Is Wilkie Collins's Anne Catherick a Victorian Cinderella or a fallen woman? This is one of the questions taken up by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas's book bringing together fairy tales and sensation novels. The mutual interest of these two literary genres in the representation of gender is apparent when novels by Rhoda Broughton, Mary Braddon, and Wilkie Collins are read alongside Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Ridinghood. The female body is the crucial link between these very different narratives. The corseted Venus de Milo used in an advertisement from the 1860s provides one kind of sculpting rebelled against by the heroines taken up here. Each chapter of this study takes as its starting point the shaping of the female body both physically and figuratively in pursuit of an ever-elusive feminine ideal. Lewis Carroll's photograph ‘It won't come smooth' (1863) of a young Irene MacDonald on the book jacket provides a paradigmatic image of the female body at once requiring and refusing to be moulded to the era's pattern of docile femininity.

One of the book's contributions to Victorian studies is in bringing together two literary genres often discussed in isolation. Few studies to date have brought together such dissimilar authors as Christina Rossetti and Mary Braddon. While many sensation novels retell fairy tale plots without ending ‘happily-ever-after', the study is less interested in tracing an intertextual debt than a shared divergence from mainstream realism. The first half of the book is devoted to individual Victorian fairy tales: George MacDonald's ‘The Light Princess' (1864), Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy (1869), Juliana Horatia Ewing's ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs' (1870), and Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874). The second half encompasses familiar sensation novels by Braddon, Broughton, Collins, and Dickens. The attention given by these chapters to material culture is another contribution. The Crystal Palace stands in the background to this book's materialist approach under which even Lewis Carroll's Alice is treated as a young female consumer. Nor do Collins's heroines appear so fanciful when considered alongside Rachel Leverson, a beautician notorious for exploiting female insecurity through pamphlets with titles such as ‘Beautiful for Ever'. Fashion will never look so innocent again after seeing the uses to which sensation novels put dresses, wigs, cosmetics, corsets, and creams.

Talairach-Vielmas's study extends the recent interest in analysing sensation fiction in terms of gender. Some will see as a weakness the study's reliance on a familiar model of second-wave feminism not always adequate to the complexity of these tales. The growing number of studies of sensation novels advocating a more nuanced approached to gender over the last decade do not receive attention here. Important work on the relationship of the sensation novel to modernity is also overlooked, which is unfortunate since this is a key category for the book. Still, the pairing of fairy tales and sensation novels is a welcome departure from the usual approaches to this period.

Matthew Rubery, University of Leeds

More details of this book can be found at the Ashgate Press website.