In the Footsteps of Edward Bulwer-lytton's Lucretia: Revisiting Victorian Popular Narratives of Madness.

Abstract

The character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has often been considered the paradigm of ‘the madwoman in the attic’; an archetype arising from Gothic domestic fiction that would recur in later Victorian popular narratives and sensational novels, such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) – which inaugurated Victorian sensationalism -, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) – which consolidated the genre. Nonetheless, it has rarely been noticed that Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Lucretia (1846), featuring a demented Victorian heiress as a result of her upbringing in an eminently male environment, was published one year before Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre (1847). This article aims at establishing intertextual links between some of these canonical popular Victorian portrayals of female madness and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Lucretia in order to prove the influence Bulwer-Lytton himself, as well as his own personal life as a Victorian man of letters, exerted over them, thus recovering nowadays the status Edward Bulwer-Lytton deserves as a Victorian novelist.