Nóra Séllei:

A Symptomatic Reading of the Sensation Novel: The Case of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

A typical mid-nineteenth-century genre, the sensation novel can be read symptomatically: it reveals not only several aspects of the Victorian period, but also exposes the limits of realist representation and problematizes some contemporary modes of a gradually extending literacy. In this respect, the sensation novel functions similarly to the Gothic novel (both in its classical, 18th-century version and in its later developments, including contemporary literature) because it can be interpreted as a literary code for expressing phenomena that are close to impossible to mediate within the framework of the realist novel. Focussing on various forms of criminality and using contingency as a key structural element, the stakes of the sensation novel are the questions of legitimacy related to the foundations of the established society and the (relative) certainty provided by the metonymical narration of the realist novel. Revolving around Lady Audley, who commits a series of crimes (fake identity, forgery, bigamy, arson, attempted murder), Braddon’s novel challenges notions of decency and propriety, explores the contemporary construction of femininity, and takes issue – and a gendered issue at that – with the Bildungsroman. Harking back to Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the text asks questions about the legitimacy and the legitimate narrative of a self-made woman.

Nóra Séllei is Professor at the Department of British Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, and at the Department of English, Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She gained three postgraduate degrees: PhD, “habilitation”, and DSc. Her main teaching and research areas include gender studies, feminist literary theory, and 19th and 20th-century women’s literature, primarily novelists and autobiographers. Her publications include five monographs: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Peter Lang, 1996), and four monographs in Hungarian: one on 19th-century English women writers (1999), one on 20th-century women’s autobiographies (2001), one on Hungarian feminist theory and criticism (2007) and one on the cultural self-reflexivity in Woolf’s writings of the 1930s (2012). Apart from being also the author of about 130 articles, she was the series editor of the Hungarian feminist book series Artemis Books. She is the Hungarian translator of Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, Jean Rhys’s Smile Please, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. She also edited a HJEAS-volume (2003.1) and also a collection of essays (2006) on female subjectivity, and two other volumes: She’s Leaving Home: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context (Peter Lang, 2011) and Presences and Absences: Transdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge Scholar, 2013), and edited and translated a reader on postmodern feminist theory (2007). She is the Head of the Gender Studies Centre at the University of Debrecen, and for four years (2011-15) she was the president of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English.