Students of sensation fiction are unaccustomed to seeing these scandalous “newspaper novels” linked to the fairy tales and fantasies for children that were also a prominent feature of the mid-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. This book, unusually, seeks to demonstrate the similarities in the ways in which these antirealistic genres represented femininity and responded to modernity. It is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality in these hyperrealistic narratives, this book argues, that enabled them to interrogate the real and to deconstruct and reconstruct normative conceptions of femininity.

This is hardly new, nor is the book's examination of the role of medical and scientific discourse in mid-nineteenth-century constructions of femininity. However, the author is much more interested in the shaping role of women's economic position and of their complex position in consumer culture. Among the many recent cultural histories of the nineteenth century that are cited in this study, Thomas Richards's The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) and Lori Anne Loeb's Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) have been most influential in shaping its argument.

Central to this argument is the contention that the wordplay and nonsense of the fairy tales and fantasies “recall the way in which Victorian advertising used language to transform the real into ‘a fantastic realm in which things think, act, speak, fall, fly, evolve'” (7, quoting Richards [11]), and in doing so deconstruct the clichés of the feminine ideal, bridging the literary world and consumer culture. The refractions of commodity and commercial culture glimpsed in fairy tales and fantasies, which repeatedly show female characters experiencing their own powerlessness in realms where “male figures handle their bodies and seek to construct them as ethereal beings … light women forbidden food and confined within glass structures” (173), become the key components of the plots of sensation novels. Moreover, sensation fiction—it is argued—constructs normative or prescriptive femininity as a series “of accessories, of goods available at the counter and displayed behind shop windows” (7).

The early chapters focus on fairy tales and fantasies from the 1860s and 1870s, beginning with Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy, which, in its association of femininity with language and masculinity with capitalism, apparently offers women a voice of their own away from the alienating power of consumer culture, only to undercut it when Mopsa realizes that she remains the creation of a male character and can only repeat old stories. George McDonald's “The Light Princess”—a modern adaptation of both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White—is read as deconstructing the cliché of the disembodied Victorian ideal of the ethereal angel woman. Lewis Carroll's Alice is seen as representative of the mid-Victorian consumer struggling against her appetite, and her underground journey into womanhood is seen as a journey into powerlessness in which the female body is turned into a text and fragmented parts that match Victorian propriety. On the other hand, the underground journey of Juliana Horatia Ewing's Amelia in “Amelia and the Dwarfs” is seen as enabling her to turn women's objectification on its head, while Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses presents female characters who discover a nightmarish world in which “dear” little girls must learn to curb their appetites and become crystallized beneath plate glass windows.

Moving from the glass coffins that imprison fairy-tale princesses to the glass houses of consumer culture, as epitomized by the Crystal Palace, Talairach-Vielmas offers a reading of Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely But Too Well as a rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood in which the heroine constructs herself both as an avid consumer and a commodity. The chapters on the sensation novel focus on the way in which the rise of consumer culture constructed female desire and invited women to hide themselves behind creams, powders, and fashionable clothes and accessories. Thus Dickens's Bleak House and Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret are read alongside each other (and alongside the nineteenth-century genre of Books of Beauties) as novels whose heroines—through their emulation of the feminine ideal—are merely social fictions located in detective plots that investigate the world of fashion and in which male detectives seek to decipher the construction of the modern lady.

The book closes with three chapters on Wilkie Collins's exposure of the female consumer and the commodification of femininity. In this account the masquerades of Magdalen Vanstone in No Name are given second place to the shopping addiction and lack of order and control of Mrs. Wragge, here seen as signifying a potential for female transgression and rebellion that is neutralized by her husband's wresting back control by using her money to set up as a purveyor of pills and using her image to advertise them. The purveying of pills, potions, and cosmetics to improve or fabricate women's appearance is also central to the discussion of Lydia Gwilt, Mrs. Milroy, and Mrs. Oldershaw in Armadale. All three are seen as characters who are used to expose a society that constructs women as dangerous fakes who use cosmetics as a tool for trapping men, only to become trapped in a false identity. The metaphorically poisonous nature of this construction of femininity and the literally poisonous nature of the cosmetics and other agents used to enhance the female appearance are explored further in the final chapter on the gothic treatment of the commodification of femininity in The Law and the Lady.

This yoking together of a selection of fantasies, fairy tales, and sensation novels throws new light on both genres and on the relationship between literary representations of femininity and the rise of consumer culture. This well-researched study is informed by the author's wide reading in the recent secondary literature. If I have a quibble, it is that her argument is occasionally a little slippery and her readings overdetermined by her desire to mold them to the aperçus of those critics whom she has found most seductive.