The complete online text of Phantom Fortune, a Novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

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). James placed Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret (1862),...

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 turned conventional morality on its head by describing...

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 throughout her long career. Although she eventually wrote at l...

IT'S BEEN haunting Broadway for more than a year, and it's still frighteningly difficult to come by a ticket to "The Phantom of the Opera," Andrew Lloyd Webber's monstrous musical hit. But you can get tickets to a "Phantom of the Opera." The...

The fairy Do-nothing was gorgeously dressed with a wreath of flaming gas round her head ... Her cheeks were rouged to the very eyes,--her teeth were set in gold, and her hair was of a most brilliant purple. The fairy Teach-all, who...