East Lynne was written by Ellen Wood and first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine (Jan 1860-Sept 1861). Wood (née Ellen Price) (1814-1887), under the name of “Mrs. Henry Wood,” was one of the most successful and prolific writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Her fame has receded considerably and today she is best-known for East Lynne.

Lady Isabel Vane is the beautiful daughter of a poor, dissolute nobleman, the Earl of Mt. Severn. When he dies, he can leave her nothing, but fortunately for her Archibald Carlyle, a lawyer friend of her father, is in love with her, and proposes marriage to her, which she accepts. Unfortunately, not everyone is happy about the marriage; Archibald’s sister Cornelia thinks he’s a fool for marrying Isabel, and treats Isabel badly. Moreover, another of Archibald’s clients is the Hare family, one of whose daughters, Barbara, is dreadfully in love with Archibald (for his part it is friendship only) and has her heart broken when he marries Isabel. However, he continues to help the Hares; their son Richard has been convicted in absentia of murder, though he swears he didn’t do it, and Archibald helps investigate the case for the Hare family.

Prepared by the malicious words of a servant, Isabel misinterprets Archibald’s attentions to Barbara and abandons Archibald and their three children, going to Europe with Francis Levison, a debauched rake who promises to marry her. He never does, and a year later, after Isabel’s divorce from Archibald is made official, he abandons her and their child completely. There is a train accident, which kills Isabel’s child by Levison and dreadfully injures and scars Isabel, ruining her health. Isabel is incorrectly reported to have died in the train wreck, thus freeing Archibald to marry Barbara Hare after all. At length Isabel becomes governess to her children, her new appearance and her carefully concealing mode of dress disguising her true identity, even from her own children.

Matters wend their melodramatic way. One of Isabel’s children dies of consumption, and the other children add to Isabel’s remorse by their constant remembrances of their true mamma. Francis Levison is revealed to have been the murderer, not Richard, and eventually Levison is convicted of the murder and Richard is freed. Isabel dies of a broken heart, but before she dies she reveals herself to Archibald and explains herself, gaining his forgiveness for her actions.

East Lynne, with Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in White, is generally held to be responsible for turning sensation novels from a successful subgenre of the 1850s into the successful subgenre of the 1860s. Like the latter two novels, East Lynne remains surprisingly entertaining, over a century and a half after it was written.

Ellen Wood is an interesting case. She was an invalid mother whose husband Henry was a professional failure, forcing Wood to begin writing professionally to support the family, something she continued to do through the rest of her life (Henry Wood died in 1865, leaving Ellen Wood to maintain herself and her four children through her writing). A clear-eyed professional, Wood set aside her usual conservative personality when it came to her writing and looked out for her own interests with a sharp eye.

East Lynne was only her second novel, and in some respects her inexperience shows. There are momentary infelicities, some adjectives are repeated too often, and at times Wood allows her religious feelings to impose themselves too overtly on the novel. And the novel has a surfeit of Sensation material. One can–sort of–understand why George Meredith rejected the novel when he read it for publishers Chapman and Hall, and why so many contemporary critics condemned the work. But as events showed the rejection was a gross mistake on the part of Meredith and of Chapman and Hall; East Lynne was an immediate success, a runaway bestseller that sold more than a million copies by 1900 and was turned into smash hit plays.

The modern reader of East Lynne will be inclined to side with the Victorian public and not with Meredith et al. East Lynne, even with its flaws, is a professionally-told sensation novel with the usual pleasurably melodramatic sensation novel elements–murder, adultery, bigamy/divorce–wielded with a more-than-competent hand. In some respects East Lynne is written by the anti-Henry James. Care was not taken with the crafting of individual sentences, and characterization and narration-as-art were secondary concerns to Wood. The plot was all. Wood did not neglect characterization, exactly, and certainly made the narration as professional and competent as she could. But the plot was the most important aspect of the novel to Wood. She does not linger on scenes and wastes no time on preambles or material extraneous to the main plots. She rushes from chapter to chapter, making the plot become ever twistier and adding to the suffering of poor Isabel with every turn. As Stevie Davies writes, “It is written not with power but with immense gusto and relish; its hectic and most improbable plot is a triumph of the active enjoyment of story-telling.”¹

Wood keeps her narrative voice to a minimum, and for the most part limits her moralizing to that of her characters–an important distinction in Sensation Novels, which would not be well-received by publishers or critics without the requisite moral tut-tutting over the sins of a Sensation Novel’s characters, but which the reading audience was not necessarily interested in.

Of course, the degree to which a novel can be enjoyed has little relation to that novel’s critical or historical importance–just witness the hot mess that is Waverley. East Lynne is now of interest for a number of reasons.

East Lynne is an intensely feminine novel, one that is, in Lyn Pykett’s words, “a story of the feminine and a feminine story. The address is consistently woman-to woman. The way in which the story is unfolded replicates the rhythms of women’s conversation...this apparently easy, gossipy address, full of trivia...positions the reader within a feminine discourse of a specific social register.”² The relationships between women, good and bad, are the core of the novel, with the men being off to the side, and more objects than subjects. Sensation novels were often seen as women’s novels, both due to the author and due to the presumed audience for them, but rarely were sensation novels as women-oriented as East Lynne. Indeed, East Lynne is far more of a domestic melodrama than most sensation novels–Under Two Flags is primarily adventure, while Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman and White are mysteries. East Lynne is focused on the home and a woman’s place in it.

However, the message of East Lynne–such as it is–about the state of women is ambiguous. There is an emotional extravagance and a sadism in the lengthy exploration of Isabel’s misery and too-late repentance of her sins, and her death and that of two of her children would seem to be a message by Wood about the morality of the book–that it is a particularly harsh application of Christian morality to the actions of a sinner. This has led critics like Stevie Davies to write,

Personality is dangerous in Mrs. Henry Wood's world, if you are a woman, and want to remain safely within orthodox society. Your nature is assimilated to your wifehood, and the duties of a wife are universal. Mrs. Henry Wood's novel makes a classic statement of the Victorian sexual code for women. The wages of sin is death. For women, this means sexual 'sin', the sin against the Holy Ghost being adultery, since the good man is God in his own household. The code is barbaric and primitive. Mrs. Henry Wood shows no overt desire to criticize it. On the contrary she seems to relish it. She endorses its unforgiving judgment in a ringing authorial voice which urges the female reader to profit by the horrific fate of the gentle and aristocratic Lady Isabel, by sticking close to her own husband, putting up with her lot and avoiding jealousy, which, rather than lust, seems to be defined as woman's original sin.³

But critics have questioned whether East Lynne subverts the preceding judgment or not–whether the amount of time spent with poor Isabel makes the reader sympathize with her to the point that the judgment of the novel is rendered incomprehensible and even loathsome. To contemporary readers–those not scandalized by the appearance of adultery and various sins in the novel–East Lynne’s appeal may well have lay in its combination of the consequences of sin and a very conventional moral commentary. But readers may equally have responded to Isabel and rooted for her, as some or many undoubtedly did with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley, and enjoyed the novel despite the ending rather than because of it.

Of equal interest is the novel’s treatment of marriage. As Davies notes, Wood’s view of marriage is a very realistic one–much more realistic than other novels, domestic or Sensational:

The author does not pretend that love's first hectic raptures last. Woman's lot is likely – she gives it about two years at the most – to be less than idyllic, for your husband is in the course of things through familiarity liable to cool in ardour and set his mind on external matters, like business. The message is that you aim for a sensible and steady affection from your husband, fueling this as far as possible by a stoic maintenance of his comforts and precedence, and aim for security and respectability rather than excitement.⁴

However, East Lynne was published only three years after the contentious passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act, which made divorce much more achievable for middle class men and women. As Elisabeth Jay points out, East Lynne “probes many of the legal, financial, and emotional implications of the new Act.”⁵

Lastly, there is the class consciousness of the novel. Sensation novels were very much products of the middle classes, written by them and for them and about them. But East Lynne goes beyond that in its treatment of class. As Dinah Birch notes, not only would the Victorian middle classes recognize their virtues and aspirations in the book, but members of the aristocracy, from Sir Francis Levison to Isabel herself, are punished, and it is only the supposed work ethic of the middle classes, in the person of Archibald Carlyle, which will bring its bearer appropriate rewards.⁶

East Lynne is usually dismissed as a classic Victorian potboiler, and the damning reviews of its worst critics are taken as considered judgments. But East Lynne is considerably more complex than those critics give it credit for, and despite occasional hiccups Wood wrote a work which holds up even today.

¹ Steve Davies, “Introduction,” Mrs. Henry Wood and Steve Davies, East Lynne (London: Dent, 1984), vii.

² Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), 118-119.

³ Davies, “Introduction,” viii.

⁴ Davies, “Introduction,” x.

⁵ Elisabeth Jay, “Introduction,” Ellen Wood and Elisabeth Jay, East Lynne (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005), xi.

⁶ Dinah Birch, “Fear Among the Teacups,” London Review of Books, accessed Jan. 25, 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n03/dinah-birch/fear-among-the-teacups