Popularity and proliferation: Shifting modes of authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife and Vixen

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s long career coincided with a shift in writing practices, as the Victorian literary marketplace became increasingly professionalized and competitive. This article argues that Braddon intervened in contemporary debates about the status of the popular novelist and the nature of authorship through her fiction, implicitly mounting a defence against the critical attacks on her own prolific production. Through a discussion of representations of authorship in The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Vixen (1879), it is suggested that Braddon offers an important example of a bestselling female novelist who both exemplified the changing construction of composition in the nineteenth century and the move towards mass culture, and also engaged with and commented on this transition in interesting ways.