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 least seventy-nine other novels, along with innumerable plays, short stories, occasional pieces, and blood-curdling anonymous serials for the penny press, it was with Lady Audley's Secret, composed and published somewhat erratically in 1861-1862, that she achieved her first notoriety, establishing a reputation as a sensation novelist that clung to her persistently, if rather unfairly, for the next half-century. Praised by Henry James as "a magnificent benefactress to the literary estate," she was a popular writer of remarkable vitality, resilience, and longevity who tirelessly chronicled the fashions and foibles of a changing English society from the heart of the Victorian era to the opening days of the First World War. Before her death in 1915, she had not only bought herself a motor car, but had seen the silent movie version of her own early melodrama Aurora Floyd (1863).
