ePub Lady Audley's Secret (Broadview Literary Texts) download

by Natalie M. Houston,Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Author:

Natalie M. Houston,Mary Elizabeth Braddon

ISBN13:

978-1551113579

ISBN:

1551113570

Language:

English

Publisher:

Broadview Press; Critical ed. edition (August 19, 2003)

Category:

Fiction

Subcategory:

History & Criticism

ePub file:

1818 kb

Fb2 file:

1427 kb

Other formats:

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Rating:

4.1

Votes:

385

Natalie M. Houston Mary Elizabeth Braddon History and Criticism English

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Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. The novel exemplifies sensation fiction in featuring a beautiful criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. To its contemporary readers, it also offered the thrill of uncovering blackmail and criminal violence within the homes of the upper class.

Lady Audley's Secret book. that's rather sad because she deserves much better. the novel is stylish and very easy going down. it is the opposite of a torturous experience - it is delightful! and beautifully written as. ISBN 13: 9781551113579. Series: Broadview Literary Texts.

Lady Audley’s Secret was the most successful sensation novel published in the 1860s, the decade that saw the high point of sensation fiction

Lady Audley’s Secret was the most successful sensation novel published in the 1860s, the decade that saw the high point of sensation fiction. The book’s author, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, became famous – and notorious – as a result of the novel’s runaway success, and she would go on to have a very lucrative publishing career as a prolific novelist. Despite the novel’s popularity, it is only in recent decades that it has received the analysis and attention it deserves, as one of the founding texts of the sensation fiction genre.

Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the . Natalie Houston's scholarly introduction provides useful insights into Braddon's life and work

Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. Natalie Houston's scholarly introduction provides useful insights into Braddon's life and work. - Chris Willis, Birkbeck College.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s first novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, was one of the most popular English novels of its da. I do not know how I never read Mary Elizabeth Braddon! Genius storyteller!

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s first novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, was one of the most popular English novels of its day. Published serially in 1862, it tells the story of the lovely Lucy Graham, who becomes Lady Audley at the beginning of the novel, and who conceals a scandalous secret from her new husband and his family. The plot, which includes madness, bigamy, attempted murder, and seduction, made this a shocking but highly successful story for Victorian audiences. I do not know how I never read Mary Elizabeth Braddon! Genius storyteller! I was on the train full steam as soon as Lady Audley's Secret started!

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835. Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’. It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835. Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840. When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia. However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form.

Lady Audley's Secret is a sensation novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon published in 1862. It was Braddon's most successful and well-known novel. Critic John Sutherland (1989) described the work as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". The plot centres on "accidental bigamy" which was in literary fashion in the early 1860s.

Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. The novel exemplifies “sensation fiction” in featuring a beautiful criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. To its contemporary readers, it also offered the thrill of uncovering blackmail and criminal violence within the homes of the upper class. The novel makes trenchant critiques of Victorian gender roles and social stereotypes, and it creates significant sympathy for the heroine, despite her criminal acts, as she suffers from the injustices of the “marriage market” and rebels against them.

This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad selection of primary source material, including reproductions of the twenty-two woodcut illustrations from the London Journal serialization of the novel, extracts from two Victorian dramatizations of the work, satirical commentaries, and contemporary reviews.

Zamo

Lady Audley's Secret belongs to a genre known as the "sensation" novel. Today, of course, we would be more likely to call it a "thriller," or a "mystery," but that original term is important not only because it belongs to 1860s Victorian literature, but also because it maintains a connection back to the eighteenth century and the novel of sensibility that made made this kind of work possible in the first place. "Sensation" and "sensibility" refer to a novel's ability to provoke emotions in the reader, and certainly Lady Audley's Secret promises to draw us in as readers from the opening pages. Given these influences, Braddon plays self-consciously with the expectations of the nineteenth-century reader for much of the book, drawing especially from the conventions of the Gothic novel in ways that cleverly (and in a more indirect, subtle way than in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey) make fun of this fictional formula. Since most readers today are not familiar with the literature of that era, many of those references will be overlooked or misunderstood. Happily, the plot does not rely on them for advancement.

The story itself follows the laconic barrister Robert Audley, whose friend George Talboys has just returned from colonial Australia as a rich man, having found success on the goldfields there. Upon his return, George discovers that the wife he had left behind in England has just died, news that sends him into a deep and lasting depression. When George disappears suddenly, leaving only a note that he has decided to return to Australia, Robert becomes increasingly suspicious that George has in fact been murdered. Robert finds his investigations hampered by his rich uncle's new wife, Lady Audley, a beautiful young woman who seems to have something to hide.

Braddon's narrative is smooth and well-written, and she does a good job of drawing readers into the book's core mystery. But as with any such narrative, the ultimate success of the work depends on the pay-off, and this is where the novel is inevitably going to fall short for the modern reader. The canny reader will quickly work out the most obvious of Lady Audley's secrets, but she does have more than one, and when our detective-protagonist in Robert discovers this deeper truth the novel seems to shrink unimpressively from the spirit of subversion that marked its opening pages. So strong are the moral conventions of the Victorian that Braddon does not dare to challenge them directly. It's not hard to see why - just look at the lashing Thomas Hardy received some thirty years later for the directness of Jude the Obscure - but ultimately it does leave today's reader feeling a bit let down. Braddon's ending does manage to impart some hidden barbs at being forced into this ending, but they are subtle and easy to overlook, and certainly my graduate students did not feel that they rescued the text from disappointment.

Despite this inherent sense of disappointment, I would still highly recommend this book to those who are willing to look past their contemporary expectations and understand this work within its context. It is a very easy and engaging read for a classic work of literature, and while Braddon will not go down as one of the great Victorian writers, this particular work nonetheless does deserve its place as a landmark piece of genre fiction.

Fenius

This is a Victorian novel is all senses of the term -- written a couple of decades into the start of the Victorian era, set in Victorian society, and written for a Victorian audience. It was initially serialized, and each chapter is meant to get the reader to buy the next issue of the magazine. That plus the conventions of the period mean that it's terribly wordy. Perhaps the author was paid by the word, as Dickens was. But it's worth slogging through because it's a very early example of a murder/detective mystery, and you get a pretty clear picture of the social attitudes of the era. It's also unusual in that it's written by a woman, Margaret Braddon. She manages to write it as though she was a man, or at least as though she agreed with the contemporary view of women as having limited capacity. If nothing else, it's a lesson in how far social attitudes have changes and how far good mystery writing has come.

Lucam

This story was first published in 1862, that fact alone intrigued me. I love to read these old books from another lifetime. The phrasing, the prose, the way of life in another century, all of it comes vividly to life among the pages. The characters were so well portrayed, the mystery was intricate and not fully concluded until the end of the story. I absolutely loved it.

Nothing personal

This is a glorious story to immerse oneself! The author's approach of writing about these characters in a straight-forward factual way, gives the reader a chance to piece together the first secret that Lady Audley is keeping and eagerly I read to see what would come from the train collision confrontation that was sure to occur. Yet when it does occur, the author takes us away from that action, leaving us to find out with Robert Audley - the lawyer turned detective - what exactly is going on with Lady Audley and how many crimes did she commit to keep her secret(s). As the reader, I was intrigued by how the author makes it easy to know what is going on in the minds of the characters without actually detailing their thoughts, and I felt like this approach kept up the suspense of wanting to see the other characters realize the truth, which was strung out until almost the end.

In addition to the excellent plot, there are side commentaries on the nature of women, especially their influence over men, and a strange condemnation of women's power which I found so odd because the main impetus for Lady Audley's questionable conduct came from a man. At least I think the fault of men was glossed over repeatedly, and I couldn't tell if the author meant that ironically or not. But it was very thought-provoking to think of how different the lives of many of these characters would have been if the men had made better choices. Not that Lady Audley is without fault.

The writing in this novel is very precise and detailed; with a story that has so many intertwining motivations and agendas, and the author does a great job of revealing all the information at the right time without slowing down the pace. It's a highly entertaining read with characters that are complex and relatable. It's a suspenseful, pseudo-mystery (the reader often knows more than Robert Audley did) but there are still a couple plot twists in the end to make it interesting. I highly recommend this book!

tref

An early mystery story written in a 19thC florid style. The mystery was obvious, but it was interesting, to read of class distinctions and life style of the upper class . The author gives ample time to train schedules, structured times and attire for meals,discussion of mental illness , and how leisure was
viewed. The book ends with all problems solved and evil is justly punished. The events of the story must have been shocking for contemporary readers, but very tame for today's readers.

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