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).
Born in 1835 (a date she later falsified; even her tombstone reads 1837), Mary Elizabeth Braddon passed a typical Victorian girlhood, sewing, reading, waiting eagerly for the yellow-covered monthly installments of Vanity Fair (1847-1848), trying her hand precociously at fairy tales, domestic stories, and historical novels. In an unpublished memoir written during the last months of her life, she recalled "the quiet and safety of that shabby London where the muffin bell tinkled in the dusk at tea time, and where Punch could be heard two streets off." Her father, Henry Braddon, was a less-than-flourishing solicitor, the black sheep of a prosperous and well-established family from Cornwall; her adored mother, Fanny White Braddon, was the daughter of a ne'er-do-well Irishman. In the first days of their marriage, her parents were authors themselves after a fashion, collaborating on articles for Pitman's Sporting Magazine under the pseudonyms "Rough Robin" and "Gilbert Forester." Her brother, Edward, later a colonial civil servant and prime minister of Tasmania, and her sister, Margaret, were so much older that Mary Elizabeth spent her earliest years at home virtually as an only child.
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