Why do we need to know Lady Audley’s Secret?

Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Elizabeth Braddon was one of the most popular novels in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With its heady mix of beautiful criminal heroine, amateur detective, blackmail, arson, madness, bigamy, and suspenseful action, it helped launch – with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White – the new genre of ‘sensational fiction’. In the novel, Braddon subverts Victorian gender roles and social stereotypes, but what made Lady Audley’s Secret so shocking to contemporary readers? Join Marie-Louise Luxemburg to find out.

Marie-Louise Luxemburg, writer