[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 Victory, lies at the heart of the sensation novel. It both exposes and plays on the fear of respectable Victorian society that social and familial normality had some dark secret at its core. The secrets of the family and the secret histories of families are the source of the typical sensation plot, which, as Henry James noted, is concerned with ‘those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’ (1865:594). Indeed, the power of sensationalism, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out, derives ‘from its exposure of secrecy as the fundamental enabling condition of middle-class life’ (1978b:104). As both Showalter and Anthea Trodd (1989) have

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