Mrs Henry Wood, as Victorian author Ellen Wood persistently called herself, was a bestselling novel writer in her time who, with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, belonged to the vanguard of the so-called 'sensation school' that took the English reading public by storm in the early 1860s. Drawing on features of the earlier Gothic tradition and of the more recent 'Newgate' fiction as well as of the emerging cheap newspaper sensationalism, those writers set their stories of crimes and secrets firmly in contemporary Victorian England, presenting the dark underside of  a society obsessed with outward respectability. Cherished Victorian values like the sanctity of family and home, the role of women as obedient 'angels in the house', the concept of unfailing gentlemanly honour and of being always rewarded for virtuously doing one's duty were thus undermined. Contemporary criticism was quick to point out the dangers of this new genre: it was supposed to make its predominantly female readership unfit for their preordained roles as wives and mothers by instilling notions of disobedience, even rebellion, and impurity; with concern it was observed that these novels were read across class boundaries, 'the literature of the kitchen read in the drawing-room', and thus might serve to upset society's basic structures.

Wood, though, has always been regarded as being safely on the conventional side compared to her more radically subversive colleagues Braddon and Collins. Her novels are populated by pious, honest and hard-working 'good' protagonists opposed to mean, greedy and often blaspheming villains who are invariably punished in the end, while the surviving good ones get rich and marry. Occasionally there are scenes of embarrassing sentimentality, especially the ever-occurring deathbed-encounters stretching over twenty pages. As the author makes no secret of her personal opinions and is always moralizingly explaining, judging and commenting her characters' attitudes and behaviour, it is understandable that her novels are no longer read today except by literary scholars. Her contemporary audience, however, had no problems with that, as Wood's sales figures amply prove. The Victorian concept of literature was strongly didactic and people wrote and read even highly entertaining fiction for moral guidance, too. Nevertheless, her first sensation novel, East Lynne, caused quite a scandal on publication, being the story of an adulterous wife who leaves her husband and three children for an irresponsible rake who finally turns out to be a murderer, too. Much of the novel is concerned with the lady's everlasting remorse, and the narrator's warning address to other married women who might be pondering a similar action has become a much-quoted passage among experts. But the erring wife's doings and feelings are  presented with much sympathy and thus at least part of the guilt is laid at the seemingly ideal husband's door, however much the auctorial voice may deny it.

However, even if one inevitably knows how it all will end, the stories are well-plotted and on the whole quite suspenseful,  so the narratorial shortcomings are worth bearing with. Moreover, not all her characters are so boringly all good or all bad: love makes fools of many of Wood's male heroes who often fall for a totally unsuitable wife, or they fail to make the right decision at a crucial moment because, as she likes quoting, 'conscience makes cowards of us all'; unneccessary secrecy and too much refined sensitivity can result in severe marital upheaval, and lack of parental guidance may lead the best of children astray. Even if she is less radical, less subversive than other sensation writers, Wood has an axe to grind with Victorian society, too: the need for education, with a view of having a profession in life, is a big topic with her, another is to advocate the merits of the middle classes in opposition to the burnt-out aristocracy, yet another  society's preoccupation with amassing material wealth - quite a few of her novels deal with 'ill-gotten gains' and the dire retribution inevitably following.

So, after all, Wood's novels are worth reading if one is willing to overlook the narratorial deficiencies, not only because they offer interesting stories full of suspense and romance but for the cultural insight they grant into the concerns and anxieties of apparently perfectly ordinary members of Victorian society: what is it that made so many Victorian readers value these novels as 'unputdownable', as modern book reviews like to put it? Sensation fiction has for some decades been a fertile field for Victorian scholars and the works of the 'big' ones, Collins and Braddon, have been the foremost subject of interest, and, consequently, of quite a heap of publications. It may be safely assumed that sooner or later Wood will be next.
 

The novels:
(the title links lead you to content summaries)

Danesbury House (1860)
East Lynne (1861)
The Channings (1862)
Mrs Halliburton's Troubles (1862)
The Elchester College Boys (1862)
The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863)
Verner's Pride (1863)
The Foggy Night at Offord (1863)
Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864)
Oswald Cray (1864)
Trevlyn Hold (1864)
William Allair (1864)
Mildred Arkell (1865)
St Martin's Eve (1866)
Elster's Folly (1866)
A Life's Secret (1867)
Orville College (1867)
Lady Adelaide (1867)
Anne Hereford (1868)
The Red Court Farm (1868)
Roland Yorke (1869)
Bessy Rane (1870)
George Canterbury's Will (1870)
Dene Hollow (1871)
Within the Maze (1872)
The Master of Greylands (1873)
Told in the Twilight (1875)
Bessy Wells (1875)
Parkwater (1876)
Edina (1876)
Adam Grainger (1876)
Pomeroy Abbey (1878)
Court Netherleigh (1881)
Lady Grace (1887)
The Story of Charles Strange (1888)
Featherston's Story (1889)
The House of Halliwell (1890)

Biographical data:

Born Ellen Price in Worcester 1814, the daughter of a glove maker, she spent most of her younger years with her grandmother. As a result of a curvature of the spine, while still a girl, she was to become a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. Ellen married an important banker and shipping agent, Henry Wood, in 1836 and thereafter lived abroad with him, mainly France. She began writing and her stories were published by Harrison Ainsworth in his Bentley's Miscellany, receiving very little renumeration. Her work was popular and her output was steady - she was writing for a living since her husband had lost his income -, although it was put aside when the demands of raising a family required her full attention.

Always using her husband's name, her first novel to be published was Danesbury House in 1860, soon followed by her most famous work, East Lynne (1861). Good reviews led to massive sales and she became a household name. The book lent itself to melodrama and a succession of dramatic adaptations helped to maintain interest in its author. Although her popularity continued and her output was prolific (with fifteen novels appearing in the next seven years) she was never to repeat the success of that book.

Following the death of her husband in 1866, she took on responsibility for publication of the periodical, The Argosy, with the help of her son, Charles. She contributed most of the content, some of it anonymously, including her Johnny Ludlow stories. A Life's Secret (1867) was also published without the author's name - a good thing since it caused an uproar with its derision of liberal thinking. She settled back in London, at St.John's Wood, from 1880 and was to live to the ripe old age of seventy-three. She died in 1887 and was buried in Highgate cemetery.
(mostly taken from: Literary Heritage at http://home.freeuk.com/castlegates/wood.htm)
 

Biographical essay in three parts written by her son Charles Wood and first published in The Argosy 1887 (taken from http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/WoodX1.htm); 1894 published in volume form by Bentley.
 

Further Links:

see Michael Flowers's great website at http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk
 

Select Bibliography:

Wood's work:

• Burgauer, Rolf. Mrs. Henry Wood: Persönlichkeit und Werk. Zürich: Juris, 1950.
• Elliot, Jeanne B. “A Lady to the End: The Case of Isabel Vane.” Victorian Studies 19 (1976): 329-44.
• Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. “Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon and Isabel Vane.”Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16/2 (1997): 303-25.
• Kaplan, E.A. “The Political Unconscious in the Maternal Melodrama: Ellen Wood's East Lynne." Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure. Ed. D. Longhurst. 1989.
• Maunder, Andrew. "Ellen Wood Was a Writer: Rediscovering Collins's Rival." Wilkie Collins Society Journal N.S. 3 (2000): 17-33.
• Maunder, Andrew. Introduction. East Lynne. By Ellen Wood. Peterborough: Broadview, 2000.
• Walker, Gail. “The ‘Sin’ of Isabel Vane: East Lynne and Victorian Sexuality.” Heroines of Popular Culture. Ed. Pat Browne. Bowling Green OH: Popular, 1987. 23-31.
• Wynne, Deborah. "'See What a Big Wide Bed It Is': Mrs Henry Wood and the Philistine Imagination." Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities. Ed. D. Duffy and Emma Liggins. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
 

Sensation novels in general:

• Boyle, Thomas. “Fishy Extremities: Subversion of Orthodoxy in the Victorian Sensation Novel.” Literature and History 9 (1983): 92-96.
• Boyle, Thomas. Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism. London: Hodder, 1989.
• Brantlinger, P. “What is Sensational about the Sensational?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1-28.
• Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.
• Edwards, P.D. Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Foes. St Lucia, Queensland, 1971.
• Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
• Loesberg, Jonathan. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Representations 13 (1986): 115-138.
• Pykett, Lynn. The Improper Feminine. The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Pykett, Lynn. The Sensation Novel From The Woman in White to The Moonstone. Plymouth: Northcote, 1994.
• Showalter, Elaine. “Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s.” Victorian Newsletter 49 (1976): 1-5.
• Showalter, Elaine. “Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the Eighteen-Sixties.” The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses. Ed. A. Wohl. London, 1978.
• Wynne, Deborah. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
 

General Victorian:

• Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.
• Elwin, M. Victorian Wallflowers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.
• Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader 1837-1914. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
• Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
• Griest, Guinevere. Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970.
• Helsinger, E.K. et al., eds. The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883. 3 vols. Manchester, 1983. [Vol. 3].
• Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels. Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.
• Poovey, M. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. London, 1989.
• Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.