The Most Scandalous Book You've Never Read

On Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret" and the Victorian sensation novel.

La Ghirlandata, Dante Gabriel Rossetti ca. 1873. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the titular character’s infamous portrait is painted by a pre-Raphaelite artist. Via Art UK.

A Victorian housewife curls up in her drawing room with a certain magazine tucked under her arm. She glances about, ensuring the servants aren’t hovering nearby, before diving into its salacious contents. The periodical Robin Goodfellow arrived in the post that morning, and she is eager to read the latest edition before her husband returns. After all, the novel serialized within has prompted equal amounts of uproar and intrigue—if whispers are to be believed, its author’s own life story mirrors that of her characters a little too well. 

Lady Audley’s Secret is easily one of the most scandalous books of the Victorian period, and one of the era’s top sellers. Written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, it was serialized in Robin Goodfellow in 1861 before its first print run in 1862. Seven printings of the book sold out within three months of publication, and soon after, it was adapted for the stage.¹ Even those who had never read the book knew its name: Braddon sold nearly one million copies of the novel during her lifetime.

If you’ve never heard of Lady Audley’s Secret, it’s because sensation fiction is generally skipped over in literature courses, as it is often considered too “low brow” for academia. I feel this is a mistake—the genre offers a potent exploration of Victorian anxieties and social norms. 

Sensation fiction is a literary genre that grew incredibly popular in Britain during the 1860s and 1870s, in part thanks to the success of Braddon’s novel. The genre borrows from Gothic literature and mass market categories such as the penny dreadful. As the name suggests, sensation novels focus on shocking subject matter, though unlike their Gothic counterparts, their narratives are usually centered on the domestic sphere. This bolstered their risqué reputation, as writers like Braddon delved into controversial topics within the confines of the supposedly pure environment of the Victorian home.

 

Lady Audley’s Secret is a story about bigamy. When Helen Talboys’ husband leaves her and their young child for Australia, allegedly in the hopes of bettering their financial circumstances, Helen fakes her death and leaves her son in the care of her father. Facing dire poverty, Helen refashions herself into a governess named Lucy Graham, and thanks to her striking looks, she succeeds in marrying a much older, wealthy aristocrat. As the new Lady Audley, “Lucy” will do anything to keep her past life a secret—even if that involves a murder plot or two. 

In one of the more memorable scenes of the novel, Lady Audley’s story begins to unravel when her nephew Robert invites his new friend George Talboys to his uncle’s estate. George is still grieving the “death” of his wife Helen upon his return from Australia. In an erotically-charged scene, George and Robert crawl through a secret passage to access Lady Audley’s boudoir, from which they’ll be able to view her new portrait by a pre-Raphaelite painter: 

It was so like and yet so unlike; it was as if you had burned strange couloured fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of feature, the brilliancy of colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint medieval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend.²

Is there a better example of the Freudian uncanny in literature? It was so like and yet so unlike. Lady Audley, the perfect Victorian housewife, is revealed in this moment to possess a palimpsestic nature—underneath her angelic visage is the monstrosity of a “beautiful fiend.” It is in this scene, of course, that George recognizes his wife staring back at him. 

Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, William Powell Frith ca. 1865. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As literary critic Christopher Herbert has observed, the most provocative aspect of Lady Audley’s Secret lies in the implication that the titular character’s embodiment of “two antithetical formations”—her idealized role as the “angel of the house” and her underlying sadism—could be two sides of the same coin.³

Like the Gothic, sensation fiction held a mirror to Victorian society, suggesting that the stringent purity and infantilization of the Victorian housewife (a status only afforded to those of means—let us not forget that working class women have always had to work) was built upon a lie. The novel frequently makes use of infantilizing language toward Lady Audley—her interests are at various points described as “youthful” and “childish.”⁴ Despite being close in age, Robert describes his new aunt as “the prettiest little creature.”⁵ I find it hilarious that she is often compared to a fairy—as we’ve explored several times in The Crossroads Gazette, the Victorian period is when fairies began their dainty, diminutive makeover, though tales of fairy menace and cruelty lingered. In that sense, Lady Audley is indeed fairy-like. 

Along with Victorian anxieties regarding women’s self-determination, Lady Audley’s Secret is full of homoerotic undertones, as the relationship between Robert and George winks to the reader that more lies beneath the surface. The Victorian period was also the time when the term “homosexual” was coined as a concrete identity; prior to this era, sexuality was understood not in terms of personal identity (“I am straight” or “I am gay,” etc.) but in terms of physical acts performed.⁶ The Victorian period saw the psychiatric community’s pathologization of gay people, and many of the harmful stereotypes placed on that community sprung from this time. 

Braddon makes ample use of those stereotypes within her novel. The Victorian caricature of a homosexual man was one of decadence and laziness—in the case of Robert Audley, a man whom the narrator describes as having a “listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner.”⁷

He grows fixated upon George’s sister Clara, though his reasons for loving her are entirely to do with how she reminds him of George: “If poor George were sitting opposite to me, or—or even George’s sister—she’s very like him—existence might be a little more endurable.”⁸ The uncanny rears its head again: Clara is so like and yet so unlike her brother. “What am I in the hands of this woman, who has my lost friend’s face and the manner of Pallas Athenè?”⁹ The allusion to the Greek goddess Athena further suggests that Robert’s view of Clara stems from his own imagining, as Athena was born not of a woman, but of Zeus’s mind.¹⁰

Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Henry Treffry Dunn ca. 1867. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As you may imagine, readers across Britain devoured this book, and its notoriety was further amplified by Braddon’s disreputable past. 

Braddon was raised by a single mother, as her parents separated due to her father’s infidelity. She was a deeply passionate actress, and her mother supported her career on the stage—a fascinating twist, considering that acting was not an acceptable profession for a middle class woman. She began writing novels in her twenties, and in 1861, she met Irish businessman John Maxwell. Maxwell was in the business of periodicals, publishing weekly magazines for working class readers and loftier publications for the well-to-do. Braddon had just written Lady Audley’s Secret, and Maxwell agreed to serialize her novel in Robin Goodfellow. A writer and a publisher: surely, a match made in heaven. 

There was only one problem. Maxwell was already married. 

In a wild instance of life imitating art, Braddon moved in with Maxwell and his five children. The massive success of her novel offered her financial independence, and she could simultaneously pose as Maxwell’s “wife.” A few years later, their story blew up in the press when it was revealed that Maxwell’s real wife, Mary Anne Crowley, was very much alive and living with her family; at one point, she was housed in a mental institution due to “severe mental collapse.” Crowley passed away in 1874, allowing Maxwell and Braddon to formally marry.¹¹ 

Unlike Lady Audley, Braddon was able to carve out independence for herself, a rarity for women of her time, thanks to her successful writing career. She published over 80 novels in her lifetime and founded the literary magazine Belgravia in 1866; her enterprising nature and talent for plot twists earned her a great fortune. Today, her work offers readers a journey into the Victorian psyche—and, over 160 years later, a narrative that can still leave you on the edge of your seat. 

1. “Introduction,” Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Natalie M. Houston (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), 9.

2. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Natalie M. Houston (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), 107.

3. Christopher Herbert, “The Doctrine of Survivals, the Great Mutiny, and Lady Audley’s Secret,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (2009): 431-436, doi:10.1215/00295132-2009-038.

4. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 90.

5. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 93-94.

6. The term “homosexual” wasn’t coined until a few years after the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret, but these burgeoning identity-stereotypes already existed and would have been familiar to readers.

7. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 71.

8. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 230.

9. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 275.

10. The myth of Athena’s birth appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, lines 886-930.

11. “Introduction,” Houston, 13-16.