ofnovels that exemplify the most diverse forms sensationalism could take inthe century’s second half: domestic sensationalism, exemplified by FlorenceMarryat’s Love’s Conflict (1865), edited by Andrew Maunder; Gothicsensationalism, exemplified by Ellen Wood’s St. Martin’s Eve (1866), editedby Lyn Pykett; sensation with a purpose, exemplified by Felicia Skene’sHidden Depths (1866), edited by Lillian Nayder; erotic sensationalism,exemplified by Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower (1867), edited by

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Tamar Heller; sensation and detection, exemplified by Mary Cecil Hay’s OldMyddelton’s Money (1874), edited by Mary Knight; and newspapersensationalism, exemplified by Dora Russell’s Beneath the Wave (1878),edited by Graham Law.

3 Shirley Jones, ‘‘‘LOVE’: Rhoda Broughton, Writing, and Re-writingRomance,’’ Popular Victorian Women Writers, ed. Kay Boardman and ShirleyJones (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004) 208�36 (208). Not Wisely, butToo Well was initially serialized from August 1865 to July 1866, and ComethUp as a Flower from July 1866 to June 1867.

4 Jones 209.5 Broughton’s novels are almost exclusively discussed within ‘‘the overlapping

contexts of popular Victorian fiction, sensation fiction and the culture ofwomen’s reading’’ (Jones 211�12).

6 Cometh Up as a Flower has recently been reprinted by Broadview Press (editedby Pamela Gilbert) in 2010, and by Pickering and Chatto (edited by TamarHeller) in 2004. Not Wisely, but Too Well, edited by Tamar Heller, isforthcoming by Valancourt Press.

7 Nina Auerbach, ‘‘Ghosts of Ghosts,’’ Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1(2004): 277�84 (281).

8 Percy Lubbock, Mary Cholmondeley: A Sketch from Memory (London: JonathanCape, 1928) 28.

9 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘‘The Round Dozen,’’ Complete Short Stories, vol. 1(London: Doubleday, 1952) 377�402 (385).

10 E.A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (London:Grant Richards, 1901) 61.

11 Bennett 62. Concentrating on Foes in Law, Bennett takes this late novel as arepresentative example in which Broughton seems ‘‘purposely [to have] triedto embody the characteristics of her school in a single scene’’ (62).

12 Jones 208.13 Margaret Oliphant, ‘‘Sensational Novels,’’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91

(May 1862): 564�84 (574).14 Margaret Oliphant, ‘‘Novels,’’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (Sept.

1867): 257�80 (268, 269).15 Tamar Heller, ‘‘‘That Muddy, Polluted Flood of Earthly Love’: Ambiva-

lence about the Body in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely but Too Well,’’Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberley Harrison andRichard Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006) 87�101 (88).

16 Heller, ‘‘Muddy’’ 88.17 Heller, introduction xxxiv.18 Jones 212.19 Heller, introduction xxxiii.20 Tamar Heller, ‘‘‘All Married People Grow to Hate One Another’: Marriage

and the Adultery Plot in Broughton’s Fiction from 1873 to 1886,’’ chapter

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of an unpublished manuscript. I am grateful to Tamar Heller for herinsightful discussion and helpful advice.

21 Rhoda Broughton, Red as a Rose Is She, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley,1870) 6.

22 In the face of her quickly notorious objections to the genre, Oliphant’s ownsensation novel, Salem Chapel (1863), depicts a violently angry divorcedwoman who wants to shoot the ex-husband who has abducted their mentallydisabled daughter.

23 Anna Despotopoulou, ‘‘Trains of Thought: The Challenges of Mobility inthe Work of Rhoda Broughton,’’ Critical Survey 23.1 (2011): 90�101 (93).

24 Despotopoulou 93.25 Qtd. in Tamar Heller, ‘‘Rhoda Broughton,’’ A Companion to Sensation Fiction,

ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011) 281�92 (290).26 Despotopoulou has analysed in detail extensive reviews in periodicals like

Temple Bar, Blackwood’s and London Society (91).27 Rhoda Broughton, ‘‘Correspondence with George Bentley,’’ Archives of

Richard Bentley and Son, 1829�1898 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1976)pt.1, reel 22. I am grateful to Tamar Heller for pointing out the significanceof this correspondence.

28 Heller, ‘‘Rhoda Broughton’’ 290.29 Rhoda Broughton, Nancy: A Novel (New York: D. Appleton, 1874) 4, 9�10.

Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.30 Sally Mitchell, ‘‘Sentiment and Suffering: Women’s Recreational Reading in

the 1860s,’’ Victorian Studies 21.1 (1977): 29�45. Mitchell convincinglyreads ‘‘a host of forgotten authoresses’’ as different as Broughton, Wood andthe antifeminist religious novelist Charlotte Yonge together as examples of‘‘the popular emotional novel’’ (29�30).

31 Ernest Baker, The History of the English Novel: Yesterday (London: H.F. and G.Witherby, 1939) 211.

32 Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s PopularNovels (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 113�14.

33 Jones 222.34 Mitchell 31.35 Mitchell 32.36 Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain

(Albany: State U of New York P, 2009) traces ‘‘a pattern of increasingliability for midlife males’’ in Victorian texts (71). An extreme example ofan unequal marriage that is not expected to work by several bystanders whoare then proven wrong can be found in the ‘‘subplot about the May�December marriage between sixty-two-year-old Dr Strong and his wife’’(42) in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850).

37 Cf. Heath passim.

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Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is

currently an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singa-

pore. Her books include Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money

and the Novel Genre, 1815�1901 (Ohio State University Press, 2010) and Longing:

Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740�1890 (Bucknell University Press,

2004), as well as edited collections on Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel:

Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Cambria Press, 2009) and

Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nine-

teenth-Century Literature (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). She has recently

completed a scholarly edition of Frances Trollope’s 1843 novel The Barnabys in

America. Wagner’s current projects include a special issue on colonial girlhood for

the journal Women’s Writing. Address: Division of English, HSS-03-76, School of

Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 14 Nanyang

Drive, Singapore 637332, Republic of Singapore. [email: tswagner@ntu.edu.sg]

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