Beth Palmer. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-19-959911-0. Price: US$110.00/£60.00

Beth Palmer’s Women’sAuthorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies contributes to a growing body of works that dismantle the notion of sensation as a faddish fictional genre of the 1860s. In the pattern of (editor) Andrew Maunder’s invaluable Varieties of Women’s Sensation Writing, 1855-1890 (Pickering & Chatto, 2004, vols. 1-6), Palmer reads sensation through several rhetorical and ideological traditions, but she bases her interpretations in the context and development of the serial magazine. Palmer concentrates on three sensation novelists who also edited the magazines in which their own and others’ sensation writing appeared: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Belgravia), Ellen Wood (The Argosy), and Florence Marryat (London Society). The status of these author/editors as sensation novelists, she argues, not only secured their editorial posts, but in doing so merged the readers of sensation with those of the magazine serial. On the family magazine stage, then, Braddon, Wood, and Marryat performed a variety of roles that made sensation palatable—or at least marketable—to a respectable, largely middle-class audience. The concept of performance, as discussed below, is at once the most original and most uncertain part of this otherwise solid and engaging book. In the first chapter Palmer examines the publishing foundations of the 1850s that sensation’s practitioners were to inherit and reshape in the 1860s and beyond. Celebrity editors like Charles Dickens (Household Words), Isabella Beeton (The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine) and Emily Faithfull (Victoria Magazine) not only wielded great control over the content and organization of their magazines, but flavored them with their distinctive personalities, lending them the credibility that comes with familiarity. As Deborah Wynne has argued, too (in The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine [Palgrave, 2001]), Palmer shows that sensation and the serial magazine were not oppositional rhetorical modes so much as they were co-constructive. In the next three chapters of the book, her detailed readings of the magazines helmed by the female sensation writers/editors ably examine sensation as a moveable feast of technique, ideology, and political affiliation. Palmer’s three central chapters on Braddon, Wood, and Marryat open sensation to a wider field of signifiers; under the aegis of magazine publishing she shows how poetry, non-fiction, and illustration drew upon the sensational elements we associate primarily with novels. In the chapter on Braddon, Palmer’s readings of the author’s little-known novels serialized in Belgravia, like Birds of Prey (1867), Dead Sea Fruit (1868) and Hostages to Fortune (1875), offer a fresh perspective. Her attention to Braddon’s “carefully considered plotting” (65) challenges the notion that serialization’s extemporized process yielded slipshod novels that were short on narrative and technical expertise. Instead, Palmer identifies a Braddon who, as both author and editor, exploits her publishing platform and the literary and moral controversies associated with sensation, and whose often frenetic pacing in her novels was intentional, not modal. Palmer’s analysis of Wood concentrates on the author/editor’s merging of “two seemingly conflicting discourses: sensationalism and pious Christianity” (84), a feat Wood managed by representing the sensational elements of her writing as states of authentic feeling. The chapter on Marryat provokes questions about why this illustrious and erratic literary celebrity is not better known today; her proliferation of identities (professional, political, and artistic) reinforces Palmer’s interpretation of Marryat as a melodramatic, self-conscious, sexually daring, and unpredictable exemplar of sensation.. The final chapter’s foray into the New Woman press of the 1890s is less successful at telling us what we do not already know. The New Woman’s adaptation and politicization of literary and professional precedents, and more recently, the links between sensation fiction …