Railway fiction or seaside sensation? Journeys to the sea in Lady Audley’s Secret and No Name.

The increasing tendency from the 1860s to use ‘railway reading’ and ‘seaside reading’ as interchangeable terms has been largely overlooked in studies of sensational and gendered reading. But Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collin’s No Name use the coastal resort to explore affective responses in the context of physical and moral health. Considering the journey by rail as a loop rather than a linear movement with a beginning and end point repositions the resort, as both sensational setting within the novels, and a place where subversive reading practices could be carried out, at a time when sea-bound travellers were often advised not to read at all for the sake of their health and greater enjoyment of the natural environment. Both Braddon and Collins insistently portray the sea as both sinister and overtly sexual, in what amounts to a deliberate assault on the nerves.

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