"The Most Pitiless and Calculating of Human Creatures": The Rational Woman and Transcendent Skin in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

Since 1970s, feminist scholars have interpreted Lady Audley's Secret as censuring horrors of women's domestic lives by treating title character as subversive.1 The problem with these feminist readings of Braddon's novel is that, in re-envisioning Lady Audley as sympathetic character, scholars suggest that Lady Audley' s actions are praiseworthy2 and that her primary antagonist, step-nephew Robert Audley, embodies oppressive circumstances she resists. This kind of interpretation oversimplifies complexity of patriarchy by assuming that patriarchal victim cannot also commit reprehensible crimes and that man who benefits by and defends patriarchal norms does not also suffer from them. A more complex critique of patriarchy in Lady Audley's Secret emerges through combining feminist and postcolonial theories. Lillian Nayder employs such combination by identifying 1 857 Indian mutiny as backdrop for Braddon's novel.3 However, her application of postcolonial theory serves only to re-vilify Lady Audley in wake of too enthusiastic feminist scholarship. Instead of viewing Lady Audley and Robert Audley as either good or evil, we can use postcolonial theory to see more accurately power structures that so warp their characters.Because, as Frantz Fanon indicates, All forms of exploitation resemble one another,4 examining combination of discourses regarding power can greatly improve our understanding of how various forms of power operate. In Lady Audley 's Secret, Braddon uses imperialist discourse to highlight structural inequalities, particularly oppression experienced by Lady Audley and indoctrination of Robert Audley into classist British patriarchy. Although this hierarchy of critiques - use of an imperialist critique to focus on other aspects of English culture - is Eurocentric because it relegates actual imperialism to periphery of discussion,5 study of this technique contributes not only to our knowledge of Braddon's particular literary moment but also to our better understanding of interrelationship among forms of exploitation.According to Edward Said, 'imperialism' means practice, theory, and attitudes of dominating metropolitan centre ruling distant territory. Therefore, imperialism is philosophy that permits colonization or the implanting of settlements on distant territory.6 Because of practice of this philosophy over time, nations and their citizens possess a considerable material in such beliefs.7 Maintaining this investment necessitates an objectifying attitude toward colonized peoples; as Fanon writes, since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellow-man without committing crime, [our soldiers] lay down principle that native is not one of our fellow-men.8 Without imagining colonized people as objects, colonizers would experience moral difficulty in continuing to oppress them for material gain. This imperialistic attitude dehumanizes colonizers as well as colonized.9These theories regarding psychology of colonization can be applied to Lady Audley's Secret because novel itself gestures toward colonial issues. The most prominent of such gestures is use of Australia, an English penal colony, as unrepresented location of George Talboys' successful gold mining. As Said discusses in Culture and Imperialism, colonized periphery does not figure as setting in Victorian novels until after middle of century. Rather, outlying territories are available for use, at will, at novelist's discretion, usually for relatively simple purposes such as immigration, fortune, or exile.10 The periphery becomes distant site where restless English characters can make their fortunes.11 Similarly, products from colonies and other exotic places like Crimea where Britain had an economic or political role appear as details in Braddon's novel, reminding readers about existence of colonial periphery on which Empire depends. …

Acknowledgements Jessica Cox: Introduction: Blurring Boundaries: Fiction of M.E. Braddon New Perspectives on Lady Audley's Secret Tabitha Sparks: the Mad-House Born: Ethics of Exteriority in Lady Audley's Secret Nancy Knowles and Katherine Hall: Imperial Attitudes in Lady Audley's Secret Michelle Lin: To Go Boldly Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Alicia Audley and the New Woman Grace Wetzel: Homelessness in the Home: Invention, Instability and Insanity in the Domestic Spaces of M.E. Braddon and L.M. Alcott Beyond Lady Audley's Secret Andrew Mangham: Drink It Up Dear It Will Do You Good: Crime, Toxicology, and Trail of the Serpent Anne-Marie Beller : Sensational Bildung? Infantilization and Female Maturation in Braddon's 1860s Novels Juliette Atkinson: Serve God and Mammon: Braddon and Literary Transgression Joanne Knowles: French Connection: Gender, Morals and National Culture in Braddon's Novels Tamara S. Wagner: Re-Plotting Inheritance: Triangulation of Legacies and Affinities in Fatal Three Laurence Talairach-Vielmas: If I Read Her Right: Textual Secrets in Thou Art the Man (1894) Kate Mattacks: Sensationalism on Trial: Courtroom Drama and the Image of Respectability in His Darling Sin Carla E. Coleman: The Stage! Oh, Flora, the Very Idea Frightens Me!: Representations of Professional Theatre in Rupert Godwin and A Lost Eden Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

... there are classes who love the horrible and the grotesque. We do not object particularly to their gratification - provided that those who cater to them are content with their true place in literature, which is not above the basement.1She never pandered to the lower tastes of the age, and the fresh vitality of her thoughts was matched by the purity of her pen.2Why are all the novels of Miss Braddon out of print? Why has nobody got the sense to republish in cheap editions Audley's Floyd, Vixen, Venetians, Trail of the - to mention only a few.3As the above quotations illustrate, in the space of around seventy years, Mary Elizabeth Braddon went from controversial purveyor of lowbrow sensation fiction, to respectable Victorian author, to literary obscurity. Interest in Braddon' s work has subsequently revived, and since the 1970s she has become the focus of increasing critical attention. These shifting attitudes towards her work are suggestive of the manner in which her writing blurs the boundaries between respectable and lowbrow literature, and this reflects a broader concern with the blurring of boundaries in the work of Braddon and other Victorian sensation writers. In this Introduction, I consider some of the problems of categorization that emerge from an examination of Braddon' s oeuvre and reflect on some of the various ways in which her work challenges generic and social boundaries - a recurring issue in the essays in this collection.From literary sensation to literary obscuritySince her literary career took off in the early 1860s, Braddon has been viewed primarily as an author of sensation fiction, largely due to the phenomenal success of two of her early novels, Lady Audley 's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863). Over the course of her career, however (a period splanning more than sixty years), Braddon produced not only sensation fiction, but also worked as an actress, edited a successful magazine, and wrote poetry, plays, pennydreadfuls, ghost stories, realist novels, and historical fiction, as well as the sensation novels for which she is best remembered. This collection seeks to further explore Braddon' s contribution to the sensation genre, through a critical examination of both Lady Audley' s Secret, her most successful work, and a number of her lesser known sensation novels, and to emphasize the diversity of Braddon' s output and continue the process (begun in recent years) of acknowledging a literary contribution that extends beyond the sensation novel. In his bibliography of sensation novels published between 1855 and 1890,4 Andrew Maunder includes forty-one of Braddon' s novels, yet critical attention has focused primarily on only a few of these works (most notably, Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd). Amongst the works discussed in this collection are the relatively unexplored sensation novels The Trail of the Serpent (1861) and Charlotte's Inheritance (1868), along with later works containing some of the typical characteristics of sensation fiction, such as His Darling Sin (1899) and A Lost Eden (1904).It is hardly surprising, given the popularity oi Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd - the works with which she initially found fame - that Braddon should be pigeonholed as a sensation writer. The novels provoked much controversy, with critics accusing Braddon of dealing with revolting topics,5 and labelling her novels one of the abominations of the age.6 Such assertions, though directed specifically at Braddon, represent a broader response to the genre of sensation fiction as a whole. The cultural anxiety invoked by the emergence of the sensation novel was largely a consequence of the threat the genre was perceived as posing to both class and gender boundaries. These concerns are reflected in a frequently quoted 1 865 article by W.F. Rae, in which Braddon is accused of making the literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room. …

Railway Fiction or Seaside Sensation?Journeys to the Sea in Lady Audley's Secret and No Name Carolyn W. De La L. Oulton (bio) Reading on the Rails If the seasoned traveller of the 1860s knew (long before Oscar Wilde's Gwendolen) the value of having "something sensational to read in the train" (The Importance of Being Earnest 40), the very act of reading could itself be sensationalized in the context of "rail travel as a time out from normal constraints" (Bailey 11). But while the now familiar image of sensational "railway fiction" is a powerful one in itself, it implies an important question that has attracted surprisingly little critical attention—where are all these readers going and are they likely to continue with the books that they have started (or at least taken with them) on the train? The link between the major circulating libraries such as Mudie's, the innovative W. H. Smith's railway bookstalls, and the success of 1860s sensation fiction is well established. But positioning the railway experience as a transitional or mid-point, and not necessarily as a defining context for the reading of sensation fiction, uncovers a second determinant in the writing and consumption of these novels: the Victorian seaside holiday. At a time when resorts were still catering to a significantly large number of invalids, the question of what and how visitors were reading was both vital and controversial. At the very least an over-indulgence in the latest novel could interfere with the health cure, as popular medical author Spencer Thomson explained: "one man goes to the sea-side, and lolls on the beach, or in the reading-room, and takes it easy, but gets half measure of the new air; whilst another exercising himself gets double measure and double good" (14). Possibly inappropriate reading forms a crucial link between travel and the seaside resort itself, but one that is largely predicated on a discourse of nervous debility in which the sea air was [End Page 232] prescribed as a restorative while "reading implied a transmissibility of emotions from text to reader that paralleled medical and psychological discussions of suggestibility" (Vrettos 97). In Kelly Mays's analysis, "While reading habits resembled the automatic motions of the machine, they were also and more consistently described with reference to bodily ingestion—eating, drinking, and drug-taking" (172). This threat to bodily integrity was of course exacerbated in the case of women, with reading appearing "as a topic within the literature of hysteria" (Flint 58). But despite concerns about the impact of sensation fiction on women in particular, periodicals of the time routinely advertised the latest titles to the seaside holiday market. Two major novels of 1862, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins's No Name, provide a test case for this difficult relationship. The increasing tendency from the 1860s to use "railway reading" and "seaside reading" as interchangeable terms has been largely overlooked in studies of the sensation genre and its contribution to debates about gendered reading. But Lady Audley's Secret and No Name use the trope of the coastal resort as a means of exploring affective responses in the context of wider debates surrounding physical and moral health and the proper function of the seaside holiday. Both writers insistently portray the sea as both sinister and overtly sexual, in what amounts to a deliberate assault on the nerves. In a strategic move these novels engage directly with the debate on the ill effects of sensation fiction. Both include seaside settings in the context of women's health, flagrantly playing to the preoccupations of female readers. But far from claiming that sensation fiction is beneficial to readers, these novels internalize the concerns widely expressed by critics, welding images of reading itself to themes of debility and breakdown between the railway and the coast. It has become almost a cliché that the types of fiction read on the train are mirrored by anxieties about rail travel itself. The organization of the journey may have, in Jonathon Grossman's phrase, "standardized time and space" (9), but it could not standardize social behavior. If travellers "found themselves in a fluid environment...

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century. A scandalous success during its own time, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1863 novel Lady Audiey's Secret was an inspiration for many writers who borrowed both its piot and sensational elements. 1 One adaptation that has not received sustained critical attention in this regard is Vera Capsary's 1944 novel Bedelia. Considering Bedelia as a reimagining of Lady Audley's Secret allows one to read against the grain of critical interpretation of Caspary's novel, which tends to see it as reinforcing traditional gender roles. On the contrary, in rewriting Bradd on's novel , Caspary brings Victorian-era concerns with female identity and women's limited opportunities into the twentieth century, providing a social critique of World War II America. In addition, the genres in which each author was workingnineteenth-century sensation fiction and twentieth-century crime fictionwere especially suited to questioning the cultural hegemonies of their respective time periods, particularly with regard to gender. Although Lady Audley's Secret has garnered much critical attention in recent yea rs, Bedelia, recently reissued by the Feminist Press, is likely less familiar to readers. Caspary's novel focuses on the relationship of a newly married couple, Charlie and Bedelia Horst. The novel is set in a Connecticut country house over a few days in 1913, as Charlie slowly discovers that his perfect wife has not only attempted to poison him but has killed several previous husbands as well. The novel ends with Charlie pressing Bedelia to commit suicide by drinking the very poison she had given him. Although there is no direct evidence that Caspary read Lady Audley's Secret, she was Laura Vorachek is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Dayton in Ohio, where she specializes in Victo rian literature and culture, and gender studies. CLUES • A Journal of Detection / Volume 28 . Number 2 I Fall2010 I pp. 69-76 I !SSN 0742-4248 (paper) I lSSN 1940-3046 (online) I DO!: 10.31721CLU.28.2.69 I(!:! 2010 McFarland & Company, Inc.

The paper analyzes Lady Audley's Secret in the context of Victorian gender inequality. During this era, women faced societal expectations rooted in domesticity, limiting their access to education and public life. Braddon's novel challenges these norms, portraying a complex heroine, Lady Audley, who engages in criminal activities to navigate the constraints of her gender and social expectations. The novel explores themes of economic dependence, the limitations of marriage, and the use of madness as a societal tool. Lady Audley's character embodies paradoxes, reflecting the tension between societal ideals and individual desires. Braddon's portrayal of ordinary women's struggles provides a nuanced perspective on femininity, challenging the prevailing stereotypes of the time. The analysis examines the societal implications of madness and the consequences of resisting prescribed gender roles. Lady Audley's Secret emerges as a subversive work that addresses the invisible lives and personal conflicts of ordinary women, contributing to the broader discourse on female autonomy in the Victorian era.

This article analyzes the under-discussed issue of cosmetics in Lady Audley's Secret, as well as in the periodicals that serialized her work, the Sixpenny Magazine and Robin Goodfellow. These periodicals highlight the controversy surrounding cosmetics use by featuring both advertisements for cosmetics and social commentary condemning the use of artifice. While never either overtly endorsing or critiquing cosmetics, Lady Audley's Secret highlights the discursive fantasies and patriarchal fears they engendered. Braddon sensationalizes the polarized views represented in the periodical press by depicting cosmetics as a secretive Gothic device that has radical potential for female transformation.

She shall look at me, ... I will make her meet my eyes, and I will read her as I have read her before. She shall know how useless her artifices are with me.1When Robert Audley is eventually convinced of his aunt's guilt in Lady Audley 's Secret, he constructs the eponymous heroine as a text that the detective knows how to read. His association of the guilty female character with written material highlights the mid- Victorian construction of femininity sensation novels debunked by hinging their plots upon heroines well versed in the art of applying make-up and polishing their faces. Often fervent consumers of beauty products, the sensational heroines of the 1860s present the modern woman as a collage of accessories which help them cloak their crimes, and they hoard sables, furs, muffs or shawls in the same way as they frenetically collect artworks and curios. Braddon's Lady Audley, Wilkie Collins' Magdalen Vanstone in No Name (1862) and Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1864) are scheming actresses who illustrate the perfect lady as a mere facade - as a series of ciphers of fashion. Though Braddon's and Collins' heroines look naturally beautiful, the allusions to Madame Rachel's beauty shop which obsessively pepper sensational narratives2 function as so many clues to the heroines' deceitfulness. In Lady Audley's boudoir, crammed with bottles of perfume, hairbrushes and other womanly luxuries, the female character increasingly changes dresses as the detective comes closer to the truth.Further, whilst creams and female accessories become incriminating motifs for the alert reader, the clues the detective gathers are mostly written material. Lady Audley's handwriting, on a sent to her stepdaughter or on a note left to her father, on the dedications written in her books or on the railway labels pasted on her bonnet-box, reveals the fraudulent female character in a glass darkly, reflecting her crimes as a mirror would reflect her body. Gradually seen as two-dimensional by the detective and constructed as a surface by the trendy frills and flounces behind which she hides herself, the female character, like a model posing on a fashion-plate, becomes a discourse of fashion and can, indeed, be read as a text.However, the secret of Braddon's eponymous heroine is ultimately and surprisingly not to be read on the surface of her body. In fact, it lies deep inside, as Lady Audley tells Robert in her final confession. At the end of her novel, Braddon revises the Gothic motif of buried writing, transforming the concealed manuscript which records the crimes of the past into a physiological text which the female character nurses in her womb: her hysteria, which she has inherited from her mother and which, it seems, has urged her to commit her crimes. The physiological text her mother has transmitted to her is a script only a physician can decode, and Lady Audley is sent to a Belgian asylum and rewritten as Madame Taylor so that she may no longer endanger the Victorian status quo.At the opening of Thou Art the Man (1894), published over thirty years after Lady Audley 's Secret, the physical description of Sibyl, Countess of Penrith, wrapped in dark fur, with a proud, clearly cut face showing pale between the sable of her close-fitting toque and the sable collar of her long velvet mantle,3 gives the impression that Braddon's heroine is another Lady Audley, dissimulating her dark secrets beneath furs and sables. The fashionable appearance of Lady Penrith is, however, but a red herring, in this fin- de-siecle novel which portrays women detecting male secrets and completely rewrites Braddon's older plots dealing with female criminality. In the very first scene, the female character receives a letter from the dead. Whilst readers may wonder whether the ghostly message is meant to indicate the surging up of the crimes of the past haunting Lady Penrith, the image of buried writing issuing from the grave instantly constructs the female character as a reader and an interpreter. …

I find the publication of Beyond Sensation and the project that it represents particularly gratifying because when I discovered Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861) as a graduate student in the 1980s and even when I published a book on Victorian sensationalism in the 1990s, I never imagined that Braddon could be worthy of a collection devoted entirely to her work. Instead, I felt the need to justify my interest in her most notorious novel by situating it within the broader context of debates about women's popular culture and the history of mass culture more generally. It was the reception of Braddon's novel as much as the text itself that drew my interest, and I summarized the plot for my readers because I didn't expect them to have actually read Lady Audley's Secret. A generation of predominantly feminist scholarship has, however, brought new visibility to Lady Audley's Secret, which is now read with considerable frequency not just in the bedroom or the conference room but in the classroom, thanks to new editions from publishers such as Penguin and Oxford World Classics. Not content with this level of success, however, the editors of Beyond Sensation seek to "explode the predominating conception that Braddon's work is summed up in this single novel" (xxi), and they take the ambitious step of recommending the entire oeuvre of this immensely prolific writer as a valuable object of study.

Abstract: This article argues that what I call the "slow psychology" of adolescence encouraged writers like Maud Hart Lovelace to transform Victorian sensation into serialization, offering young girls in the twentieth century a new temporality of growing up. Featuring an often-banal drama of sublimative experiences, serial stories like Lovelace's provided a modern antidote to old Victorian sensation tales of female psychological degeneration and madness. In Lovelace's fourth installment of her famous Betsy and Tacy series, Downtown (1943), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Victorian blockbuster Lady Audley's Secret becomes a crucial psychological intertext because it marks and maps all of the psychological dangers of sexual prematurity for teen girls. The feelings and emotions that Lady Audley's Secret ignites in its eleven-year-old girls readers must be exorcised, and Lovelace's novel carefully demonstrates how desire, passion, jealousy, rage, and even depression can be sublimated into family life and into forms of civic participation that allow the girls to vent their dangerous emotions in appropriate public spaces.

For a work that addresses itself in many ways to the question of madness, Lady Audley's Secret broaches the topic only as it nears its conclusion. In terms of the mechanics of this sensation novel, madness is the most melodramatic of a series of scandalous disclosures. Other revelations may have been anticipated, but this one, conventional as it is, startles even the canniest reader, since Lady Audley appears throughout the novel to be perfectly sane. This last secret is also the means by which the novel effects closure. After she has been certified, Lady Audley can be handily dispatched to a homelike asylum. On the face of it, madness is the secret now told, but it functions in significant ways more as 'cover-up' than disclosure.

... the world is essentially a stage to Miss Braddon, and all the men and women, the wives, the lovers, the villains, the seacaptains, the victims, the tragically jealous, the haters, the avengers, merely players. We could extract pages, fit, as they stand, for the different actors in a melodrama, vehemently and outrageously unnatural.1Poor little Rosie fancied herself a genius in those days. She mistook her love of dramatic art for capacity, and thought she had only to walk on to a stage in order to become a great actress, like the star she had seen at York. She did not know that the star was five-and-thirty, and had worked laboriously for ten years before audiences began to bow down to her.2With the publication of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), Mary Elizabeth Braddon joined the company of writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood as a key producer of sensation fiction, one of the most popular and controversial Victorian genres. Braddon's writing career extended from the 1860s into the early decades of the twentieth century, eventually encompassing over eighty novels, short story collections and plays. One trait unifying many of these works beyond their sensational nature is her repeated incorporation of the professional stage and its practitioners, particularly female performers. Sometimes these characters occur as leads; sometimes they play bit parts in the novel and can be seen simply as part of the supporting cast. In addition to the frequency of their appearances, what makes these inclusions particularly significant to any discussion of the role of theatre in the Victorian novel and society is the fact that Braddon was writing about the stage from personal experience: before she rose to fame as a novelist and journalist, she supported herself and her mother with a nine-year theatrical career. Even after she left the stage as a performer, Braddon maintained her theatrical connections; throughout her life she wrote plays, and many of her novels - particularly Lady Audley 's Secret - reached the stage in dramatic form.One of her most recent biographers, Jennifer Carnell, argues that Braddon incorporates the world of the theatre, given its bad reputation and frequent association with criminality and immorality, into her novels as a way of heightening their sensational incidents and melodramatic situations. According to her and fellow scholar Graham Law, Braddon's main reason for including theatrical episodes is to entice her readers with glimpses of exotic settings and strange lives, and heighten the excitement induced by the novel's main foci - events such as bigamy, theft and murder.3 But, while I will concede that Braddon does use the theatre in part for atmosphere, to say she primarily incorporates the theatre for this reason may be an oversimplification of her work, as it does not take into account the author's very real knowledge of the stage and her affection for it. A more satisfying explanation is to consider Braddon's incorporation of the stage in relation to Victorian society's well-known anti-theatrical prejudice, the main sources of which were the period's obsession with the idea of a stable or real identity and the prevailing desire for a direct correlation between what people are on the inside and what they seem to be on the outside.4 Professional performance created anxiety for the Victorians because it indicated that perhaps identity was not an integral part of the individual, but could more accurately be paralleled to a changeable costume or a temporarily assumed and easily put off role. Therefore, many Victorians displaced their anxieties about the identities of those around them onto the stage itself.I would argue that Braddon incorporates the professional theatre and its performers into her works to highlight the hypocrisy of such prejudices, particularly regarding female performers who, judging from much of the periodic literature of the period, bore the brunt of society's criticism. …

A class of literature has grown up around us, ... playing no inconsiderable part in moulding and forming the habits and tastes of its generation.1 This new class was that of sensation fiction, plotdriven novels of crime and detection rooted in a contemporary context, featuring insubordinate women, unstable class boundaries, and incorporating elements of popular melodrama and penny dreadfuls. Greeted with immediate success amongst both middle- and lower-class readers in the early 1860s, this birth was surveyed with suspicion by the critics, who erected within the influential reviews and journals a cordon sanitaire of policing discourse aimed at containing the dangerous upstart.2 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, co-founder of the genre, rose to celebrity with Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and, more than her fellow-sensationalists Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade or Mrs Henry Wood, offered self-reflexive work that acknowledged the prevailing critical laws whilst questioning them. Much of the ongoing revival of interest in her having focused on the potentially subversive feminist content of her fiction,3 Braddon' s constant attempts to wrestle for authority with professional men (and a few women) of letters has received less attention. Indeed, through her strong awareness of the strategies deployed to control her creations as both morally and aesthetically trasgressive, Braddon reproduces within her novels her opponents' language in order to (sometimes ambivalently) contest it, creating a space for herself to participate in contemporary endeavours to regulate the category of the literary.Whilst contributing to a contemporary overproduction of fiction, Braddon' s novels addressed the Victorian proliferation of common and expert readers. As striking as the surfeit of murder and bigamy which unsettled the critics is her depiction, unnoticed by her reviewers, of a society in which characters (taken from every social class and both genders) are partially defined by literary preferences. In Lady Audley's Secret, Lady Audley, her nephew Robert and maid Phoebe enjoy French novels, which Robert later rejects. Individuals in Aurora Floyd (1863) gather according to reading taste: Aurora's husbands, the lower-class Conyers and wealthy Mellish, share her interest for sporting magazines, as Lucy, reader of High Church novels, draws closer to philosophy-reading Talbot. In The Doctor's Wife (1864), characters are grouped and separated as readers (Isabel, Roland, Smith, Jeffson) and non-readers (George). Literature is constantly discussed in the novels, enabling Edith and Herman's courtship in Hostages to Fortune (1875) and becomes an inexhaustible source of reference against which experience is measured. Lady Audley predicts her fate through that of a fictional criminal and suffered agonies that would fill closely printed volumes,4 and Mellish laments that he does not look as if [he]'d walked out of a three-volume novel.5Critics reacted strongly to the explosion of socially heterogeneous readers and available reading-matter in post- 1850 society, with one writer commenting in 1866 that literature - like our commerce, our house-building, or our railway system - grows and spreads at a wonderful rate.6 The analogy of house-building and railways conveys a sense of the English landscape shaped by developing novelistic constructions. For the Victorian critic William Fraser Rae, Braddon, publishing incessantly, was contributing to the deluge as after month she produces instalments of new novels.7 This regularity, redolent of the manufactory and the shop,8 disturbed reviewers' conceptions of literature: as Pamela Gilbert argues, their denunciations of commercial literature pit the hack . . . who writes to order (and therefore seldom well) against a Romantic image of the bardic artist who writes only when he ... has something he must communicate.9The idea of overproduction entailed the necessity of selection (a notion which Mudie's Select library exploited), which, in a postDarwinian age, would have accrued further resonance. …

This paper compares Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1862 novel, Lady Audley's Secret, with Donald Hounam's 2000 TV adaptation of the text. Braddon's novel is a key example of the sensation literature of the 1860s, characterised by the subversion of notions of Victorian domesticity and femininity. Although not overtly feminist, the novel nevertheless raises important questions about the social situation of the nineteenth-century woman, especially through its concerns with marriage and female insanity. In particular, this essay focuses on the translation of the feminist message from the novel to the screen, and considers the implications of the status of the Victorian woman writer and twentieth-century male scriptwriter on their respective versions of the text. Specific consideration is given to the conclusion of the film adaptation, which is radically different from that of the original narrative. The conclusion of the paper examines the overall effectiveness of Hounam's film adaptation of a Victorian narrative.

In typical sensation fashion, Mary Braddon's 1862 novel Lady Audley's Secret figures the crossing of revered Victorian borders - those separating upper and lower classes, sanity and madness, and respectable and fallen femininity.1 But the boundary that most cogently defines anti-heroine Lucy Audley's transgressivness is the gilded threshold of the Victorian country house. Lucy Audley ultimately suffers for seeking the beautiful facade that others prize in her, and while Braddon dismantles the false fronts of her two most decorative subjects, Lucy Audley and manor house Audley Court, she also reinforces the notion that femininity and the Victorian house are intricately devised and co-dependent products of commodity culture. Using Lucy Audley as a model of conflicted femininity, and relying upon a literal connection between exteriority and femininity that Braddon's novel invites, we can examine the ways in which the country house defined Victorian womanhood.Lucy Audley's rise to mistress of Audley Court follows a scandalous series of events whereby her acquisition of wealth and position is sought through her various alliances with men - and typified, at each stage, by the material value of the house to which those men admit her. former Helen Maiden, Lucy first marries George Talboys to escape the drudgery of her childhood. But the match disconnects George from his inheritance, and he leaves for Australia to seek their fortune. Helen abandons their child to start a new life under the name of Lucy Graham, finding first a position as governess, and then winning the heart of Sir Michael Audley. When she learns of George's return to England, she feigns her own death, and soon must avoid the heartbroken George, who is a friend of Robert Audley, Sir Michael's nephew. When George suddenly disappears, last seen at Audley Court, Robert Audley determines to piece together the mysterious past of his new step-aunt. As Robert rightly suspects, Lucy's angelic aspect obscures her criminal past - including her attempt to kill George Talboys and bury, with him, her true identity.Lucy's social experience is impossible to dissociate from her psychological experience, which her relationships to her houses makes literal. If we treat Lucy's alleged psychosis as a reaction to the cultural pressures of the day rather than accept the novel's glib and unconvincing gesture towards inherited madness, we see that the similarities between the domestic home and the domesticated asylum illuminate the identity construction of Lucy Audley as one bound and reflected by the symbol of the Victorian country-house.By uncovering Lucy's material self-interest, Lady Audley 's Secret troubles Victorian norms about women by revealing this materialism at its crudest. Lucy's equation between her social value and the value of her home - punished by the events of the novel but never adequately denied - is mirrored by a more deeply entrenched Victorian equivalence between a woman's beauty and her character. And, while the material is theorized to be only an outward expression of inner, immaterial traits, the events of the novel suggests that exteriors are deterministic, and do shape character - at great cost to the moral status and psychological autonomy of women.House-bound women in Victorian EnglandThe country-house in Victorian England provides a living symbol of an earlier England, a nation unpolluted by the commotion and greed of industrial society, and one organized by the ancient code of the aristocratic order. As country-houses typically are passed from generation to generation, they mark the endurance and supremacy of old families. longevity of the country house signifies the stability of a past world. For instance, in Ruskin's attempt to preserve the past, he explicitly connects morality with long-lasting architecture, asserting in The Nature of Gothic that It is an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last to one generation only . …