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

  Braddon took the same path trod by many successful professional women writers in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Following her initial success as a sensation novelist she consolidated her reputation and position in the marketplace by editing a literary magazine, Belgravia, from 1866 until 1876. Like Argosy—owned and edited (from 1867) by Ellen Wood, the author of the best-seller East Lynne which appeared at the same time as Lady Audley—Belgravia (owned by Maxwell and aimed at a middle-class readership) was a vehicle for its editor’s own serialized fiction, some of it published under Braddon’s pseudonym of Babington White. Braddon also used the magazine to launch a vigorous defence of popular fiction—particularly the sensation novel—against its critics, especially in two essays she commissioned from George Augustus Sala—‘The Cant of Modern Criticism’ (November 1867, pp. 45–55) and ‘On the Sensational in Literature and Art’ (February 1868, pp. 449–58).10

  Braddon sought to keep pace with changing publication practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. Quick to exploit new markets, she was one of the first best-selling authors to sign up with W. F. Tillotson, who, in the 1870s, pioneered the syndication of fiction in British weekly newspapers prior to book publication,11 and in the early 1880s her novels were also syndicated in the USA. She also continued to produce serial fiction for metropolitan magazines such as All the Year Round and the Whitehall Review. More carefully written and revised than the newspaper novels, the novels first serialized in magazines were sometimes treated more positively by reviewers. For example, her 1875/6 Belgravia serial Joshua Haggard’s Daughter (published in volume form as Joshua Haggard) was reviewed positively by the Athenaeum as a realist novel, influenced by George Eliot, which relied for its effects on ‘analysis of character rather than … complication of incident’.12

  In the 1890s Braddon resisted the demise of the three-volume format that had served her so well throughout her career, but when it came in the mid-1890s she rapidly produced three single-volume novels: London Pride (1896), Under Love’s Rule (1897), and Rough Justice (1898). She adapted to the changed literary marketplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writing more tersely and focusing more closely on character: ‘Less detail of heroines is wanted now and more character study’, she noted: ‘Readers are not satisfied with incidents alone; they like to see character evolve as events move’.13

  Lady Audley’s Secret

  This section and the two following refer to aspects of the novel’s characters and plot which some readers may prefer not to know before enjoying their own reading of the story.

  Lady Audley’s Secret begins with a chapter simply entitled ‘Lucy’, but its opening pages offer a description not of the female protagonist named in its title, but of the ‘noble’ (p. 8) house and gardens of Audley Court and its owner, the 56-year-old Sir Michael Audley who has recently married a young wife, the Lucy of the chapter’s title. The rest of the opening chapter deftly sketches in the narrative of the meeting and courtship of the ageing nobleman and the ‘amiable’ (p. 11) Lucy, about whom nothing was known except that she had answered an advertisement for a governess to a neighbouring family. The narrative then switches to a passenger on a Liverpool-bound ship, George Talboys, who is returning to the wife and child whom he had left three and a half years earlier in order to seek his fortune in the Australian goldfields. Chapter III returns the reader to Audley Court, but this time the focus is on a servant of the house, Lady Audley’s maid Phœbe, who with her cousin and future husband, Luke, marvels resentfully at Miss Graham’s rapid transition from being ‘but a servant like me’ (p. 29) to her present position as the wife of a baronet and mistress of Audley Court. The envious pair secretly enter Lucy’s boudoir to admire the luxurious objects with which her husband has showered her, but are more intrigued by the mundane but mysterious contents of a secret drawer which they discover. The scene immediately shifts to London and an idle young barrister, Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, who, in one of those extraordinary coincidences so beloved of Victorian novelists, finds himself reunited with his dearest schoolfriend George Talboys, when he literally bumps into him in the street. Together they read the announcement of the death of George’s wife in an obituary notice in The Times, and together they visit the grave of Helen Talboys on the Isle of Wight. Thus ends the fifth chapter of the novel (and the second episode of the serialization in the London Journal). What is the connection between George and Helen Talboys (née Maldon) and Sir Michael and Lady Audley (née Graham)? Who is Lucy Graham and what was her history before she arrived as a governess in Essex? What is the significance of the contents of the secret drawer, and to what use will Phœbe and Luke put their discovery? As the novel unfolds the questions and mysteries proliferate—what is the meaning of George’s disappearance, and is Robert correct to suspect Lady Audley’s involvement in it? Robert sets out to resolve these mysteries and to uncover Lady Audley’s secret or secrets. Lady Audley does her best both to outwit him and to control the servants who seek to blackmail her, in order to maintain her position as a baronet’s pampered wife. If they agree with her on nothing else, most readers will agree with the nineteenth-century critic Margaret Oliphant that in Lady Audley’s Secret ‘Miss Braddon proved that she can invent a story’.14

  When it first appeared Lady Audley’s Secret was greeted (or condemned, according to taste) as belonging to a new kind of fiction, in which, like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, ‘[t]here is a secret, generally a crime, to be discovered’.15 Before long Lady Audley’s Secret was being linked to The Woman in White as an example of the sensation novel, a type of fiction which many credited Collins with either inventing or reviving.16 A hybrid form which combined realism, melodrama, romance, and the domestic, the sensation novel had its origins in the Gothic novel of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Newgate novel of the earlier nineteenth century. However, unlike the Gothic, which usually dealt with aristocratic intrigues in exotic foreign and/or historical settings, or the Newgate tales of urban, criminal low-life, sensation novels focused on apparently ordinary middle-class families or members of the landed gentry in the English countryside or suburbs. Henry James claimed that Braddon invented the sensation novel in Lady Audley’s Secret by building on Wilkie Collins’s introduction ‘into fiction of those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’. Writers like Braddon, James argued, gave ‘a new impetus to the literature of horrors’ by treating readers to the ‘terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings’.17 The narrator of Lady Audley’s Secret underlines this point:

  We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths … inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose very shadow promised—peace… . No crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with—Peace. (p. 51)

  In this novel it is the apparently cheerful country house, Audley Court, which is the scene of disruption, violence, and intrigue. The Audley Court to which the reader is introduced in the novel’s opening pages as a ‘glorious old place’, a ‘noble place’, some eleven centuries in the making, the equal of which ‘was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex’ (p. 8), is, in fact, already (unknowingly) a crime scene, and during the course of the narrative further crimes, some of them violent, are committed there or in its rural environs.

  In its narrative of Audley Court and its inmates, Lady Audley’s Secret, like many sensation novels, challenged deeply held beliefs (or wishes) about the English country house, the sanctity of the home, and domestic peace. It also exploited contemporary anxieties about domestic privacy, and, in particular about the role of servants in disrupting or breaching that privacy, through eavesdro
pping, spying, and gossip. As Anthea Trodd noted in Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, the mid-nineteenth-century householder’s ‘outraged sense of routine invasion of privacy by his domestic staff expressed itself in the production of crime plots in which servants, so often inconspicuous in other kinds of fiction, routinely play highly visible and sinister roles’.18 In Braddon’s novel, the peace and order of Audley Court is disturbed by a woman who had previously occupied the uneasy social position of governess, a role which was akin to that of a superior family servant, and also by the servants who spy on her and her doings when she becomes the mistress of a household. Lady Audley is shown as being acutely aware of the servant’s ability to come and go without notice, both in her use of her maid Phœbe to further some of her plans, and in a passage in the novel’s third volume in which the increasingly beleaguered protagonist seeks to obtain space for manoeuvre by dispensing with the services of her new maid (Martin) for the evening:

  Amongst all privileged spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges … She has a hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’s secrets. She knows by the manner in which her victim jerks her head from under the hair-brush … what hidden tortures are racking her breast—what secret perplexities are bewildering her brain. (p. 286)

  Perhaps even more important than its challenging of, or playing into, contemporary ideas and anxieties about domestic peace and privacy, was the way in which Lady Audley’s Secret also disturbed accepted views of the priestess of the domestic temple in its portrayal of its eponymous heroine/villain. Indeed, several contemporary commentators asserted that Braddon set a trend by creating a new kind of fictional heroine, who possessed the appearance and outward demeanour of the domestic novel’s angel in the house, but who is nevertheless a kind of fiend—‘the lovely lady with fishy extremities’.19 Oliphant accused Braddon of being the ‘inventor of the fair-haired demon of modern fiction’:

  Wicked women used to be brunettes long ago, now they are the daintiest, softest, prettiest of blonde creatures; and this change has been wrought by Lady Audley, and her influence on contemporary novels.20

  Much critical commentary on Braddon’s early novels and on the sensation novel more generally focused on their creation of wilful, ‘high strung’, heroines who were ‘full of passion, purpose, and movement’ and ‘very liable to error’, a version of femininity which, in the view of E. S. Dallas, resulted from the new tendency to give ‘the heroines … the first place’.21 Moreover, female sensation novelists were regularly taken to task for focusing on the physical charms and, more alarmingly, the physical feelings of their heroines. For example, Margaret Oliphant accused Braddon of being the leading exponent of the sensational school, which offerered ‘a very fleshly and unlovely record’ of ‘the feminine soul’, with its presentation of women ‘driven wild with love … women who marry their grooms in fits of sensual passion … who give and receive burning kisses … and live in a voluptuous dream’.22 In fact the reader of Lady Audley’s Secret will look in vain for such scenes. Its heroine’s voluptuous dreams are of the caress of furs, the glitter of jewels, and the possession of other costly objects rather than of grooms or dragoons, and she is most passionate when defending the social position and material trappings which accompany a loveless marriage to a baronet. As Lady Audley explains to Sir Michael following her unmasking:

  The common temptations that assail and shipwreck some women had no terror for me … The mad folly that the world calls love had never any part in my madness, and here at least extremes met and the vice of heartlessness became the virtue of constancy. (p. 301)

  Braddon tends to portray her heroine/villain less as a desiring subject than as an object, who is displayed amidst other objects. In one such tableau the narrator envisages her protagonist as the subject of an imaginary Pre-Raphaelite painting:

  If Mr Holman Hunt could have peeped into the pretty boudoir, I think the picture would have been photographed upon his brain to be reproduced … [on canvas] for the glorification of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. My lady in that half-recumbent attitude, with her elbow resting on one knee, and her perfect chin supported by her hand, the rich folds of drapery falling away in long undulating lines from the exquisite outline of her figure … Beautiful in herself, but made bewilderingly beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the shrine of her loveliness. Drinking-cups of gold and ivory … cabinets of buhl and porcelain … (p. 251)

  This imaginary portrait in the Pre-Raphaelite style (which was still distinctively modern in 1861–2) picks up an earlier description of a portrait of Lady Audley which George Talboys and Robert Audley view when, in a parodic referencing of Gothic conventions, they gain access via a secret passage to her boudoir (also described in lavish detail). In this earlier scene the reader is positioned as looking over the shoulder of a stunned George, who silently stares at the unfinished portrait for fifteen minutes. However, the reader sees the portrait through the eyes of the narrator, whose ‘reading’ of it at once explains, satirizes, and appropriates the Pre-Raphaelite gaze and aesthetic. This scene portrays two kinds of revelation: George’s blank stare, as the reader later discovers, reveals to him that Lady Audley is not who she claims to be; the narrator’s commentary emphasizes how the portrait reveals that she is not who or what she appears to be, by unmasking her inner identity as that of a ‘beautiful fiend’ (p. 65).

  The repulsive attractiveness of Lady Audley, a character who is simultaneously villain and victim, schemer and schemed against, was one of the reasons that some early reviewers greeted Braddon’s novel as ‘one of the most noxious books of modern times’.23 For many critics the book’s noxiousness derived from the way in which Braddon satirized the domestic feminine ideal both by exaggerating it and by showing that it is a role that can be played. By representing Lucy as an actress and a chameleon, Braddon also plays on contemporary fears and fantasies about feminine duplicity. Regarded by most who meet her as the embodiment of childlike, genteel femininity, Lucy is revealed by the narrative to be a scheming, resourceful, self-fashioning woman, who is capable of committing extreme acts in order to hang on to the prize recommended to all middle-class girls: a socially acceptable and financially secure marriage. When she is finally unmasked, Lucy openly articulates the usually unspoken credo of the marriage market.

  I had learnt that which in some indefinite manner or other every schoolgirl learns sooner or later— I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better than any of them. (p. 298, emphasis added)

  The task of unmasking Lady Audley’s secrets is given to Robert Audley, a familiar type in the sensation novel, and one which indicates the genre’s interest in the construction of gender and class identities. Like several of Wilkie Collins’s heroes (including Walter Hartright in The Woman in White and Franklin Blake in The Moonstone), Robert begins the novel as both morally ambivalent and lacking a clear social role and masculine identity. Supposedly engaged in reading for the Bar, he actually spends his time in a state of aristocratic indolence, reading racy French novels—a taste in reading which so often in Victorian fiction signals a lack of moral and national fibre and manliness. As is frequently the case in the sensation novel a detective quest becomes the hero’s route to a properly masculine social identity. In this novel Robert’s quest is to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his friend George Talboys and its connection to Lady Audley. During the course of the narrative Robert is transformed from an aristocratic flâneur with a ‘listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner’ (p. 33) to the purposeful head of a Victorian bourgeois family who has embraced the work ethic and discovered a vocation by developing the forensic legal skills of assembling evidence and building a compelling case against his aunt. Initially presented as a man who neither understands nor particularly likes women, Robert is set on his journey to a properly socialized bourgeois masculinity by his fascination with a wo
man whose impersonation of the feminine ideal masks her ruthlessness. He is further propelled on this journey by another woman—Clara Talboys—whose apparent embodiment of the quiet, passive feminine ideal masks a female determination and resoluteness which is more socially acceptable than Lady Audley’s. In Braddon’s narrative Clara’s close physical resemblance to her brother acts as a constant spur to Robert to resolve the mystery of George’s disappearance. For several recent critics, however, the novel’s insistence on Robert’s powerful sense of Clara’s physical resemblance to her brother suggests that she is a vehicle for Robert’s displaced homoerotic attachment to George.

  Reversing an important plot element of The Woman in White, Braddon gives her hero the role which Collins assigned to his villains. In The Woman in White Sir Percival Glyde and his co-conspirator Count Fosco consign vulnerable and victimized women to lunatic asylums in order to gain control of their wealth or prevent them from telling their secrets, and Collins’s hero, Walter Hartright, rescues the misused women and restores to them the identities which had been stolen from them. In Braddon’s novel, on the other hand, it is the hero who incarcerates a woman in a lunatic asylum in order to prevent the public disclosure of her own secrets. Having carefully uncovered Lucy’s secrets Robert suppresses them in order to preserve the reputation of his uncle’s family. Moreover, having stripped away the layers of the different identities which Lucy has adopted, he gives her yet another false identity as Madame Taylor, a certified mad woman.