Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #722

Text 1 Nineteenth-century author Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s incorporation of ghosts, ancestral curses, and clairvoyance into her sensationalist novels is frequently lauded by modern literary critics as a daring, intentional subversion of Victorian rationality. However, this retrospective framing ignores the practical realities of the Victorian publishing industry. Braddon was primarily a businesswoman. The penny dreadfuls and serialized magazines of her time thrived on the macabre, and Braddon explicitly calibrated her inclusion of supernatural tropes to maximize circulation among a mass public hungry for escapist thrills, rather than to make profound intellectual or societal statements. Text 2 It is undeniable that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational fiction was exceptionally lucrative, capitalizing heavily on the Victorian era's burgeoning mass-market readership. Yet, dismissing her supernatural motifs as mere pandering is reductive. By deploying ghosts and curses—elements entirely divorced from the rigid, patriarchal logic of 19th-century realism—Braddon created imaginative spaces where her female protagonists could exercise unprecedented agency and enact revenge with impunity. The supernatural was precisely the cloak that allowed her to smuggle radical feminist critiques into the homes of unsuspecting, thrill-seeking readers. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim in Text 1 regarding Braddon’s motives for using supernatural tropes?