SOURCE: “Amateur and Professional Detectives in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 1983, pp. 19-34.

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) is now little known, even to students of mystery and detective fiction. Yet from her first great success, the notorious Lady Audley's Secret (1862), to her skillful and subdued portraits of Edwardian and Georgian society, Braddon was one of the best known and most popular authors of her time. A youthful and exuberant Henry James began his discussion of “Miss Braddon,” as she was always known to her readers, by saying that “Miss Aurora Floyd, as half the world knows, was a young lady who got into no end of trouble by marrying her father's groom...