Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)

Abstract

This contribution situates Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret at the interface of Victorian constructions of gender and genre. As to the former, gender, it shows how the protagonist of Braddon’s novel, the eponymous Lady Audley, appears to be the embodiment of ideal Victorian femininity, but only because she has been indoctrinated in its script from an early age. Considering the latter, genre, Lady Audley’s Secret is discussed as a prototypical example of a ‘sensation novel’, and this subgenre is compared to other fictional conventions such as the Gothic novel, the Newgate novel, and the novel of domestic realism. In this context, the article also reviews Victorian publication strategies such as serialisation. Finally, the concluding section provides a brief survey of critical approaches to Braddon’s novel, again foregrounding those approaches which privilege questions of gender and genre.