The new Magdalen 1881 r.

The new Magdalen 1881 r. - Wilkie Collins

The New Magdalen is part of a genre known as the Sensation Novel (eg. The Moonstone, East Lynne, Lady Audley’s Secret, all written in the early 1860s) which is described in Matthew Sweet’s gloriously un-highbrow piece on the British Library website. He writes: ‘Sensation fiction is populated by men who cannot bear loud noise and women who cannot digest cake. On its pages you will meet wives fixated on vengeance and husbands shamed by murder… The fiction of Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon unsettles profoundly. Its accounts of sickness, insanity, identity-theft and long-suppressed family secrets tell a story about the anxieties and uncertainties of nineteenth-century life – and our own lives, too.’The New Magdalen is, as well, revealing about mid-nineteenth century attitudes and moral values. As James Bobin writes in his Persephone Preface: ‘Wilkie Collins’s earlier work such as No Name dealt with illegitimacy, Man or Wife centred on Scottish marriage law, and Poor Miss Finch was the story of a young blind woman and a romantic triangle with two brothers. Collins’s novels, throughout the 1860s and 1870s, grew markedly more angry at what he perceived as injustices.’