Ladies with Secrets: Lady de Winter, Lady Audley, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Revision of The Three Musketeers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Noting striking similarities between two femme fatales – Lady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844) and Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) – I theorise that Dumas’s tale is a hitherto unacknowledged influence on Braddon’s iconic sensation novel. My reading of this influence focuses on three ways in which the French text anticipates important aspects of the British one. First, even though Braddon could not, as a Victorian woman writer, import the most risqué features of the French work, Lady de Winter provides an uncensored model of a female character who, like Lady Audley, uses her sexuality to achieve class mobility. Secondly, as a consummate actress who plays the role of virtuous woman for duplicitous ends, Lady de Winter prepares for Braddon’s representation of femininity as artifice rather than intrinsic female nature. Thirdly, and most subtly, Braddon’s revision of Dumas reproduces his text’s ambivalence about both the femme fatale and the men who punish her. In each novel the ethically and legally dubious methods men use to punish the dissident woman unsettle the celebration of male homosociality and patriarchal ideology with which both tales conclude.