1The most famous sensation novels of the 1860s, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), were characterized by intricately crafted, suspenseful plots, dealing with secret crimes taking place in bourgeois Victorian settings. Although these novels were immensely popular with Victorian readers, they fell out of favour with the high-brow Modernists and were neglected within academia during most of the twentieth century. Until the 1980s, sensation fiction was often dismissed as ‘a minor subgenre of British fiction which flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade or two later’ (Brantlinger 1). Since the 1980s, however, critical reassessments have led to the revaluation of popular fiction and to the realization that the influence of the mid-Victorian sensation novel was in fact neither short-lived nor small-scale.
2In this article, I shall first sketch out the legacy of sensation fiction from the late-Victorian period to the present day. Then, in the second part of the essay, I shall use Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith as an exemplary text which illustrates some of the ways in which contemporary fiction has engaged with the Victorian sensation novel: I shall focus on Waters’s allusions to The Woman in White and discuss the politics of pastiche, as well as the concept of character ‘migration’; and, finally, I shall show how Waters’s appeal to the sense of touch borrows from Wilkie Collins’s tactile poetics, in order to invite us to read haptically, that is to say, to reconnect with a form of reading which is embodied and makes the Victorian past a palpable, substantial part of our contemporary selves.
3Since the 1980s, critics have shown that sensation fiction continued to exert its fascination on readers and writers long after the initial decade of its emergence in the 1860s. Not only did it live on as the adventure novel and the thriller or detective fictions of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century (in the works of Conan Doyle, Daphne Du Maurier, Agatha Christie and many others); but it also informed the New Woman novel of the 1890s (with proto-feminist authors such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, and Victoria Cross) and the horror stories or fantastic tales of the fin de siècle (the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, for instance).
4More generally, scholars came to recognize that sensation fiction shaped even mainstream realist Victorian fiction and the development of Naturalism as a literary mode in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Critic Andrew Maunder thus concludes that ‘most if not all mid- and late-Victorian novelists were drawn to the conventions of sensation fiction’ (23), whether these authors were part of the second generation of sensation novelists of the 1870s and 80s (Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat, or Ouida to name but a few), or whether they were canonical figures like Thomas Hardy (Desperate Remedies 1871), George Gissing (The Whirlpool 1897), and Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent 1907). Maunder also points out that even Victorian authors who had expressed the strongest reservations about sensation fiction, like Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot, resorted to sensationalism in their own way in novels such as Salem Chapel (1863), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Felix Holt (1866). In 1899, the Daily Telegraph’s selection of the 100 best novels of the nineteenth century included The Woman in White, East Lynne, Lady Audley’s Secret, and The Moonstone, which confirms the enduring popularity of sensation fiction at the turn of the twentieth century (Pykett 210).
5One of the reasons why sensation fiction became integral to late nineteenth-century fiction was that its plots addressed the crucial themes the Victorians were most anxious about: issues of social class, social mobility and social change; questions of money, family, manners and morals; and, last but not least, the problems of marriage, sex and the elusiveness of personal identity. The New Woman novel of the 1890s, for instance, clearly shares sensation fiction’s preoccupation with exposing the contradictions and inequities of Victorian marriage. Building on the sensation novel, New Woman writers also typically explore late Victorian debates about conventionally prescribed gender roles; they depict transgressive, independent heroines, while focusing on the representation of women’s bodies, women’s perceptions and women’s desires. In this regard, Collins’s protagonist Marian Halcombe can be considered as a prototype for many subsequent strong-minded and gender-fluid New Woman characters, such as Victoria Cross’s mustachioed heroine, Theodora, who appears both in a short story and a novel written by Cross at the turn of the century: ‘Theodora: A Fragment’, published in The Yellow Book in 1895, and the novel Six Chapters in A Man’s Life, published in 1903.
- 1 H. L. Manse wrote: ‘A class of literature has grown up around us . . . playing no inconsiderable p (...)
6Of course, a second reason why writers and readers were drawn again and again to sensation fiction was because of the effectiveness of its narrative strategies. Although it borrowed elements from the Gothic romance, its plots were devoid of supernatural elements and were thoroughly grounded in contemporary British society—which made it easy for readers to identify with the protagonists. Moreover, building on the sensationalism of newspaper culture, of early Victorian melodrama and of the popular genres of the Newgate novel and the Silver Fork novel of the 1830s‒40s, it was also a type of fast-paced, event-packed serial fiction that appealed to the nerves, as a journalist from the Quarterly Review noted in 1863.1 It provided a reading experience which was electrifying and somatic, not just intellectual and detached. In fact, the materialist qualities of the genre of sensation fiction were articulated by Collins as early as 1860 in The Woman in White, when Count Fosco asserts: ‘Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body’ (617). Indeed, as Tara MacDonald observes, sensation novels are ‘filled with detailed descriptions of bodies that affect and are affected by others’ (1), a point to which I will return in the last section of this article. This is why many Victorian reviewers feared that sensation fiction posed a threat to morality—especially the morality of young female readers, who were thought to be particularly impressionnable.
7What Lyn Pykett calls the ‘dispersive trajectory’ (211) of sensation fiction can be followed into the next century: indeed, its influence persisted and disseminated widely, as it was recycled and reworked to suit the cultural, social and ethical concerns of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Literary rewritings, but also radio, screen, and stage productions of specific sensation novels have appeared regularly since the beginning of the twentieth century. Collins’s The Woman in White, in particular, has been repeatedly adapted and appropriated. Of course, these processes of adaptation, revision, and transmediation began in Collins’s own time, since Collins himself dramatized The Woman in White as stage melodrama in 1871 in a way that sometimes departed from his original narrative.
8To give a few examples of how the post-Victorian period has engaged with The Woman in White, one can mention that in the early years of the twentieth century Collins’s novel provided the source plot of four silent suspense films (in 1912, 1913, 1921 and 1929). In 1947 it became a Warner Brothers film production; in 1949 it was made into a graphic novel by Alex A. Blum for the Classics Illustrated series; and in 1957 it was dramatized for British television for the first time. It was turned into a comic melodrama by Tim Kelly in 1975 and into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004. Today, there are also video games based on The Woman in White, such as the 2011 gaming CD issued by eGames (in the ‘Victorian Mysteries’ series) or its more recent tablet version. In the 1980s and 1990s, the novel was adapted several times for the BBC; and outside English-speaking countries, too, there were Italian, Austrian, German and Soviet TV adaptations. Perhaps influenced by the reinterpretation of The Woman in White by feminist critics of the 1980s, some of the BBC adaptations are notable for their depiction of Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe as independent women. Predictably, some of these adaptations choose to make explicit the sexual exploitation of Victorian women and the violence exerted against them. In bringing to the fore what is only implicit in Collins’s narrative, these adaptations take some liberties with Collins’s text, but one may argue that what they are really doing is simply updating Collins’s sensationalism for twentieth-century audiences.
- 2 For a recent exploration of neo-sensation fiction, see Jessica Cox, Neo-Victorianism and Sensation (...)
9One of the most significant literary developments is how, since the 1990s, the legacy of the sensation novel has also been evident in a growing number of neo-sensation novels, from Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989) to Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994), James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001), Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), John Harwood’s The Asylum (2013) and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (2023). Neo-sensation novels fall under the category of literature which Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographic metafiction’. They explore our ambivalent relationship to the Victorian past and appropriate the conventions of the sensation novel, in order to work through contemporary anxieties about class, gender, race, sexuality, authenticity and the writing of history. The term ‘neo-sensation’, first introduced by Kelly A. Marsh in 1995, designates contemporary novels which continue the process begun by the controversial sensation writers of the 1860s.2 In the rest of this article, I examine Sarah Waters’s neo-sensation novel Fingersmith, in order to study more closely some of the key aspects of the afterlife of The Woman in White.
10Fingersmith is set in 1861 and its main story-line centres on the 17-year old orphan Sue Trinder, raised among thieves in the London slums, who becomes involved in a plot to trick out of her inheritance another orphan of the same age, the wealthy heiress Maud Lilly, by manipulating her into marrying the alluring criminal Richard Rivers. Although Maud Lilly first appears to be the victim of this scheme, things are far from being that simple, for every single character in Fingersmith is hiding secrets. Like The Woman in White, Waters’s plot involves the substitution of one woman for another in a lunatic asylum and includes a number of sensational twists: theft, impersonation, drugs, baby farming, illegitimate children, psychological, sexual and physical abuse, abduction, imprisonment, murder, illicit lesbian love, a hanging, and even the swapping of babies at birth—a ploy which had already been used in the now-forgotten sensation novel by Reverend Compton Reade, entitled Who was that Gentleman? published in 1886.
11Using Wilkie Collins’s narrative tactics, Sarah Waters delays the unravelling of her novel’s secrets by dispersing narrative authority: her story, like Collins’s, follows the triple-decker format but is ‘told by more than one pen’ with each character relating ‘their own experience, word for word’ (Collins 5). However, because Fingersmith aims at envoicing female characters and extricating them from patriarchal structures of discourse, it distributes narrative agency among exclusively female protagonists. In this three-part novel, the narration is divided between Sue Trinder, who is the first-person narrator of the first and third parts, and Maud Lilly who narrates her own very different version of the same events in the second part. Additionally, a crucial piece of the puzzle is conveyed in secret to Maud through the confession of the baby farmer Mrs Sucksby, while a vital piece of evidence resurfaces at the very end, in the form of a letter of intent, written and signed seventeen years earlier by Sue Trinder’s dead mother, Marianne, in order to save her daughter from a sinister destiny. Marianne’s ghostly presence haunts Waters’s entire novel, and her very name can be considered as a residual trace of the protective spirit of Collins’s Marian Halcombe.
12With Sue Trinder’s final discovery of her mother’s letter, her identity quest and her search for origins come to an end. Her rightful inheritance is restored. A new female text can begin to be written, as Sue Trinder rejoins Maud Lilly in the library of Briar House and the latter assumes the role of authorial figure in the closing paragraphs of the novel. The two friends, almost sisters, and now lovers, re-establish themselves in the old family mansion. If at first the name and description of Briar House evoke both Thornfield Manor in Jane Eyre and the story of Little Briar Rose by the brothers Grimm, Waters’s denouement rids the family mansion of its dangerous features and turns it into a hospitable locus of female creativity and love.
13In adding an openly lesbian dimension to Collins’s narrative, Waters is not distorting the original source; she is in fact actualizing potentialities already present in Collins’s treatment of the Laura/Marian dyad, and anticipating queer interpretations of The Woman in White, which have been persuasively made by critics such as Richard Nemesvari. Where Waters significantly diverges from The Woman in White is in her rewriting of the trajectory of its male saviour figure, Walter Hartright. Indeed, Waters’s central male protagonist Richard Rivers conflates the characters of Sir Percival Glyde and Walter Hartright. Like Walter, Richard becomes Maud’s drawing master, before eventually marrying her. But although Richard is known by the name of ‘Gentleman’, he turns out to be manipulative and abusive, and as with Percival Glyde it is eventually revealed that he has no claim to a noble parentage. So, whereas the faithful Walter gets both the girls and the estate at the end of The Woman in White—thus enabling a return to conventional patriarchal order in compliance with Victorian expectations—the same is not true of Richard: he dies at the hands of a triumvirate of angry women. In the final page of Waters’s novel, it is Maud herself who takes charge of narrating the end of the story—instead of Walter Hartright mediating Marian Halcombe’s words at the end of The Woman in White.
14Although the two novels’ closing scenes similarly draw attention to the act of writing, they differ on an important point. In Fingersmith, ‘She [Maud] put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to show me [Sue] the words she had written, one by one’ (548); whereas, in The Woman in White, Walter concludes: ‘So she [Marian] spoke. In writing those last words, I [Walter] have written all. The pen falters in my hand . . . Marian was the good angel of our lives—let Marian end our Story’ (643). The self-reflexive, metanarrative dimension of each text draws attention to the process of writing, the practical activity of using pen and paper. But in the second quotation, under the guise of giving Marian the credit that is due to her, Walter in fact re-assigns her to the traditional role of ‘angel’ in the house, while subsuming her tale under his own authoritative framing narrative: he claims she is writing the ending, but he is in reality confiscating her authorship, as the chapter title also shows (‘The Story concluded by Walter Hartright’, 629‒43).
15Fingersmith’s sustained dialogue with The Woman in White thus offers an ironic pastiche of Collins’s novel, a postmodern ‘parody’, that is to say a text which, according to Linda Hutcheon’s definition, works through ‘a double process of installing and ironizing’, so as to signal ‘how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference’ (93). Moreover, in resisting Collins’s conventional ending and amplifying the queer trajectory of its protagonists, Waters’s novel contributes to the political project of literary Neo-Victorianism to ‘re-write the historical narrative of [the Victorian] period by representing marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally “different” versions of the Victorian’ (Llewellyn 165).
16Importantly, the neo-Victorian project does not limit itself to the revisiting of plots, it also revitalizes contemporary readers’ interest in characters. This is something that certainly would have appealed to Collins, since he concluded his 1861 Preface to The Woman in White by claiming
here is a story, the interest of which . . . is never disconnected from the interest of character. ‘Laura’, ‘Miss Halcombe’, and ‘Anne Catherick’ . . . have made friends for me wherever they have made themselves known. I hope the time is not far distant when I may meet those friends again, and, through the medium of new characters, awaken their interest in another story. (Collins 4)
17Neo-sensation novelists respond to Collins’s wish to meet his literary ‘friends’ again. They embrace ‘neo-characterization’ (Letissier np) as a central aspect of their self-conscious ‘act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewlyn 4). As Laura Hadley points out, ‘the sense that characters in Victorian novels have, in some way, an existence beyond the confines of the novel spurs the desire for adaptation’ (32). Here the concept of ‘character migration’ is helpful to describe what is at stake. The idea that literary characters ‘migrate’ from one text to another was first developed by Umberto Eco in his study of postmodern fiction, but it has been productively applied within neo-Victorian studies by critics such as Armelle Parey, Isabelle Roblin and Georges Letissier to show how certain memorable Victorian protagonists are reconstructed in neo-sensation texts, in order to challenge some of the limitations imposed on them by the conventions of Victorian literature.
- 3 The purple dress Maud wears as she runs away from Mrs Sucksby’s also echoes Anne Catherick’s lavend (...)
18In Fingersmith, Waters’s rich characterization of Maud Lilly and Sue Trinder reassembles elements carefully borrowed and adapted from Collins’s major female protagonists, Laura Fairlie, Anne Catherick and Marian Halcombe. Like Laura, Maud is placed under the legal protection of a self-obsessed uncle, who lives as a recluse and disregards his duties as guardian. Like Marian, Maud’s writing skills are essential to the resolution of the plot and to the voicing of female desires. Like Anne Catherick, Maud regularly visits the grave of the woman she considers as her mother, and she is similarly defined by pieces of clothing that serve as markers of social identity and moral purity—in particular Anne Catherick’s white dress and Maud’s white gloves,3 which are typically featured on the book covers of most editions of these novels. Importantly, in Maud’s case as in Anne Catherick’s, whiteness also connotes a form of erasure: it conveys both the vacancy that defines woman’s ghostly presence in patriarchal culture and a silence, an absence of inscription, a wordless blank, that can be understood as the symptom of the traumas experienced by Maud and Anne Catherick. Maud’s education, however, enables her to exist outside of normative ideals of genteel Victorian femininity: the immoral literature which her uncle has forced her to read has paradoxically set her free from the crippling lady-like code of conduct to which Laura remains bound. This is ultimately what enables Maud to succeed: she outplots her uncle, confiscates his books and starts earning her living, in contrast to the angelic Laura who remains a passive character throughout Collins’s narrative.
- 4 As Waters mentions in the ‘Notes’ to Fingersmith, the madhouse scenes are based on Marcia Hamilcar’ (...)
19Sue Trinder similarly deviates from the conventional ideals of Victorian femininity exemplified by Collins’s female protagonists. At Briar House, Sue’s protective attentiveness to Maud reminds us of Marian Halcombe’s unfailing support of Laura. But whereas Marian laments not having ‘the privileges of a man’ and chafes under the impression of ‘being . . . nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life’ (Collins 200), Sue on the other hand, is not hindered in that way. Indeed, as a ‘fingersmith’, i.e. a pickpocket, Sue is partly modelled on the character of Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838). Having been brought up in the criminal underworld of London, Sue’s skills as a trickster and a picker of locks come in handy during her escape from the insane asylum. As she runs away from the madhouse at night and looks desperately for the way to London, the analogy between Sue and Anne Catherick is obvious. However, unlike Anne Catherick, whose nerves are permanently shattered after her incarceration in the asylum, Sue recovers her full physical strength and mental faculties. Another important difference with Collins’s text is that the physical abuse Sue endures at the hands of nurses and doctors in the madhouse are related in great detail in the sixty pages that Waters devotes to this episode. Basing her descriptions of the insane asylum on authentic testimonies by nineteenth-century female patients4 (and perhaps also on Charles Reade’s 1863 Hard Cash, a sensation novel exposing the abuses within the Victorian system of the insane asylum), Waters fills in the gaps and silences of Collins’s reticent narrative, thereby demonstrating neo-Victorianism’s ethical commitment to bear witness to the traumas that have traditionally been suppressed or erased in Victorian literature.
20If the fingersmith of the book-title ostensibly refers to Sue Trinder’s dexterity as a pickpocket, one might argue that thievery and trickery become modes of survival for all of Waters’s female protagonists, as they find themselves entangled in a multi-layered patriarchal system that offers them no legal possibility of development or freedom. Like The Woman in White, Fingersmith focuses on the female condition as one of institutionalized disempowerment and entrapment, in order to explore strategies of survival. While the oppression is of a similar nature in the two novels, Fingersmith differs only in the kinds of tactics and perspectives it affords its female protagonists so that they can achieve complete emancipation.
- 5 This was a conscious choice on the part of the author, who explains that ‘Fingersmith was a word I’ (...)
21Ultimately, the cleverest ‘fingersmith’ of all is Sarah Waters herself. Filled as it is with intertextual references, to The Woman in White but also to a dazzling multiplicity of other Victorian sources, Waters’s novel foregrounds the notion of the author as self-conscious literary thief. Importantly, it also celebrates the author as ‘midwife’—which, according to the OED, is the other meaning of the word ‘fingersmith’.5 The author thus becomes a literary midwife giving birth to a new generation of sensation fiction, all the while ensuring the survival of the old, and mediating between past, present and future.
22There is yet another way in which the title of Waters’s book serves as a major clue to this novel’s aesthetics and politics, as well as a bridge back to The Woman in White, and that is through the reference to actual fingers, which I want to examine briefly now in the remainder of this essay.
23Fingers, hands, skin and the sense of touch play a major role in the plots of Fingersmith and The Woman in White, as well as in the development of their protagonists. Remember the decisive scene of the meeting between Anne Catherick and Walter Hartright, a scene which has been identified by Janice Allan as ‘the iconic moment of sensationalism’ (99):
[M]y mind remained passively open to the impressions produced by the view; and I thought but little on any subject . . . I had left the heath and had turned into the by-road, where there was less to see . . . when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road . . . stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. . . .
‘I heard you coming’, she said, ‘and hid there to see what sort of man you were, before I risked speaking. I doubted and feared about it till you passed; and then I was obliged to steal after you, and touch you’.
Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me? Strange, to say the least of it. (Collins 19‒22)
- 6 I am referring to the following three influential studies: William Cohen’s Embodied: Victorian Lite (...)
24In her recent analysis of the above passage, Tara MacDonald points out that Walter does not first see Anne Catherick but feels her, an aspect of this encounter that he considers ‘strange’. Interestingly, he finds the touch of Anne Catherick’s hand all the more startling as his lack of vision and mental acuity (‘there was less to see’, ‘my mind remained passively open’) makes his body especially receptive. The tactile quality of this encounter, as well as many others in the novel, illustrates Collins’s interest in nineteenth-century investigations into consciousness, the nervous system and its distributed terminals on the body’s skin. Critics such as Constance Classen, William Cohen and Pamela Gilbert have shown that by the mid-nineteenth century, touch emerged as a central and privileged sense in materialist studies of the mind by physiological philosophers such as Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer.6 The touching hand, in particular, was abundantly discussed, not only as ‘a site of sensory input that forms a conduit between inner and outer worlds’, but also ‘as an instrument of the will’ (Gilbert np), and thus a key factor in the development of the individual. This increased attention to hands is prominently reflected in mid-Victorian literature, where according to Gilbert hands come ‘to rival the face in descriptive significance’. Taking a quick quantitative survey of literary texts, Gilbert notes that:
whereas the word ‘hand’ or ‘hands’ appears only 89 times in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and 35 times in Burney’s Evelina (1778), it appears 159 times in Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860), 156 times in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and 240 in Collins’s Woman in White (1860) (to say nothing of other references, such as ‘finger’—55 in Woman in White) . . . . (Gilbert n.p.)
25In the scene of the meeting between Anne Catherick and Walter, Collins imagines skin not as a barrier between individuals but as a porous membrane through which sensations pass. Because of its unique reflexive quality, the sense of touch unites the toucher and the touched in a way that allows the circulation of affects between them, with the result that Walter ends up feeling ‘touched’, in the emotional sense this time, by Anne Catherick’s ‘loneliness and helplessness’ (22). Affect, Fredric Jameson tells us, can be defined as a precognitive ‘nameless bodily state’ (32), i.e. a sensation that activates the body without yet being assigned a name as an emotion or an idea. And indeed, Collins emphasises how after Anne Catherick has touched Walter, their bodies start acting independently of their minds: Walter’s legs move involuntarily, ‘on the instant’, while Anne’s voice starts sounding ‘mechanical’ (20‒21). ‘The haptic quality of this encounter and the two characters’ automatic movements are’, according to Tara MacDonald, ‘some of the ways in which Collins theorises the transmission of affect between the protagonists’ (2). Ultimately, moving from sensation to affect, then to motion and finally to emotion, Collins’s description illuminates the role of touch in re-orienting the protagonists’ course of action beyond predictable conventional frames of reference, so that Walter’s ‘natural impulse to assist and help’ gets the better of ‘the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which a colder man might have summoned’ (22).
26The tactile imagination which is so characteristic of The Woman in White is equally pervasive in Sarah Waters’s novel, through the story of Maud, who is initially deprived of the sense of touch. Her hands are not her own. Indeed, in Fingersmith Maud is forced to wear gloves at all times, including during her sleep, because her uncle, Christopher Lilly, is obsessed with the care with which his collection of rare books must be treated. Not unlike Edward Casaubon with Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871‒72), Lilly relies on Maud as his amanuensis. Because his eyesight is failing, he needs Maud to be his ‘eyes’ and his ‘hands’ (199). The egotistic scholar considers his young niece as his possession, a tool that is useful only as long as she follows the regimental discipline he imposes on her, and which consists in reciting eighteenth-century erotic literature with a soft, steady voice, copying books in a perfectly neat handwriting and, above all, keeping the skin of her naked hands absolutely smooth, clean and white for the sole usage of handling his precious volumes. Through Maud’s story, Sarah Waters’s novel voices twenty-first century concerns over the objectification of young girls and its perpetuation through male pornography, for like Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White, she is eager to reveal and denounce the psychological abuse and sexual brutality to which women are exposed.
27During the early stages of her training as Lilly’s amanuensis, Maud’s working desk is placed close to the library door and she is prohibited from crossing into the book section: the separation between her work space and the book area is marked on the ground by ‘a finger of brass’ laid in the wooden floor of the library. Partly modelled on the Victorian book collector Henry Spencer Ashbee, as Waters explains in her ‘Notes’ to Fingersmith, Lilly is engaged in compiling what he calls his ‘Great Index’, a multi-volume bibliography to guide other collectors in the study of erotic literature of past ages. The word ‘index’, of course, has two meanings: it is the detailed alphabetical list of titles that Lilly owns and categorizes; but an index is also the forefinger used for pointing, directing, warning or accusing. This is no coincidence. Like the brass finger inserted in the library floor, Lilly’s bibliographical index symbolizes the unflinching nature of the patriarchal law that tyrannizes over Maud’s body and mind. But they are also, arguably, intertextual references to Anne Catherick’s characteristic gesture when Walter Hartright first sets eyes on her (Fig. 1). If Anne Catherick’s pointing hand has frequently been illustrated in the various editions of The Woman in White, it is arguably because her capacity to act, warn and denounce is correlated with her exerting her sense of touch in the scene of her encounter with Walter.
Fig. 1—Illustrations by John McLenan (Harper’s Weekly, 1859) and F. A. Fraser (Chatto and Windus book edition, 1875).
28Just as Anne Catherick’s touching hand sets into motion an unforseen course of events in Collins’s novel, Maud’s first feel of Sue’s fingers on her face marks a turning point in Fingersmith. As Rosario Arias observes, with the arrival of Sue as Maud’s lady’s maid at Briar Manor, touching bodies (instead of books) becomes a powerful means of sexual awakening and liberation (27). Through Sue’s caring touch, Maud’s sensibility of skin is restored, and skin regains its function as a conduit for sympathy, knowledge and self-knowledge, abolishing the distinction between active and passive, between toucher and touched. Indeed, the novel explores how Maud re-learns to connect sensorial experience with affect. And it foregrounds embodied subjectivity and embodied cognition as powerful ways of bypassing ideological limitations and enabling transgressive modes of action.
29Whereas Lilly’s control of his niece’s hands had atrophied Maud’s sensorium, cognitive development and sense of agency, Sue’s touching hand re-establishes Maud’s self-awareness and her capacity for rebellion against the plots authored by the two male villains of the novel, Lilly and Rivers. Touch, Maud reflects, ‘changes everything’ (283): it radically alters what she feels and is able to understand, how she loves, what she does, and ultimately what she writes. When at the end of Fingersmith Maud reads to Sue the opening lines of the lesbian novel she is writing, the mise en abyme of the act of reading draws attention to the somatic and affective dimensions of the transformative reading experience which is also our own. As a site of corporeal knowing, Waters’s text succeeds in blurring the hermetic boundaries between past and present, fiction and fact, mind and body, giving us the impression that we are touching, and being touched by, the Victorian past.
30The legacy of Victorian sensation fiction in the twenty-first century has been rich, diverse and thought-provoking. In the case of neo-sensation fiction in particular, Wilkie Collins has been a major source of inspiration. As I have shown, Fingersmith draws heavily on Collins’s narrative strategies, subversive plots, scandalous protagonists and tactile poetics. But it is also important to stress that Sarah Waters engages with Collins inventively, self-consciously and critically. She contests and revises The Woman in White as much as she pays homage to it. Indeed, for women writers especially, Adrienne Rich warns us, ‘Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction, is . . . more than a chapter in cultural history, it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves’ (18).
31At the same time, Fingersmith’s emphasis on the haptic encourages us to rediscover Wilkie Collins’s own fascination with sensorial experience and embodied subjectivity. In an age of ever-increasing domination of our lived experience by technology, Collins’s and Waters’s insistence on hapticality as a mode of reading, writing and knowing constitutes a welcome antidote to the growing sense of alienation from our bodies—and perhaps one of the main reasons why Collins remains inspirational and relevant in 2024, as we celebrate the centennial year of the Victorian author’s birth.