Despite the fact that both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman writing caused a sensation in their own day, and were widely discussed as examples of new and often disturbing trends in fiction, they nevertheless rapidly disappeared from view, leaving (according to the critical consensus) little lasting impression upon the history of fiction. Thus Patrick Brantlinger, re-examining the sensation novel in 1982, drew attention to its ephemerality, describing it as ‘a minor subgenre of British fiction that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade later’ (37). Similarly, David Rubinstein, an historian who writes interestingly and sympathetically about the New Woman fiction, concludes that it was ‘in decline by 1896 or so’ (1986:25), and that the female New Woman writers ‘contributed little of permanent value to the development of English fiction’ (33-4). Many of the feminist critics who have rediscovered the New Woman writing in the wake of post-1960s feminism have been moved to ponder the question of ‘why it was that the men who took up the themes of feminism in their fiction were the ones who had literary survival value, and not the women’ (Lovell 1987:107). A similar question might be asked about the sensation novel. Why has interest in the work of Braddon and Wood lagged so far behind the revival of interest in Wilkie Collins?

The rapid disappearance from critical view of both the women’s sensation novel (and perhaps the sensation novel in general) and the New Woman writing may, in part, be seen as a function of their topicality. They were both very much of their own time. They registered the pulse of contemporary feeling and were deeply implicated in the immediate social

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