Twentieth-century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority.

(Jane Tompkins 1985:123)

The evaluative system and its attendant process of cultural sifting described by Jane Tompkins (above) have not only played a crucial role in writing the women’s sensation novel out of literary history, but were also important components of the contemporary critical response to sensation fiction, and constitutive elements of the genre itself. However, a variety of recent historical and theoretical work on popular forms and genres (particularly narrative forms by and for women) has enabled us to rethink the equations Tompkins outlines, and to reassess both the contemporary cultural meaning of sensation fiction, and its subsequent changing significances.

Of particular importance in this respect has been what Andrew Higson and Ginette Vincendeau (1986) have described (with reference to contemporary film studies) as The feminist-inspired desire to focus on texts traditionally popular with female audiences (and derided by male critics)’ (3). This focus on women’s genres has not only brought ‘low’ genres into critical view, but has also led to a rethinking of the concept of genre itself; instead of conceptualising it as ‘a structure (of binary oppositions, of iconographies and themes)’, there has been a move towards seeing it as ‘a processing of narrative

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