ASIN: B00LR6X0J4
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Pages: 261
Lady Audley’s Secret was published in 1862 and was Mary Elizabeth Braddon's most popular novel. It has been called "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". The success of book, along with Braddon's other bestseller, Aurora Floyd, established her as the main rival of the master of the sensational novel, Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White). A protest against the passive, insipid 19th-century heroine, ‘Lady Audley’ was described by one critic of the time as "high-strung, full of passion, purpose, and movement." Her crime (the secret of the title) is shown to threaten the apparently respectable middle-class world of Victorian England. The story centers on "accidental bigamy" which was in literary fashion in the early 1860s. The plot was summarized by literary critic Elaine Showalter (1982): "Braddon's bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband ...
