Brief encounters: sensation fiction and the short story

Building on recent work on sensation short fiction, which has convincingly argued for the form’s significance to our knowledge of mid-Victorian sensationalist culture more broadly, this article examines Wilkie Collins’s ‘A Marriage Tragedy’ (1857–58), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Levison’s Victim’ (1870) and ‘The Mystery at Fernwood’ (1861). Through a focus on generic hybridity, marriage, and identity, the connections and divergences between the short and long forms of literary sensationalism are traced, from the passing of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857 to the first Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. These particular markers reflect the distinct emphasis on matrimony within these texts during a crucial period of public interest in the Marriage Question. It is argued that the sensation short story is more heavily characterised by gothic tropes than its longer counterpart, even as it eschews the supernatural. Female characters in these stories encounter marriage as an uncanny site of terror and are silenced and traumatised by these intimate experiences. Despite the legal reforms and ongoing public debate of the 1860s and 1870s, writers of the sensation short story suggest that modern marriage retains the threats to female liberty, safety, and sanity that characterised the gothic narratives of an earlier period.