In Margaret Oliphant's 1862 essay ‘Sensation Novels’, she complains about the exaggeration and supposed speed of sensation fiction and other serial forms. By 1867, however, her vitriol was reserved for the genre's candid depictions of desire and its impact on young female readers (568). This later article, simply entitled, ‘Novels’, was part of a national conversation about women's reading, one prompted by the popularity of sensation fiction. Oliphant worries that sensation fiction will disrupt the English practice of family reading and, instead, will lead young women to read and interpret sensation narratives in private (259). She is critical of both female sensation authors and readers:

Oliphant makes two assumptions that were repeated by a range of reviewers in this period: that female readers understood these books to offer ‘a true representation of themselves’, and that this sensational realism was in opposition to ‘the monotony of ordinary life’. In 1868, Francis Paget expressed unease about the ‘kind of follies, scrapes, and difficulties’ into which a girl might fall ‘who should take the sensational novel as her guide in the common-place events of everyday life’ (308). A few years later, the author of ‘The Vice of Reading’ (1874) similarly argues that contemporary ‘works of imagination’ have ‘a dangerous tendency: since they encourage hopes which are never fulfilled, nourish nothing but illusions, and … engender a discontent with life as it exists’ (253). This rhetoric offers little insight into the actual experiences of readers in this period, but the frequency of this kind of language indicates ‘how much was imagined to be at stake in the ordinary act of picking up a novel to read’ (Gettelman 112).