SOURCE: "Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Secret Histories of Women," in The 'Improper' Feminine, Routledge, 1992, pp. 83-113.

In the following essay, Pykett examines the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon to discuss the relationship between Victorian gender roles and the convention of the family secret in sensation novels.

[Sensation novelists] wanted to persuade people that in almost every one of the well-ordered houses of their neighbours there was a skeleton shut up in some cupboard; that their comfortable and easy-looking neighbour had in his breast a secret story which he was always going about trying to conceal.

(Ray 1865:203)

Had every creature a secret, part of themselves, hidden deep in their breasts, like that dark purpose which had grown out of the misery of her father's untimely death—some buried memory, whose influence was to overshadow all their lives?

(EV I:3)

This fearful question, asked by Eleanor Vane, heroine of Eleanor's...