Genre
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

The Woman in White is one of the earliest English-language sensation novels. This genre, which was particularly popular in the 1860s and 1870s, is built on the combination of romance and realism by writers who place shocking subject matter in settings that are familiar to a reader. Unlike Gothic fiction, which often offered readers stories of crime and depravity in geographically and temporally distant settings, sensation novels offered readers such stories in settings that were much closer to home. Thus, the genre's characteristic page-turning stimulation to a reader's nerves hinges on setting—and on the suggestion that crime, madness, and scandal are plausible features of a contemporary Victorian middle-class household.