Lady Audley Research Articles

Professional Authorship: M. E. Braddon and Mary

DESPITE writing more than eighty novels between 1860 and 1915 in such disparate forms as sensation fiction, Zolaesque naturalistic works, and Balzac inspired novels, Mary Elizabeth Braddon is still best remembered for her earliest forays into fiction, Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863). Such was the demand for novels by Braddon that she produced up to three works a year at her most prolific (between 1861 and 1868) and continued to write at least one novel every year until her death in February 1915. She navigated the transition from the three-decker format to single volume novels in 1895 with ease and professionalism, having already prepared three manuscripts for publication in the new format in advance.1 The negotiations for Braddon's final novel, Mary (1916), attest to her enduring popularity as a writer. Her agent A. S. Watt, writing to her eldest son William Babington Maxwell, estimates sales figures in excess of 5,000 copies, pays £200 in ‘advance and on account’ of expected royalties and makes provision for Colonial and 6d editions of the novel.2 The letter, dated 1 June 1916, was written more than a year after Braddon's death and, in referring to the novel Mary, contains the extraordinary lines: I have been in negotiation with Sir George Hutchinson [publisher] about the publication of your mother's last novel,—the one of which the last chapter still remains to be completed,—I take it by you.3

War of no pity: the Indian Mutiny and Victorian trauma

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION: Jingoism, Warmongering, Racism 1 CHAPTER ONE: Diabolical Possession and the National Conscience 19 CHAPTER TWO: Three Parables of Violence 58 CHAPTER THREE: The Culture of Retribution: Capital Punishment, Maurice Dering, Flotsam 99 CHAPTER FOUR: The Mutiny in Victorian Historiography 134 CHAPTER FIVE: The Infernal Kingdom of A Tale of Two Cities 205 CHAPTER SIX: Lady Audley's Secret: The Mutiny, the Gothic, and the Feminine 239 EPILOGUE: Fiction Fair and Foul: Novels of the Mutiny 273 Notes 289 Works Cited 307 Index 317

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (review)

Reviewed by: Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels Jack Zipes (bio) Laurence Talairach-Vielmas . Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. For anyone interested in comprehending the significant social and cultural aspects of Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels, Laurence Talairach Vielmas' compelling and sophisticated study is required reading. Not only does Talairach-Vielmas draw unusual parallels between the fairy tales and the sensation novels that have rarely been drawn before, but she also depicts with great perspicacity how these unique narratives emanated and exposed the pressures and expectations that obliged young Victorian women, in particular from the middle and upper classes, to transform themselves along aesthetic and cultural models constructed according to male interests and to the rapidly growing commodity market in England. Her research is thorough and impeccable, and each chapter illuminates different problems confronted by female protagonists in the fairy tales and sensation novels that deal essentially with molding their bodies and manners in compliance with a class-biased civilizing process. Talairach-Vielmas' book is divided into nine chapters and an introduction and conclusion. In her introduction, she puts forth her major thesis: Constantly reified, extolled as an art curio connoting the wealth of its owner, the fashionably corseted Victorian woman was also girdled by discourses to define her. In the streets or in women's magazines, advertisements aimed at women and constructed women as desiring and consuming subjects. In so doing, they simultaneously led them to become merchandise themselves—thereby confining them within a role as reflectors of male power, exhibiting their fathers' or husbands' economic success. Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels explore this insolubly paradoxical terrain, where women oscillate between subject and object. (6) The first four chapters focus on key fairy tales: Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy (1869), George MacDonald's "The Light Princess" (1864), Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), Juliana Horatia Ewing's "Amelia and the Dwarfs" (1870), and Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), which, she contends, seek to question feminine stereotypes traditionally associated with passivity and victimization. She maintains that the Victorian female body registered the tensions of the nineteenth century, and thus it is through linguistic representations (narratives with clichés, metaphors, similes, puns) that fairy tale writers, female and male, transformed traditional characters and plots to reveal the oppressive manner in which young women were treated in Victorian society. Indeed, the female protagonists tend to be diverse, adventurous and inventive girls, who are sent on difficult journeys of self-discovery, and many of the fairy tales do not end happily ever after: Mopsa discovers that freedom is illusory; Alice [End Page 234] must struggle against her own curiosity and appetites to the point of self-effacement; MacDonald's light princess becomes medicated by puns and discourses that "cure" her of her rebellious nature; Ewing's Amelia learns that she should never reveal her true nature; and Rossetti's "heroines" are generally reified as precious little things for exhibition. In the second part of her book Talairach-Vielmas concentrates on six notable sensation novels: Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and Wilkie Collins' No Name (1862), Armadale (1864), and The Law and the Lady (1875). Often alluding either explicitly or implicitly to traditional fairy tales, these novels portray how young women endeavor to use the new products of the English consumer society to enhance their aesthetic charms and their ambitions, but they generally have to submit to the rules of the market dominated by male interests. While the novels by Broughton, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins differ in plot and characterization, they all emphasize that adventurous women seeking to revamp their personalities and identities will more than often end up like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, become crystallized by the market, and end up commodified. They may marry and become what they think that they want to become, but there is no bliss in their lives. Each chapter in Talraich-Vielmas' book is replete with historical and theoretical analyses that place the works in their socio-historical...

Male Gothic Detection and the Pre-Raphaelite Woman in <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>

Male Gothic Detection and the Pre-Raphaelite Woman in <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>

Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret

essay reads Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audky's Secret through the 'railway of the 1860s in order to situate Victorian anxieties about railway travel within the context of competing social discourses about the fatigued and nervous modern body. Published in serial parts from 1861 to 1862, the novel charts the coming of age of Robert Audley, a young barrister who undergoes a transformation from a handsome, lazy, care-for-nothing young man into a hard-working professional representing the of (32, 401 ) during his investigation into the disappearance of George Talboys his best friend, and husband of the thought-to-be-dead Helen Talboys, also known as Lady Audley. The novel was widely criticized throughout the 1860s for its sensational narrative of Lady Audley 's acts of bigamy, identity theft, arson, and attempted murder. Braddon gained an instant reputation in a literary marketplace that increasingly demanded that readers of popular fiction feel the pace of life in the railway age with every turn of a page. The more suspenseful the novel, the more it affected the reader s body primarily the heart rate and the nervous system and the more it became a literary sensation in the many bookstalls of Britain's network of railway stations. Braddon s novels were frequently issued as cheap railway yellow-backs, situating narratives such as LadyAudky's Secret within a social process realized primarily to accommodate the kinetics of the railway traveller's body.1 While my reading of Lady Audley s Secret engages with the social context of this reading/railway time complex, I am primarily interested in how the novel reveals the inherent contradictions in contemporary dialogues about railway travel. The railway opened up the countryside through a perceived democratization of tourism and travel, a point often raised by proponents of the railway industry. Whether riding the rails for business or for pleasure, travellers experienced a new mobility that had implications in numerous facets of social life. Yet the resulting fatigue of excessive railway travel haunted bodies, a reminder of the somatic consequences of industrial expansion. Although thoroughly conventional in its detective narrative of Robert's eventual immobilization of Lady Audley, Braddon's novel remains profoundly elusive about its conceptu-

Shattered Dials and Mute Objects: The Surfaces ofLady Audley's Secret

Shattered Dials and Mute Objects: The Surfaces of<i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>

Bearing Her Secret: Mary Elizabeth Braddon'sAurora Floyd

Were the sketch made from a man's point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England is, that it is oftenest made from the woman's side-that it is women who describe these sensuous raptures-that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls.-Margaret Oliphant HE SUBGENRE OF THE SENSATION NOVEL FREQUENTLY USES AS A PLOT device the revelation of dreadful secrets, secrets that underwrite Victorian domestic ideology. One such secret is that Victorian domestic ideology is founded on the abjection 1 of the female body by both men and women. This is the secret that Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels reveal. The male characters of Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret, Talbot Bulstrode and Robert Audley, reflect domestic ideology by constructing the female characters, Aurora and Lady Audley, as mysteriously dreadful powers of horror. This phantasy, already provided by the Symbolic, allows them to establish their masculine identity by mastering the female characters' secrets. Aurora Floyd dismantles the femme fatale myth of women as powers of horror, by examining the male characters' reactions to Aurora. The fact that this dark heroine, suspected because she has dark hair and eyes, turns out to be innocent, suggests that the male characters in this novel create the myth that women possess dreadful, hidden secrets in order to secure their identity by positing Aurora as being a mysterious terror of power they can then detect. The secret they discover is that the dark

Critical Masculinities in Lady Audley’s Secret

Recent work on gender in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's lady Audky's Secret (1862) generally neglects the novel's dynamic p rtrayal of mid-Victorian masculinities, emphasizing either the characterization of Lady Audley or that of Robert Audley Critics preoccupied with Lady Audley highlight the limitations of mid-nineteenth-century patriarchal conceptions of femininity.1 More recently, queer theorists have examined Robert Audley's sexuality and relationship to George Talboys while considering masculinity only as a point of reference against which to measure Robert's effeminacy and homosexuality.2 Critical inquiry thus calls attention to the novel's masculine identities frequently but only tangentially. However, recent studies of nineteenth-century masculinities, in particular James Eli Adams's Dandies and Desert Saints ( 1995), enable a reassess ment of Robert Audley as well as his much-overlooked double, Luke Marks, in relation to mid-Victorian ideals of manliness, namely the dandy and the gentleman. Braddon articulates the tensions of this transitional moment in the forma

Sages comme des images ? Les héroïnes sensationnalistes et le monde de la mode

If the sensational heroines shocked the critical establishment because of their passionate character or of their murderous drives, they were also criticized for the way they fashioned their bodies, using artificial aids to appear seamless beauties. This paper aims to study the way the sensation novels play upon images—from paintings to fashion plates—which display the extent to which modern femininity is artificial. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861-1862), the detective must learn to read pictures, from a Pre-Raphaelite portrait to books of beauties, so as to unveil the identity of the eponymous heroine, discovering in the process the way consumer society breeds female duplicity.

From Do-Nothing to Detective: The Transformation of Robert Audley in Lady Audley's Secret

From Do-Nothing to Detective: The Transformation of Robert Audley in Lady Audley's Secret

Looking at Lady Audley: Symbolism, the Stage, and the Antipodes

Looking at Lady Audley: Symbolism, the Stage, and the Antipodes

From Page to Screen: Transforming M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

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.

Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (review)

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.

Acts of Madness: Lady Audley and the Meanings of Victorian Femininity

Sometime in 1878, in preparation for the role of Ophelia, the British actress Ellen Terry visited a lunatic asylum study wits astray. At first, Terry confessed, was disheartened because there was no beauty, no nature, no pity in most of the lunatics. Without these qualities, the madwomen whom observed seemed almost to mock madness and appeared to have nothing to teach her; indeed, they were, Terry paradoxically emphasized, too theatrical. Then, as was leaving, found what had come for: her ideal Ophelia, a young girl whose 'body expressed that was waiting, waiting. Suddenly, Terry continues, she threw up her hands and sped across the room like a swallow. I never forgot it. She was very thin, very pathetic, very young, and the movement was as poignant as it was beautiful.' Terry's account of her search for an authentic Ophelia draws simultaneously on two seemingly incongruous understandings of authenticity: authenticity as the tangible, empirically verifiable real thing and as an ideal, immaterial quality. On the one hand, Terry visits the asylum as if it were a laboratory, to study the behavior of literal madwomen in their actual surroundings. On the other, specifies intangible qualities-beauty, pity, pathos-as the marks of authenticity, the criteria by which judges her research subjects to be original and instructive. Clustering on and within the madwomen's bodies, both meanings are crucial to Terry's sense of her artistic and empirical task. This Ophelia is authentic, that is, because is at once actual and ideal, embodied and ethereal.

THE KITCHEN POLICE: SERVANT SURVEILLANCE AND MIDDLE-CLASS TRANSGRESSION

I. Privileged SpiesTOWARD THE END of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of the Victorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson and attempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room. The narrator explains her motive:

A "Taint Upon Them": The Madame Rachel Case, Fraud, and Retail Trade in Nineteenth-Century England

A "TAINT UPON THEM": THE MADAME RACHEL CASE, FRAUD, AND RETAIL TRADE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND TAMMY WHTTLOCK Rice University With her successful advertising campaign, her mysterious shop, and her alluring advertising promise of "Beauty For Ever," Sarah Rachel Leveison was a Victorian cultural icon of cosmetic consumerism long before she became famous as a criminal swindler. Her shop in New Bond Street attracted a wide clientele:1 Old men desirous of enameling their bald old pates, ponderous females with scratch wigs and asthma, and girls, pretty and ugly, with defects capable of improvement, histled [sic] and tussled to pay the fee of the wonderful enchantress who guaranteed to . . . make one 'beautiful forever.' (Shaw 280) Rachel's success made her a fixture of popular culture. As early as 186162 with the publishing of the first serial installments of Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon referred to the dangers of imagining "all the women of England elevated to the high level of masculine intellectuality, superior to crinoline; above pearl powder and Mrs. Rachel Leveison . . ." (223).2 Punch of July 12, 1862 lampooned Rachel's promises to restore beauty with a cartoon of a row of sandwich-boarded ladies whose faces were half ancient and half young and beautiful (18).3 After Rachel's trial for fraud in 1868, however, representations of her shifted from a shopkeeper catering to female vanity to an evil, witchlike swindler duping her gullible prey. This case shaped all future representations of Rachel. Her "prey" was a middle-class widow named Mary Borradaile, a frequent customer in her shop. Although she bought make-up and "Arabian baths" at Rachel's, Borradaile was hesitant to Victorian Review 24.1 (Summer 1998) 30Victorian Review give Rachel the larger amounts of money she continually requested for elaborate beauty treatments. Borradaile resisted Rachel's requests until the proprietor of the shop took advantage of a chance meeting between Borradaile and Thomas Heron Jones, seventh Viscount Ranelagh. At the instigation of Rachel, he became the object of Borradaile's affections. Rachel claimed that Lord Ranelagh wanted Rachel to act as a go between to arrange a clandestine marriage. The shopkeeper used this premise to defraud Borradaile of her widow's inheritance — over£6,000. Rachel's melodramatic swindle caused future writers and historians to focus on the representation of Rachel as a criminal rather than earlier representations of Rachel as England's best known cosmetics dealer. Kellow Chesney calls her "a brazen old cheat" and William Roughead describes her as a "bloated and obscene spider in the center of her web" (Life & Trial, 10-11, 19).4Yet, even during her criminal trial, Victorians did not forget that the basis of her crime lay in retail trade. In the Madame Rachel fraud case and the controversy surrounding it, there were actually a series of "trials" within the larger frame of the criminal trial. Rachel was on trial as a perpetrator of fraud, but she was also on "trial" for her participation in retail trade, a trade based on the puffery of exaggerated advertisements and the vending of adulterated cosmetics. Mary Borradaile was on "trial" as a victim — her morality and respectability scrutinized to determine whether she should elicit the jury's sympathy. Borradaile was also judged for her role as a buyer, a middle-class woman selfishly wasting her dead husband's money on luxury goods. The Rachel case revealed anxieties about class, women's sphere, property, and the basis of England's rapidly changing commercial world. Critics ranging from the judge in the case to the Saturday Review especially derided the working-class Rachel Leveison's use of the commercial world to elevate her own position and that of her family. The 1868 trial spurred criticisms of advertising, middle-class women as consumers, and women in control of their own finances. Commentators were outraged that Rachel's "real" crime of selling fraudulent products with false advertising remained untouched by the English legal system. Rachel's exceptional business success fueled anxiety about the demoralizing effects of women's participation in the commercial world; a fear also linked to the growing phenomenon of middle-class women's importance as consumers — women like Mary Borradaile...

Dramatic Disappearances: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Staging of Theatrical Character

Finding themselves with more money and more time in which to spend it, the middle classes began in the 1860s to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, and to theater in particular. Recording and rendering visible this process of cultural change are the popular sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, and the numerous dramatic adaptations of her work. Braddon shares with Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott the distinction of being one of the novelists whose work was most frequently adapted for the stage. Unlike Dickens, however, she often responded favorably to the efforts of her adapters. This congenial relationship resulted, no doubt, from the three years she spent performing on the provincial stage in the late 1850s. Her continuing interest in the theater and theater people is reflected in their frequent appearance in her novels.

Unstable bodies: Victorian representations of sexuality and maternity

Sexual slippage and approximation in Victorian bio-medical discourse the making of the moral mother - working-class sexuality in Mary Barton confession, secrecy and exhibition - Agnes Grey, Ruth and Vilette maternal deviance - Adam Bede, Sorrow on the Sea and Lady Audley's Secret from hysteria to maternity - Saint Teresa and the Madonna in Middlemarch.

Fatal women: lesbian sexuality and the mark of aggression

In this major contribution to lesbian theory/cultural studies, Lynda Hart analyzes the way violent women have been represented in literature, plays, film, and performance. Starting from the historical link between criminality and sexual deviancy, Hart builds a complex and original theory in which the shadow of the lesbian animates representations of violent women from the Victorian novel to the recent proliferation of films depicting women who kill. This cross-disciplinary study critiques constructions of gender, race, class, sexualities, and the cultural politics of the 1990s in one of the first book-length contributions to lesbian theory. Fatal Women is certain to be read widely by scholars, students, and anyone interested in the politics of representation.Hart's introductory chapter constructs a theory of violence across the discourses of sexology, criminology, and psychoanalysis. Subsequent chapters detail this theory in the Victorian novel and stage sensation Lady Audley's Secret, Frank Wedekind's Lulu Plays, which introduced the invert onto the European stage, the popular films Thelma and Louise, Mortal Thoughts, and Basic Instinct, the political intersection of race and gender in Single White Female, the performance art of Karen Finley in the context of the censorship debates, the fate of Aileen Wuornos, dubbed the first female serial killer by the FBI, and the Split Britches' performance Lesbians Who Kill.

Disclosure as 'Cover-up': The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley's Secret

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.