Lady Audley's Secret

"Lady Audley's Secret" (1862) subtly undermined the Victorian myth that female self-assertion was a form of insanity. At the same time it established the prolific Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a leading "sensation" novelist, a rival to the master of the genre, Wilkie Collins. Flouting the Victorian convention of the "blue-eyed wax-doll" heroine, Braddon presented a sexually attractive woman with great depth and complexity of character: a woman, as one contemporary critic put it, "high-strung... full of passion, purpose, and movement - very liable to error". This novel can now be seen as an anticipation of Ibsen's great dramas, and as an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian womanhood. This edition includes: introduction; textual note; bibliography chronology; explanatory notes. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Skilton.