“The night was clear and fine above us. The stars shone cold and bright, while a half-moon bathed the whole scene in a soft, uncertain light. Before us lay the dark bulk of the house, its serrated roof and bristling chimneys hard outlined against the silver-spangled sky. Broad bars of golden light from the lower windows stretched across the orchard and the moor. One of them was suddenly shut off. The servants had left the kitchen” (Doyle 1).
This passage encapsulates exactly what the sensation genre is. The sensation genre is meant to make the regular extraordinary. The reason for this is because it applies to people’s lives. Lady Audley’s is a deeply normal Victorian setting. A man is set to marry a woman, she appears to be the classic innocent and docile Victorian woman, yet she turns out to be the exact opposite. This fascinates the reader because it makes the normal absurd, the excitement they lack in their everyday life is found through the sensation novel. This quote is the perfect example of this, “The stars shone cold and bright, while a half-moon bathed the whole scene in a soft, uncertain light.” The setting Doyle talks about is normal but the way he describes it makes it seem haunting, this can be seen when he describes the light from the stars as “uncertain”, he makes the stars seem uncanny when he calls the “cold and bright” as if the stars themselves are setting the scene for what’s about to take place. Next, he says, “Before us lay the dark bulk of the house, its serrated roof and bristling chimneys hard outlined against the silver-spangled sky.” While one might expect a house to be the most normal aspect of a story he describes it as, “Before us lay the dark bulk of the house.” Yet he calls it a “dark bulk” making its presence daunting and unpleasant. Finally, he says, “One of them was suddenly shut off. The servants had left the kitchen.” A normal action such as shutting off a light one might expect not to make one sit up in fear but by using “suddenly” he makes the normal action of a servant turning off the lights for the night seem threatening. This quote demonstrates the purposeful irregularity of supposedly normal circumstances, which is the purpose of a sensation novel at its core. Doyle makes what should be a normal nighttime setting feel like the beginning of a horror movie.