Fear of the Fast Young Lady

Abstract

Abstract There are three types of female mobility that persistently serve as subjects of concern in the sensation novels discussed in this chapter: social mobility (i.e., the ability to move up or down in social class), legal mobility (i.e., in particular, the ability to move in or out of the institution of marriage), and locomotive mobility (i.e., the ability to move quickly and covertly via the expanding railway system). Positioned at a point in time when social, legal, and transportational developments seemed to be conspiring together to blur and upend longstanding gender, class, and geographic boundaries, the fugitive mobilities afforded to the class-crossing, train-riding, shape-shifting female protagonists of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1863) appear to have taken hold of the popular imagination in a way that felt more sensationally threatening than ever before.