Synopses & Reviews
Murder, mystery, mistaken identity, madness, bigamy, adultery: These were the special ingredients that made the sensation novel so delectable to the Victorian palate. Readers who devoured
Lady Audley's Secret were thrilled and frightened by its inversion of the ideal Victorian heroine. Lady Audley looks like the angel-in-the-house ideal of Victorian womanhood she is blonde, fragile, and childlike but her behavior is distinctly villainous. At a time when Victorian women were beginning to rebel against their limited roles as wives and mothers, novels such as
Lady Audley's Secret spoke to their secret longings and fantasies.
Genteel women readers, slaving away as governesses in other people's families, could share the fantasy of poor Lucy, suddenly made a lady by her marriage to Sir Michael. Part detective story, part domestic drama, Lady Audley's Secret became a runaway bestseller of its era. Nearly a century and a half since it was first published, Lady Audley's Secret has lost none of its ability to disturb and captivate readers.
Synopsis
Weathering critical scorn, Lady Audley's Secret quickly established Mary Elizabeth Braddon as the leading light of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, sharing the honour only with Wilkie Collins. Addictive, cunningly plotted and certainly sensational, Lady Audley's Secret draws on contemporary theories of insanity to probe mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumer culture. What is the mystery surrounding the charming heroine? Lady Audley's secret is investigated by Robert Audley, aristocrat turned detective, in a novel that has lost none of its power to disturb and entertain.
Synopsis
Lady Audley’s Secret epitomized the scandalous and irresistible "sensation" fiction of the period and established Braddon as the doyenne of the genre. Lady Audley, a beautiful woman with a mysterious past, serves as a commentary on the rise of the middle class and the consumer culture, and her fate reflects the public’s fascination with psychological theories about the nature of identity and the definition of madness.
About the Author
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (18351915) became a best-selling author in 1862 with Lady Audley's Secret. The twenty-seven-year-old's route to fame led from a broken home, through a clandestine seven years as an actress, to a bigamous relationship with the publisher who first revealed Lady Audley to the world as a serial in one of his magazines. Surviving scandal and critical scorn, Braddon became one of the most celebrated and respected authors of the nineteenth century.