Incidental Murder: Mary Cholmondeley’s Sensational Humour

Abstract

Mary Cholmondeley’s The Danvers Jewels is a serio-comic homage to the 1860s sensation novel, serialised in Temple Bar from January to March 1887 and published anonymously in volume form later that year. The novella draws on domestic realism, sensation and humour to investigate the construction of class and gender roles: a combination that would become characteristic of Cholmondeley’s mature fiction including Diana Tempest (1893) and Red Pottage (1899). The Danvers Jewels and its publishing history show the author developing a critical network, as she balanced her own experiments in genre with the demands of the commercial market. The extant correspondence between Cholmondeley and a range of well-connected figures offers a test case for examining tensions between women writers’ sense of a literary vocation and the necessary negotiation of a professional network.