Lady Audley's Secret (Penguin Classics)

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Author), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Author), Jenny Taylor (Introduction), Jenny Taylor (Editor), Russell Crofts (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.26

  Weathering critical scorn, Lady Audley's Secret quickly established Mary Elizabeth Braddon as the leading light of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, sharing the honour only with Wilkie Collins. Addictive, cunningly plotted and certainly sensational, Lady Audley's Secret draws on contemporary theories of insanity to probe mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumer culture. What is the mystery surrounding the charming heroine? Lady Audley's secret is investigated by Robert Audley, aristocrat turned detective, in a novel that has lost none of its power to disturb and entertain.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.26

  This novel, with its most untypically forceful heroine, can be seen as an anticipation of Ibsen's great dramas, and as an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian womanhood.

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $6.81

  With an Introduction and Notes by Esther Saxey The flaxen-haired beauty of the childlike Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But M.E. Braddon's classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder. It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as its focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines. Combining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romance of upper class life, Lady Audley's Secret was one of the most popular and successful novels of the nineteenth century and still exerts a powerful hold on readers.