East Lynne (Oxford World's Classics)

695 Pages·2008·1.63 MB·English

by  Ellen Wood

oxford world’s classics
EAST LYNNE
Ellen Wood, or ‘Mrs Henry Wood’ as she styled herself for
professional purposes, was born in 1814. She lived with her grand-
parents until the age of 7 when she rejoined her parents and six
siblings. An adolescent spinal problem, confining her to a couch,
allowed her to share the education her brothers received from their
father, a glove manufacturer of scholarly turn. In 1836 she married
Henry Wood, spent the next twenty years in France where Henry
had business interests, and bore three sons and two daughters. Her
first contribution to a magazine appeared in February 1851 and
during the next decade she published another 150 or so short stor-
ies. Meanwhile, in the wake of Henry’s business failure, the family
had returned to England in 1856, and settled in Upper Norwood.
Herfirst novel, Danesbury House (1860), won a prize of £100 from
the Scottish Temperance League, and her second, the sensational
shocker, East Lynne (1860–1), was an immediate popular success,
and became a staple melodrama of the Victorian stage and early
twentieth-century cinema. After her husband’s death in 1866, Ellen
moved to Hampstead and became both proprietor and editor of
the Argosy magazine, in which she launched eleven more of her
own novels and the successful ‘Johnny Ludlow’ tales of her
Worcestershire childhood. A martyr to ill-health, Wood nevertheless
left a substantial amount of work for posthumous publication when
she died in 1887.
Elisabeth Jay is Professor of English and Assistant Dean of the
School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University. Her
published work includes a literary biography of Margaret Oliphant;
various editions of biographies, autobiographies, and novels by
Victorian women writers; and a series of books on nineteenth-century
literature and religion.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ELLEN WOOD
East Lynne
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ELISABETH JAY
1
3
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ISBN 0–19–280462–6
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xl
Select Bibliography xliv
A Chronology of Ellen Wood xlvii
EAST LYNNE
Explanatory Notes 625
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INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to
treat the Introduction as an Epilogue.
East Lynne as Sensation Fiction
In 1862 Oxford’s 47-year-old Professor of Ecclesiastical History,
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, was reluctantly persuaded to accompany
the 20-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, on a trip to Egypt. Their
fundamental incompatibility was remarked by Stanley’s Victorian
biographer: ‘Few young men of twenty would have appreciated
Stanley’s insatiable appetite for every detail of historical or sacred
associations––an appetite so absorbing as to leave little room for
sympathy with their very different interests.’ HRH, however, devised
a way of turning Stanley’s scholarly proclivities to more amusing
account:
The Prince set his mind on my reading ‘East Lynne,’ which I did at three
sittings. Yesterday I stood a tolerable examination at it. A brisk cross-
examination took place between H.R.H., A.P.S., Meade, and Keppel. I
came off with flying colours, and put a question which no one could
answer: ‘With whom did Lady Isabel dine on the fatal night?’1
Stanley’s ability to consume the novel at three sittings and the
Poirot-like mode in which he posed his tricky question (for the
answer to his question consult Chapter 27) might suggest that East
Lynne (1861) was a story of crime and detection and the novel does
indeed introduce a murder that requires solving, but the ‘fatal night’
to which Stanley referred involves the novel’s central misdemeanour,
a social crime so shocking that it will eventually attract the death
penalty which the mere act of murder is excused.
One of the first, and one of the most famous, of the 1860s outcrop
of ‘sensation fiction’, East Lynne incorporated many of the facets
that won this genre its derogatory nickname. A category broad
enough to incorporate novels as diverse as Wilkie Collins’s The
1 R. E. Prothero and G. G. Bradley, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley,2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1893), ii. 67–9.
viii Introduction
Woman in White (1860), Charles Dickens’sGreat Expectations (1861),
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Charles
Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), or Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a
Flower (1867), is always going to be hard to define coherently, but
critics of the day found it easy enough to identify the common
features they disliked and distrusted. This type of fiction was
denominated ‘sensational’ because it played upon readers’ nerves in
two ways: first, by using to the full the opportunity for suspense and
melodrama afforded by serial instalments; and second, by stimulat-
ing an ‘unhealthy’ interest in the diseases and crimes––such as adul-
tery, abduction, insanity or falsely alleged insanity, arson, bigamy,
and the crime passionel––which the newspapers claimed threatened
society daily. Perceived as playing promiscuously with discrete nar-
rative traditions, ‘sensation fiction’ further offended by infiltrating
the concerns of the cheap press into the genteel reading circles
of middle- and upper-class Britain. The appeal of East Lynne, it
might be said, lay in its ability to entrance readers with the appal-
lingly immoral consequences of ignoring traditional social boundar-
ies (Lady Isabel Vane, a peer’s daughter, is apparently genetically
incapable of communicating successfully with Archibald Carlyle, her
middle-class lawyer husband) while serving up this feast of horrors
with a seductively conventional moral commentary. Thus Isabel’s
kinsman, Lord Mount Severn, is duly summoned by the author to
spell out to the ruined Lady Isabel the full gravity of her offence, but
only some chapters after readers have been allowed to experience her
growing estrangement from her husband, and the way in which her
jealousy of a supposed rival is whipped into a fatal frenzy by the
practised seducer, Sir Francis Levison. Lord Mount Severn is par-
ticularly careful to direct Isabel and the reader’s attention to the
widespread social chaos that her adultery with a minor aristocrat
could cause: ‘Coward! sneak! May good men shun him, from hence-
forth! may his Queen refuse to receive him! You, an earl’s daughter!
Oh, Isabel! How utterly you have lost yourself!’ (p. 308)
As we have seen, his prayer was in one sense to be in vain. While
Ellen Wood, the novel’s author, was busy invoking the Queen as the
absolute arbiter of moral and social authority, the Queen’s son and
heir, Prince Edward, had become thoroughly intimate with the cow-
ardly sneak and the fallen earl’s daughter, and had thought them fit
company to be introduced to the future Dean of Westminster,
Introduction ix
Arthur Stanley. Such a reading, it might be objected, stems from
deliberately confusing real life with fiction, but this approach charac-
terized the criticism levelled in the 1860s against the new phenom-
enon of the ‘sensation novel’.2 In April 1863 Henry Mansel, later
Dean of St Paul’s, sought to identify for the readers of the conserva-
tive Quarterly Review the essential ingredients contributing to the
‘morbid ... excitement’ worked by such fiction and lighted upon the
dangerous sense of social promiscuity it conveyed:
The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale
of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation ...
[A] tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thor-
oughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the
people we are in the habit of meeting. ... The man who shook our hand
with a hearty English grasp half an hour ago––the woman whose beauty
and grace were the charm of last night, and whose gentle words sent us
home better pleased with the world and with ourselves––how exciting to
think that under these pleasing outsides may be concealed some demon in
human shape...3
It was such ‘proximity’, the sense that such demons might be at
large in one’s immediate social milieu or, even more frighteningly, in
one’s own home, which distinguished this wave of novels from their
‘exciting’ predecessor, the Gothic novel. As Henry James phrased it,
in contrasting that ur-Gothic text, Ann Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of
Udolpho (1784), with the works of Ellen Wood’s rivals, Wilkie Collins
and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: ‘What are the Apennines to us, or we to
the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated
to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London
lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more
terrible.’4 Deprived of an exotic setting, ‘sensation novels’ had instead
to rely upon ‘piquant situation and startling incident’5 to evoke awe,
and once again it was the notion of proximity that caused concern.
2 See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),54ff.
3 Henry L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’,Quarterly Review,113 (April 1863),481–514
(pp. 488–9).
4 Henry James’s review of Mary Braddon’sAurora Floyd was originally published in
The Nation, 12 Oct. 1865; it was reprinted in Henry James, Notes and Reviews
(Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921),108–16.
5 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’,Blackwood’s Magazine,91 (1862),564–84
(p. 568).