Sensation Fiction Onstage and the New Woman

Abstract ‘Sensation Fiction Onstage and the New Woman’ examines stage adaptations of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) from the last third of the nineteenth century. It contends that the plays announce and refract contemporary debates around the condition of woman (especially about marriage and motherhood), later probed by New Woman activists of the fin de siècle more extensively and explicitly. The dramatizations gesture towards a modern, emancipated woman through a selection of scenes, music, stagecraft, and dramatic acting modes—all of which accentuate the figure of the transgressive heroine. These performative modes suggest that source and target texts, for all their ambiguity, tend to champion the adulteress Lady Isabel and the murderess Lady Audley. The dramatizations in performance, thus, put the heroine and actress centre stage, literally and metaphorically.