Conclusion: ‘Substantial Ghosts’—Sensational Continuities and Legacies

This short concluding chapter offers an examination of an 1891 work by Austin Fryers (William Edward Clery): a parody entitled A New Lady Audley. Whilst its publication at the end of the nineteenth century speaks to sensation fiction’s success at this time, it also represents a potential starting point for the neo-sensation novel. This chapter considers the ways in which Fryer’s Audley Court is associated with those key motifs and subgenres of sensation and neo-sensation fiction: with Gothic symbolism, crime and detection, a youthful heroine, traumatic events (though here recounted humorously), with history and its pervasive influence on the present, and with inheritance, and examines these various concerns in relation to the complex legacy of the Victorian sensation novel.