The Bigamy Plot

A new scholar book with some Brontë-related content:

The Bigamy Plot
Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel
Maia McAleavey
Cambridge University Press
Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
May 2015
ISBN: 9781107103160

The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.
First extended study of the prevalent bigamy plot, filling an important gap in the history of the Victorian novel
Revises the common view of the Victorian novel that links its narrative structure to courtship and marriage
Provides an exhaustive appendix of nearly 300 novels featuring a bigamy plot and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels.

Part 2 has the title "The plot in space: skeletons in the closet in Jane Eyre and East Lynne"