Accidental Blogger

Up until now, whenever I have written about authors (eg. here and here) rather than a particular book of theirs, my impressions of them were gleaned from reading several books. I have only read one book by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a 19th century author who wrote more than eighty (may be more) literary pieces that included novels, poems and plays. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret  (The Wikipedia link describes the plot. Don’t read if you want to read the book later) is unusual enough that it piqued my curiosity about the author’s life and personality. The book is an oddity of sorts – a cold blooded, Victorian era crime novel written by woman.

Braddon wrote her books around the time that novels by and for women were of a far softer pitch and Wilkie Collins (Woman in White, Moonstone) was making a splash with his own sinister mystery books of intrigue and confused identities. Lady Audley’s Secret, like Collins’ novels, was initially serialized in journals. Later it was published in book form in three volumes and later again serialized in a periodical. The book has never been out of print since it was first published. The striking thing about its plot is that it includes a whole laundry list of criminal activities – attempted murder, faked death, false identity, bigamy, arson, blackmail, child abandonment… you name it. And the villain is an enterprising, calculating woman who resorts to any means necessary to extricate herself from pathetic and penurious circumstances. In an age when woman were afforded far fewer opportunities and rights to determine the course of their lives, the brazen Lady Audley earns the grudging admiration of readers for her single minded (albeit criminal) quest for material comfort and security. Meek she was not, and neither was the author who created her.

Braddon’s own life was colorful enough to be the backdrop of a sensational novel although her aspirational tools were her creative skills, not a criminal mind. A child of a broken marriage, (her father left her mother and two siblings to fend for themselves when she was four years old) Braddon was educated by her mother who had initially planned a musical career for her. At age seventeen, she became the principal bread winner for the family as an actress with the stage name of “Mary Seyton.” After seven years in provincial theaters, Braddon decided to give up acting for a life of writing and became an instant success. There was no looking back from there for the astute and prolific writer of many sensational stories.  Herself a connoisseur of fine French literature, she had a keen sense of what constituted a popular (and lucrative) best seller on the streets of 19th century England.

Although she soon established herself as a versatile and prolific writer, Braddon had few illusions about the tastes of her largely working-class readership, which, as she lamented in a December 1862 letter, tended towards “crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning, & general infamy . . . . ” She might have added that her readers enjoyed her attacks on both smug, middle-class morality and upper-class respectability; she revealed the hypocrisy of both governing classes as she attacked their marginalization of women and their social pretensions. She regarded serial writing as a “curse” since it forced her to write more than one novel at once–mere “hand to mouth composition,” as she remarked in a letter to Bulwer-Lytton. Serialization, like her youthful reading and seven years on the provincial stage, however, served her well. In terms of narrative pace and construction, sharply defined characterization, narrative flair, and theatrical scene changes, her knowledge of contemporary comedy and melodrama enabled her to write quickly and with emotional intensity.

Not only did Braddon expertly plumb the depths of Victorian society’s hypocrisy in her writings, she quietly flouted convention in her own personal life. Although a well known literary figure, she lived with her already married future husband and literary agent, John Maxwell for several years and gave birth to five children out of wedlock. She and Maxwell eventually married when the first Mrs. Maxwell, a resident of a mental institution, died in 1874, four years after Braddon’s last child with Maxwell had been born.  

I enjoyed reading Lady Audley’s Secret, a very well written pot boiler with no hint of simpering Victorian platitudes. A mystery and suspense story, it is not a whodunnit. There are few surprises on that front. Early on in the book, the author provides pretty good clues about the nature of the shady goings on and the eventual likely outcome. But bristling with one nefarious deed after another and fortuitous coincidences, the melodrama grips the reader’s attention well. The novel unfolds around the suspicions of the gentleman sleuth Robert Audley, Lady Audley’s nephew by marriage, who methodically exposes the treachery and ruthlessness of his aunt (at considerable risk to himself) and all loose ends are tied up neatly at the end.

Given the bitterness of her own parent’s marriage and separation, that Braddon cast a jaundiced eye on exploitative marriages of convenience, is not a surprise. She observed:

However nobly a wife may pardon a sin, whatever dignified silence she may preserve, she hardly burns les pièces de conviction, they remain among her papers – the sordid letters which tell the humiliating story of a husband’s infidelity.

There is no sexual infidelity in Lady Audley’s Secret, but a profusion of deception, both of self as well as  of others. In the end, Braddon portrays the beautiful and villainous leading lady as mentally unhinged. But the reader is left to wonder if she had to do that to satisfy the prevailing sensibilities of her time. Perhaps it was not permissible to create an attractive female character who turns out to be an unmitigated sociopath, utterly devoid of a conscience, as a wholly sane person. In Lady Audley, Braddon flips around the Jane Austen mold of a plain but noble (and therefore attractive) heroine and presents a physically flawless woman who is evil to her core. But was her character convincing?  Reviewer W.F. Rae had this to say in the North British Review:

Lady Audley is at once the heroine and the monstrosity of the novel. In drawing her, the authoress may have intended to portray a female Mephistopheles; but, if so, she should have known that a woman cannot fill such a part. The nerves with which Lady Audley could meet unmoved the friend of the man of the man she had murdered, are the nerves of a Lady Macbeth who is half unsexed, and not those of the timid, gentle, innocent creature Lady Audley is represented as being … Her manner and her appearance are always in contrast with her conduct. All this is very exciting; but it is also very unnatural.

Actually Rae was wrong. Braddon did not portray Lady Audley as the unconvincing and contradictory two dimensional figure as he describes. She astutely separated (and let the reader in on it) the character’s charming public demeanor and her disturbing private thoughts. Perhaps Braddon was a woman with a late 20th century mind who knew she was writing for 19th century men like Rae.