Abstract
This article seeks to explore Victorian and modern ideas of theatricality and performativity by examining the work of the novelist, actor, singer, lecturer and magazine-editor Florence Marryat (1833–1899). Unlike her fellow sensation novelists, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood, Marryat’s work has only recently begun to be recovered for critical attention. As an under read but prolific writer who balanced several careers at once, Marryat might stand for dozens of women working in nineteenth-century popular culture; however, her fiction specifically and repeatedly connects with issues of theatricality and performance – issues in which she was thoroughly invested. I argue that Marryat’s fiction and her self-constructions offer us ways of realising the complexity of ideas about authenticity, theatricality and performance operating within the realm of popular culture and sensational fiction in the nineteenth century.