Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

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  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

  Lady Audley’s Secret

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  LYN PYKETT

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

  MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON was born in London in October 1835, the youngest daughter of Henry Braddon (a feckless solicitor and writer on sporting subjects) and Fanny White, his Irish wife, who left him when Mary was 4 years old and brought her daughter up alone. In 1856 Braddon began producing magazine stories in an unsuccessful attempt to augment the family income, and in 1857, using the name Mary Seyton, she began a brief career as an actress, an experience on which she was to draw in several of her novels. In 1860 she wrote her first novel, Three Times Dead (later published as The Trail of the Serpent)—and met the publisher John Maxwell. From this point onwards Braddon’s life and career became intertwined with Maxwell’s. The first of their children was born in 1862 (they married in 1874, following the death of Maxwell’s first wife), the year in which she had her first commercial success with Lady Audley’s Secret. Partly as a result of the precariousness of Maxwell’s publishing ventures, Braddon continued to produce fiction at an extraordinary rate throughout the rest of the nineteenth century as well as ‘conducting’ several magazines, including Belgravia (1866–76). One of the most notorious sensation novelists of the 1860s, Braddon later developed the satirical talents evident in some of her earlier work to produce sharply observed novels of contemporary social life. Several of Braddon’s novels were adapted for the stage, and Aurora Floyd was made into a silent film in 1913. The last of her eighty novels was published posthumously in 1916, following her death in February 1915.

  LYN PYKETT is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She has published widely on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture. Her books include Emily Brontë (1989), The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (1994), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995), Charles Dickens (2002) and Wilkie Collins (2005) for the Oxford ‘Authors in Context’ series. She is also the editor of Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (1998).

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET was one of the publishing sensations of the 1860s. An immediate best-seller when it appeared in three-volume form in 1862, it was also one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. However, book sales figures do not tell the whole story. In the early 1860s Braddon’s novel reached a wide and diverse audience through its serialization in three magazines aimed at different kinds of readership. In addition its plot and main characters were known to many who had not read the novel in any form through the numerous stage adaptations which appeared from 1862 and were frequently revived throughout the century. Given its initial success and its continuing circulation in nineteenth-century culture it is, perhaps, unsurprising to discover that in 1899 Lady Audley’s Secret was selected as one of the Daily Telegraph’s 100 best novels of the nineteenth century by the paper’s outgoing and incoming editors Sir Edwin Arnold and W. L. Courtney and H. D. Traill (the satirical poet, biographer, literary journalist, and sometime political Telegraph leader writer). By the middle of the twentieth century, when Braddon was dismissed (when remembered at all) as merely the erstwhile favourite of the circulating library, most novel readers would have been as surprised by the inclusion of Lady Audley’s Secret in the Telegraph’s list as they would have been by about half of the other titles found there. However, since the 1970s, a renewed focus on women writers and a new interest in popular nineteenth-century cultural forms such as the sensation novel and the crime novel have returned Lady Audley’s Secret to something of the prominence and popularity that it enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Now a fixture on many university and college courses and the subject of much lively debate and reinterpretation, Braddon’s best-seller is also, once again, reaching a large and diverse audience through new paperback editions and adaptations for stage,
television, and radio. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, twenty-first-century audiences continue to be thrilled by Braddon’s tale of bigamy, murder, impersonation, and blackmail and its fascinating unravelling of the secrets of the sweetly smiling, golden-haired heroine who is not what she seems, and who becomes engaged in an increasingly desperate cat and mouse game with her husband’s nephew.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Queen of the Circulating Library

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in Soho in London in October 1835, the third child and second daughter of Henry Braddon, an unsuccessful solicitor who came from Cornwall, and his English-educated Irish wife, Fanny White. Henry Braddon’s financial unreliability as well as his wife’s discovery of his unfaithfulness led to her parents’ separation when Braddon was only 4. She then lived with her mother in a variety of rented houses in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex and subsequently in various parts of London, finally settling in the south London suburb of Camberwell. She saw relatively little of her older siblings, who went away to school with the financial support of their father’s family. Braddon herself briefly attended three different schools, but was mainly educated at home by her mother to whom she was very close and who introduced her ‘to the great world of imaginative literature’.1 As well as being formed by her mother’s ‘cultivated mind … and … natural taste for what was best in the literature of the time’,2 and especially by her love of Shakespeare and Scott, Braddon’s literary tastes were also shaped by her mother’s cook, Sarah Hobbes, who introduced her to the popular fiction of the Family Herald and Reynold’s Magazine and also to condensed editions of popular novels such as the historical romance The Last Days of Pompeii by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, whom Braddon was later to adopt as her literary mentor. A keen, precocious, and eclectic reader, Braddon soon took up the pen herself. Between the ages of 8 and 11 she began ‘a historical novel on the siege of Calais—an Eastern story suggested by passionate love of Miss Pardoe’s Turkish tales and Byron’s “Bride of Abydos”’, ‘a story of the Hartz Mountains, with audacious flights in German diablerie’, and a domestic story. This was followed by a ‘sentimental period, in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form … modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation’.3

  The young Braddon and her mother were also devotees of the theatre, and when they needed to supplement their precarious income in the early 1850s, Mary turned to the stage. Using the stage name ‘Mary Seyton’, she acted professionally in provincial theatres from the autumn of 1852,4 mainly playing minor roles in comedies. After making her London debut in 1856, she soon returned to the provincial circuit and retired from the stage completely at the end of 1859. Braddon’s theatrical interests and her personal experience of the professional theatre were important in shaping her development as a novelist. Her plots and character types were clearly influenced by the stage repertoire and some of the sensational scenes and dramatic tableaux in her novels, including Lady Audley’s Secret, clearly have a theatrical quality. Moreover, her familiarity with the writing practices of popular English dramatists, especially their penchant for recycling the plots of little-known French melodramas, came in very useful when she needed material for her fiction.

  Braddon’s attempt at a theatrical career was both bold and unconventional given that in the mid-nineteenth century professional actresses were still regarded as rather scandalous creatures and acting was considered to be an unsuitable job for a middle-class woman. As Braddon later recalled it was ‘a thing to be spoken of with bated breath, the lapse of a lost soul, the fall from Porchester Terrace to the bottomless pit’.5 The scandalous aura of her earlier stage career was to colour Braddon’s later reception as a novelist by some critics, who were wont to make rather snide jeers about her social background and familiarity with the repertoire of the popular theatre. In fact her life as a jobbing actress seems to have been extremely respectable as she was constantly chaperoned by her mother who ensured that they lived a relatively genteel life in respectable lodgings.

  During her period on the stage Braddon wrote several plays, finally succeeding in staging The Loves of Arcadia at London’s Strand Theatre in 1860. She also continued to write poems, some of which were published in provincial newspapers in Brighton and Beverley (Yorkshire), where she had acted. Her modest success as a poet (as well as her personal charms) attracted the patronage of John Gilby, a racehorse owner and trainer from Beverley. Gilby facilitated Braddon’s departure from the stage by paying her a salary so that she could work on a volume of poetry (Garibaldi and Other Poems, published in 1861). Rather more important for her future career was a commission from a Beverley printer to write a serial in penny weekly parts in the style of Charles Dickens and G. M. W. Reynolds (author of the sensational Mysteries of London): Braddon’s serial Three Times Dead appeared in 1860. Most important, however, was her meeting in April 1860 with the publisher and magazine proprietor John Maxwell, with whom she was to live and work until his death in 1895. Maxwell began publishing Braddon’s stories in The Welcome Guest, a weekly magazine which he had recently bought from its founder Henry Vizetelly. He also reissued Three Times Dead in volume form, with the new title of The Trail of the Serpent. Maxwell later boasted that thanks to his marketing efforts this novel sold one thousand copies in the first week after it was reissued. By the spring of 1861 Braddon had embarked on a career as a professional fiction writer and she was also living with the married Maxwell as his wife. By early summer she was pregnant with the first of the six illegitimate children they were to have before they were able to marry in 1874, following the death of Maxwell’s wife who had spent many years in a lunatic asylum. The similarities between Braddon’s ‘irregular’ liaison with Maxwell and the circumstances of some of her fictional characters did not go unremarked by hostile reviewers.

  Braddon’s liaison with Maxwell inaugurated a period of intensive literary production (overproduction, her critics argued) which, apart from her breakdown following her mother’s death in 1868, continued unabated until her death in 1915. In 1861 she had at least five serials appearing anonymously or pseudonymously in four different magazines. Ralph the Bailiff, a novelette featuring bigamy, blackmail, and ghostly spectres, ran in St James’s Magazine, and The Lady Lisle, in which kidnapping and impersonation are used in a plot to defraud a baronet of his inheritance, appeared in Maxwell’s The Welcome Guest. The Black Band; or, The Mysteries of Midnight (set in the criminal and political underworld of London) and an anti-slavery novel, The Octoroon; or, the Lily of Louisiana, began serialization in Maxwell’s Halfpenny Journal: A Magazine for All Who Can Read, a new publication aimed at the urban working class, edited by Braddon’s mother. Then, in July 1861, Braddon stepped into the breach when another author failed to deliver a serial promised for another new Maxwell weekly, Robin Goodfellow, and Lady Audley’s Secret began its serial run. A full-page advertisement for the new magazine which appeared in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in June 1861 had signalled Robin Goodfellow’s intention to ‘elbow [its] way’ in the increasingly crowded journal marketplace by striving ‘to provide, for the recreation and instruction of … readers, the best Novels and Tales—the ablest social essays—the raciest and most truthful Sketches of life and manners that the Literature of this age can produce, or that the money of the Proprietor can purchase’. Despite this bold prospectus and the popularity of the first eighteen chapters of Lady Audley, Robin Goodfellow failed to elbow its way amongst the competition and folded in September 1861. By popular demand Lady Audley began its run again in the launch issue of a new monthly, the Sixpenny Magazine (published by Ward and Lock)—whose strapline was ‘QUALITY, QUANTITY AND CHEAPNESS’—at the same time (January 1862) that the serialization of Aurora Floyd began in Temple Bar, another Maxwell monthly, which was aimed at the comfortable middle classes. Struck by the success of the serializations of Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd, Tinsley Broth
ers, prominent publishers of fiction, published a three-volume version of Lady Audley over the signature of M. E. Braddon in October 1862, shortly before the end of its second serial run (December). Priced at thirty-one shillings and sixpence (that is to say about five times the weekly wage of a London labourer in 1860), it was, like most three-volume novels, aimed largely at the circulating libraries.6 Lady Audley’s Secret was a publishing sensation: a runaway success with readers of all classes it was also the subject of fierce debate and attack by critics writing in some of the more heavyweight periodicals.

  For several years after the double success of Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon continued to supply at least three literary markets. Under the mask of anonymity she produced thrilling, melodramatic tales for the lower-class readers of the ‘penny bloods’, while ‘M. E. Braddon’ was the acknowledged author of literary, but also sensational and thrilling, tales of upper-middle-class life for the more affluent and better educated readers of sixpenny weeklies and shilling monthly magazines, as well as of social novels which she regarded as more ‘artistic’ and serious. The 1860s was a boom period for middle-class magazine fiction and Braddon kept this market well supplied with at least two serials each year in a range of periodicals. Most of them used elements of the sensation formula that had brought her initial success with Lady Audley: bigamy, murder, disguise or impersonation, madness, blackmail, fraud, theft, kidnapping or incarceration, and inheritance plots. Braddon also sought to transcend the sensation formula, and to ‘write for Fame & do something more worthy to be laid upon your altar’, as she put it in a letter to Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1863.7 Early examples include The Doctor’s Wife, which adapts the plot of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for an English middlebrow audience, and The Lady’s Mile, a realist novel of social critique. Braddon was a genuine enthusiast for French fiction, about which she was quite knowledgeable. She admired Flaubert’s ability ‘to make manifest a scene and an atmosphere in a few lines—almost a few words’,8 and Honoré de Balzac’s mastery of detail and mixing of social criticism and melodrama in his ‘morbid-anatomy school’ of fiction.9 She was also an early reader of the French naturalist author Émile Zola, whose fiction influenced some of her novels of the early 1880s—for example, The Golden Calf (1883).