Sensation novel

The genre's popularity was conjoined to an expanding book market and growth of a reading public, by-products of the Industrial Revolution.

[5] Sensation fiction is commonly seen to have emerged as a definable genre in the wake of three novels: Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860); Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862).

"[12] Sensation novelists drew on the influences of melodrama, Gothicism, and the Newgate novel to explore themes considered provocative by societal norms and to question the artificiality of identity.

[3] Dickens, Reade, and Collins all wrote and acted for the theatre, and the stage helped many novelists gain recognition as authors.

The Gothic influence on the sensation novel is described by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas thus:secrecy and the body go hand in hand, and the more sensation novels highlight the elusiveness or artificiality of human identity, the more hair-raising Gothic loci appear as the ultimate place where fragment of truth can be recollected and reunited and story rewritten.

[13] Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, robbery, disguise, revenge, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.

[3] Neo-Victorian novels, such as Celia Fremlin's The Hours Before Dawn (1958) and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (2013), have been seen to draw on the conventions of sensation fiction.