SOURCE: “‘Other People's Prudery’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. 27, 1984, pp. 72-82.

In the following essay, Casey examines Braddon's handling of Victorian moral conventions in her works, noting that Braddon tended to be far more conservative in her writing than in her life.

In a seminal article on minor Victorian fiction, Louis James suggested that “the most penetrating and imaginative writers transform social reality in their art. … The ‘bad’ writer on the other hand cannot either apprehend or express the social reality.”¹ In James's sense, Mary Elizabeth Braddon is neither good nor bad. She apprehends social reality clearly, but does not transform it. As a result she reveals much about the fears of the Victorians and the devices of their novelists. Braddon is one of those novelists who fit well into Richard Altick's category of minor novelists who can be examined “with profit to our...