Ellen Wood’s Edina was serialized in The Argosy from January to December 1876 and published in three volumes by Richard Bentley that same year. Although neither of these two editions lists a subtitle, later versions sometimes include the subtitle Missing Since Midnight. Edina went through multiple editions, and was published in Britain, the US, and beyond (for instance, in South Africa). Surprisingly, the novel remains one of Wood’s least studied works, in spite of its author’s status as one of the most popular and prolific British novelists of the 1860s and 1870s.
Edina contains many of the standard narrative elements of Wood’s sensation fiction. Opening in Trennach, a “bleak and bare and dreary” fictional Cornish mining town (vol. 1, p. 1), Edina follows the progress of multiple branches of the Raynor family. The town...
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Citation: Niemann, Janice. "Edina". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 July 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5428, accessed 09 June 2026.]
