First serialized in Robin Goodfellow and then in The Sixpenny Magazine, Mary Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, became an instant hit with the reading public, if not with critics. In its year of publication in volume form, 1862, it was second only to Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne in sales. A typically melodramatic Braddon tale, the novel featured a beautiful title character who, although a murderer of her illegitimate child’s father, captured the sympathy of readers. Later critics viewed Braddon’s use of irony as salvation for her sensation fiction, as she suggested something hypocritical in those who would eagerly read her work then criticize its nature.
George Talboys deserts his wife, living for a time in Australia chasing a fortune in gold, a circumstance that guarantees his characterization as a ne’er-do-well. When he returns to England, he finds his wife has died, and he renews social contacts. In reality, the clever heroine has left her child with her father, faked her death, and adopted a new identity by switching with a girl suffering consumption. She becomes a governess, adopting the alias Lucy Graham, transforming herself into a young woman others believe to be “the sweetest girl that ever lived.” She counts on leaving her hard life behind and suffering “no more humiliations” when she accepts a marriage proposal from the elderly Sir Michael Audley.
The conflict escalates as Talboys accompanies his friend Robert Audley to Audley Court on holiday, where Talboys meets Uncle Sir Michael Audley and his lovely young bride. Lady Audley fears her ex-husband will discover her identity and reveal her bigamy. Talboys’s immediate mysterious disappearance allows Robert Audley to suddenly transform from an idle rich boy into a serious detective, one of fiction’s first, as he seeks to find his friend. Lady Audley proves to be a formidable foe, attempting to halt Audley’s inquiries by burning down the inn where he stays. He escapes harm and confronts Lady Audley, eventually extracting a confession of murder.
She mesmerizes her audience as she explains that she pushed Talboys down an Audley Court well when he recognized her, and she had also considered poisoning her second husband. Rather than facing the gallows, Lady Audley spends her remaining years in a private asylum, suffering from a self-confessed hereditary insanity. However, Braddon leaves open the question as to whether her heroine is actually mad. As her doctor states, she presents no true evidence of madness. Her escape from an abusive home life to find a better one proved quite logical. She broke the law in committing bigamy, but doing so gained her wealth and high social stature, and thus was certainly not an act of madness. In plotting her first husband’s demise and that of Robert Audley to protect her new life, she “employed intelligent means… which required coolness and deliberation in its execution. There is no madness in that.”
Braddon’s contemporaries, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton, with whom she corresponded, recommended that she “deepen” her fiction, displaying the talent they knew she possessed. She replied in part to one suggestion, “I am such weary miles away from you now in the wide realms of thought,” adding, “I have begun to question the expediency of very deep emotion.”
Having suffered through life with a father who regularly engaged in affairs, then abandoned her family; having then bore the weight of supporting her family through acting; and being forced to live unmarried with John Maxwell, caring for his children and bearing him an additional six children while his wife lived in a mental hospital, Braddon had reason for what others characterized as her “flippancy of tone.” As she explained, “I can’t help looking down upon my heroes when they suffer, because I always have in my mind the memory of wasted suffering of my own.”
Modern critics such as Elaine Showalter find Lady Audley a brilliantly fashioned protagonist in the vein of the Byronic hero. Shaped in “a witty inversion of Victorian sentimental and domestic convention,” Lady Audley is not the typical dark villain, like Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). Instead, she is the blond delicate creature generally celebrated as the “angel” of domestic fiction. Not a bluestocking, but a romantic, Lady Audley proves a special danger due to her deceivingly innocent demeanor.
Braddon may have quite consciously intended to convert Wilkie Collins’s victim in his popular detective mystery The Woman in White (1860) into a villain to be reckoned with. Perhaps Lady Audley’s biggest secret is not her new identity or her indulging in bigamy but that she remains completely sane, yet escapes a deserved death sentence by convincing others she is mad. Feminist critics suggest that Braddon may have employed the trite sensationalist tactic of blaming a character’s illegal or unsocial acts on heredity in an ironic subversion.
Bibliography
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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