Mary Elizabeth Braddon, later Mrs. John Maxwell, is still best known as "the author of Lady Audley's Secret ," to quote the standard publisher's rubric that followed her around on title pages througho...
Read more
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a popular and successful Victorian novelist, mounted an audacious challenge to the codes of literary propriety. A major force in the development of the modern crime novel, she ...
Read more
On 9 November 1865 the young Henry James published an essay in The Nation titled "Miss Braddon." The occasion was the runaway success of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's fifth novel, Aurora Floyd (1863). Jame...
Read more
In the following essay, Cvetkovich examines the subversive implications of the sensational novels' upper-class settings, particularly in Lady Audley's Secret.
Although it has received...
Read more
In the following essay, Matus argues that the conclusion of madness in Lady Audley's Secret serves as a distraction from the gender and class issues raised throughout the novel.
For a work t...
Read more
In the following essay, Nemesvari argues that Lady Audley poses a threat to “male homosocial bonds.”
Elaine Showalter has characterized Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s as ...
Read more
In the following essay, Gilbert maintains that Braddon's narrative structure in Lady Audley's Secret supports a feminist reading of the novel.
Much has been written in the last few de...
Read more
In the following introduction to the 1974 edition of Lady Audley's Secret, Donaldson provides an overview of critical comment on the novel through the twentieth century.
A rare treat is in s...
Read more
In the following essay, Bedell examines the role of detectives in Braddon's fiction.
Unlike Wilkie Collins, her chief rival as a writer of sensation novels, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915...
Read more
In the following essay, Morris discusses the ways in which Lady Audley's Secret fits into the pattern of criminal women in Victorian fiction.
The women who shoot, poison, stab, steal, and bl...
Read more
In the following essay, Briganti discusses the ways in which Lady Audley is and is not a typical sensation novel villainess and Braddon's ambivalence toward her character.
And I also have no...
Read more
Teaching Lady Audley's Secret
All teaching products sold separately.
Lady Audley's Secret Lesson Plans contain 131 pages of teaching material, including:
Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Critical Essay by Ann Cvetkovich
