Mary Elizabeth Braddon is best-known as a prolific sensation novelist, whose immensely popular novels in the second half of the nineteenthcentury shocked conservative critics as much as they delighted her vast readership. Many deprecators of Braddon's sensation fiction focused on the perceived immorality of her depictions of criminal femininity and, indeed, characters such as Lady Audley have come to be seen as typifying the genre's preoccupation with transgressive women. However, sensation fiction arguably focuses an equivalent attention on the construction of Victorian masculinity, exploring ideas of approved and deviant versions of ‘manliness’; Braddon's plot trajectories frequently trace the socialisation of the hero into an appropriate version of masculinity. Indeed, sensation fiction's representations of what Lyn Pykett termed the ‘Improper Feminine’ are equally dependent on a corresponding engagement with contemporary ideas of what a man should be (Pykett 1992). As Richard Nemesvari has recently suggested in relation to sensation fiction of the 1860s:

In this chapter, I argue that Braddon's interest in, and exploration of, forms of masculinity in crisis was evident from the very beginning of her writing career, before the success of Lady Audley's Secret bought her fame and notoriety in equal measure. I examine the two lead poems from her first published book, Garibaldi and Other Poems (1861), with a particular focus on ‘Olivia’, to demonstrate the ways in which Braddon negotiates contemporary stereotypes of masculinity and nationality, and often undermines them. My contention is that the male body in Braddon's early poetry operates as the site upon which tensions are played out surrounding British anxieties regarding ‘manliness’ and nation in the mid-Victorian period. The first section of this chapter explores Victorian images of Italy, with a particular focus on nation and masculinity. I then proceed to examine these ideas in Braddon's poetry, before offering a final consideration of homosociality and the ways in which both poems privilege homosocial bonds over heteronormative relationships.