SOURCE: "What is 'Sensational' about the 'Sensation Novel'?" In Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 1, June, 1982, pp. 1-28.

In the following essay, Brantlinger offers an in-depth overview of the sensation novel.

Even though "sensation novels" were a minor subgenre of British fiction that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade or two later, they live on in several forms of popular culture, obviously so in their most direct offspring—modern mystery, detective, and suspense fiction and films. The sensation novel was and is sensational partly because of content: it deals with crime, often murder as an outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in apparently proper, bourgeois, domestic settings. But the fictions of Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Mrs. Henry Wood, and some other popular authors of the 1860s have special structural qualities as well, which can perhaps be summed up historically...