SOURCE: “Robert Audley's Secret: Male Homosocial Desire in Lady Audley's Secret,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 515-28.

In the following essay, Nemesvari argues that Lady Audley poses a threat to “male homosocial bonds.”

Elaine Showalter has characterized Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s as “a genre in which everything that was not forbidden was compulsory.”¹ Thus, much to the chagrin of many contemporary reviewers, these works focused on murder, attempted murder, bigamy, adultery, and a series of “lesser” transgressions which shocked and titillated their audience. As well, sensation fiction tended to present sexual irregularities as motivating the crimes which drove its plots, something which played no small role in reinforcing its popularity.

There was, however, one “forbidden” sexual topic which could not be addressed directly, even within the risqué confines of these novels, and that was homosexuality. Nonetheless, even though homosexuality remained, in Lord...