Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 77
are related to both sensational journalism and melodramatic theatre. They are
mainly described as being “plot-driven” in contrast to “character driven”. Therefore,
they are often regarded as inferior to Victorian realism, both artistically and
morally and as a sub-genre that is peculiarly feminine and mostly written by
women to women (Harrison and Richard xii). Mitchell comments that sensational
novels were and still are easily dismissed by critics as they lack reality. However, by
dismissing them, she warns, one does not understand “the function of women’s
recreational reading”, as “these books do not provide pictures of the contemporary
scene” they “can be read to indicate the way women felt about the society
they lived in” (“Sentiment and Suffering” 31).
Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that sensational novels were devoured
by men and women alike. Mitchell explains East Lynne’s immense success
in that “readers were tired of the inane and impossible goodness in heroines.
Really interesting women – and women worth writing a whole book about – had
sexual experiences” (The Fallen Angel 74). The first novel to be critically dubbed
“sensational“ was Wood's East Lynne (1861). It eventually started a new literary
trend, whose main exponents also included Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White,
1859; The Moonstone, 1868), Charles Reade (The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861) and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret, 1862). Though judged as heavily
sentimental and crudely melodramatic, Wood’s novel in particular enjoyed immense
popularity due to the detailed and quite accurate representation of the
worldview of its middle-class audience.
Another dominant discourse of East Lynne, apart from the woman question, is
a panorama discussion of society which supposedly added to the novel’s appeal
for the middle-class reader. Wagner notes that East Lynne “forms a charting of the
social and cultural competition between gentility in decline and [the middle class]”,
thus, it contains “increasingly complex representations of the aristocracy and
landed gentry” and that Wood “seek[s] to negotiate shifts in the social construction
of gentility as a cultural enterprise in the nineteenth century” (200). In other
words, Wood contrasts the aristocratic and the middle class to demonstrate the
moral superiority of the latter. The aristocracy in East Lynne is presented in a bad
light; Lady Isabel’s whole family, for example, has been nearly erased because of
indulgence, decadence and wastefulness. Through her marriage with Carlyle, Isabel’s
transgression from one class into the other “symbolizes the failure of aristocracy”
(A. Kaplan 45) and depicts the middle class as a new representative of morality
and the law. Wynne argues that Wood demonstrates the middle-class’s superiority
by their way of obtaining prestige, namely through “discipline, determination,
and disarmingly genial manners [they] inherit the power, property, and status
of a class group she publicly emulates, but secretly envies and despises” (68).