58 pages • 1 hour read
East Lynne
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Sensation Novels
Sensation novels were a genre of British novels, published primarily between 1850 and 1870, that focused on suspenseful and melodramatic events. They often included violence, crime, and real or perceived sexual “impropriety,” producing a shocking or “sensational” effect on readers. Sensation novels shared some features with the Gothic novel, including secrets, duplicitous villains, and the specter of danger; however, while Gothic novels were typically set in the distant past (sometimes the medieval era) and in continental Europe, sensation novels were pointedly set in England and made use of contemporary events and technologies, such as train travel. In an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world, the fear that individuals could have secret histories (including criminal ones) looms large in sensation novels. The genre was solidified through the closely clustered publication of three key texts: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60), East Lynne (1860-61), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The melodramatic plots of all three novels explore the agency and vulnerability of women in the Victorian era while also exploring their capacity for duplicity (in both East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret, a woman assumes a false identity and poses as a governess to infiltrate a household).
While sensation novels were popular and lucrative for both authors and publishers, they were often regarded disdainfully by critics and authors working in other genres. However, they have since attracted academic attention for their engagement with Victorian anxieties surrounding class, gender, and sexuality. East Lynne is notable for its commentary on all three, but particularly for its unusually frank depiction of sexual “misbehavior.” Where other sensation novels might allude to the “scandal” of a woman engaging in sex before marriage or evoke the possibility of sexual infidelity through depictions of bigamy, East Lynne contains an explicitly adulterous relationship—an unusual choice for a 19th-century British novel, though one that was somewhat more common in European literature broadly (e.g., Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina).
Historical Context: Governesses in the Victorian Era
A governess was a woman employed by a wealthy family to provide education to their children—particularly their daughters, as formal opportunities for female education were limited. The position of a governess differed from that of a nanny or nurse in that she was typically responsible for education (including skills such as music, dancing, art, and other refinements) rather than daily care and was more likely to interact with older children rather than infants or toddlers. While boys were typically sent to boarding school or taught by tutors after a certain age, girls could remain under the care of a governess until they married.
Although working as a governess was a paid position, women who held these roles often came from middle- or upper-class upbringings themselves (meaning they held a significantly higher social position than the typical household servant). In fact, a governess often drew on the education and training she had herself received to educate others. As a result, many governesses were women who had encountered financial difficulties or changed social circumstances; working as a governess was one of the only ways that a Victorian woman could earn an income without entirely sacrificing social rank. Because of this class ambiguity, as well as the presence of an unmarried woman who lived in close quarters with her employers, the figure of the governess was sometimes represented with the potential for mystery or scandal. Several well-known Victorian novels include characters who are employed as governesses, perhaps most famously Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (in which the protagonist ends up marrying the man who initially employs her). East Lynne exploits the possibilities of the governess’s position to an even greater degree, as Isabel engineers her employment by her own former husband in order to be close to her own children. The figure of the governess is thus central to the novel’s exploration of The Anxieties and Opportunities of Unstable Social Positions.
Unlock all 58 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: