Mary Elizabeth Braddon — Lady Audley's Secret with Kristine Huntley

Pass the smelling salts! Readers of the Victorian Era eagerly (or furtively) set scruples aside to read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret — the title of which was enough to tempt even the most puritanical schoolmarm into sneaking a peak. But it was Braddon’s sumptuous prose, eye for drama and sophisticated understanding of social mores which won her the admiration of contemporaries like William Makepiece Thackery, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Louis Stevenson. Booklist reviewer and television writer Kristine Huntley joins us this week to discuss Braddon’s remarkable prowess in navigating scandalous secrets … including her own!

Mentioned in this episode:

2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction shortlist and longlist

Booklist

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

“Abducted by my Teacher” Lifetime movie

“Freakish” on Hulu

“Mind Games” on ABC

“Two Sentence Horror Stories” on the CW

The real case that partially inspired Lady Audley’s Secret

John Maxwell

Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Three Times Dead by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 268 on Rosalind Ashe

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes. 

AMY: The British novel we are discussing today was first published in the Victorian era, but Kim, I kept comparing it to a much more recent thriller. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. 

KIM: Yes, the comparisons couldn't be more clear. Seemingly lovely and respectable women masking deep dark duplicity. So listeners get ready to enter a realm where deception, fabricated identities and latent monomania reign supreme. 

AMY: Don't you love that word, Kim? Every time it came up in the novel, I would start laughing. Monomania is such a dramatic Victorian freakout word, and it's one that today's lost lady, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, employs with gusto I would say. Is it any wonder that her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret was an instant and long running bestseller? It has all the makings of a Lifetime movie. Better still, her tale was partially inspired by a real life incident. 

KIM: Jaw-dropping though Lady Audley’s Secret was for its time, this novel won the admiration of writers like William Makepeace Thackery, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Amy, I was also getting some “Wilkie Collins” vibes from the mystery aspect of this novel, so I wasn't surprised to read that she completed this work not long after reading The Woman in White, which he had only recently published. 

AMY: She had some personal experience with keeping scandalous secrets, by the way.

KIM: I, on the other hand, just wanna blab all day about this novel. I love it so much! And luckily, we've got a guest today who feels equally compelled to make sure Mary Elizabeth Braddon's work is a secret to no one. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Kristine Huntley, is a television writer who happens to have written a Lifetime movie: “Abducted by my Teacher.” Okay, Kristine, this explains to me so much about why you chose this book. She also wrote for the Hulu series, “Freakish” and “Mind Games” starring everyone's favorite Christian Slater. (Oh my gosh. We all had crushes on him, right?) She was also involved with CW’s Two-Sentence Horror Stories.” In addition, Kristine reviews books for Booklist and was originally going to appear on our show last spring for this episode, but then she got the incredibly cool opportunity to be on the committee of the Carnegie Medal Awards, which sounds like a freaking dream. We're thrilled that she's completed that service and can now join us for this episode. Welcome, Kristine, and before we get into Mary Elizabeth Braddon, tell us, first off, what was that experience like getting to read books for such a prestigious prize last year? 

KRISTINE HUNTLEY: Oh, well thank you so much for having me. It was really incredible. I mean, the volume of reading — obviously you read between 102 hundred books for this award — so the volume was incredible, but the books we're reading were also incredible. I mean, there are so many amazing titles, and I am a book reviewer, so I'm always reading contemporary books, but this was like the excuse to try to read every great book that came out in 2025. And we just announced the winners on January 27th, and there's gonna be an award ceremony in June at the American Library Association's annual convention. And I think our winners are amazing, so I urge you all to look up the Carnegie Metal long list and shortlist so you can add to your TBR.

KIM: Yeah, we will link to it in our show notes. So you were obviously incredibly well read, but of all the “lost ladies” of lit you could have lobbied for, you chose Mary Elizabeth Braddondon. So tell us why. 

KRISTINE: So as a teenager I was obsessed with reading the classics, specifically of the 19th century, and I fell in love with gothic literature and then discovered sensation fiction. Uh, obviously Wilkie Collins, who you mentioned, I have read so many of his books — he's incredible. And from there, I discovered lesser known writers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote so many books and was so well known in her day. And Lady Audley’s Secret and another novel of hers, Aurora Floyd, are really the only ones that get any attention today, and it's still such a lesser level than Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens, who dabbled in sensation fiction at the very end of his life. And I just … I think she's so good at it. And this novel always stayed with me because of how subversive it was. I wrote my senior thesis in college on books that dealt with the idea of women being subversive in this way. And even today, I gravitate towards books that do come from the female point of view. And this book in particular, just because of how bold she is and how straightforward she is about what her goals are and why. I appreciated that very much. 

AMY: We made that Lifetime movie comparison at the beginning, and I think people might hear that and immediately think, “This is lowbrow. This is kind of like your guilty pleasure read.” And it is a guilty pleasure read in a certain respect, but I think it's very sophisticated. There's a lot of depth to it. It's not just a kind of throwaway dime-store novel. There is a lot to it, and we're gonna be diving into all of that. 

KIM: To me, it's like right up there with Bleak House or something like that. Like it's just written so well and it's so compelling and even reading it a second time, just in the last few months, and I'd read it a long time ago too, I was just as engaged reading it as I was the first time.

KRISTINE: Yeah, and I mean, I think to connect it to the Lifetime movie, the Lifetime movie I wrote was a true crime, so obviously had some sensation to it, but it was about this 15-year-old girl who's groomed and abducted by her 50-year-old health science teacher, her high school teacher, and obviously that is something that I think needed light shed on it because in the real life case of what happened to this young woman. The people in the town blamed her for breaking up this man's marriage. When we get into Lady Audley's Secret, we'll talk more about, you know, what her choices were and what her situation was. And I have kind of an impassioned defense for her that I think rings true through a lot of literature, actually. These sensational stories I think are important because they do shed light on women's experiences. 

AMY: Exactly. And so before we jump into the novel proper, I think we should give our listeners a little bit of background about Mary Elizabeth Braddon. What should we know about her, Kristine? 

KRISTINE: She was born in 1835. She was born in a middle class family, but one of the things that was interesting was that her parents separated when she was four years old, and that wasn't super common at the time. Um, divorce obviously was not common, but she was very close with her mother and remained so throughout her life. And her mom supported her when, in 1852, she decided to become an actress and act under the name Mary Seyton, because that was a very unusual choice for a middle class woman. It was considered a little bit scandalous because of the late hours, and you're putting yourself out there to be seen. 

AMY: What was her stage name? I'm hearing Mary Satan. 

KRISTINE: S-E-Y-T-O-N. Yeah. 

AMY: So it's Mary Seyton. Okay. 

KRISTINE: It's Mary Seyton. Yeah. So, um, she leaned into it, you know, she leaned into the “sensation.”

AMY: Exactly. Yeah. 

KRISTINE: Yeah. And she was an avid reader. She was somebody who loved, you know, from childhood, telling stories, which I think is true of a lot of writers. So she started writing at the age of 11, and she started publishing poetry in the 1850s and wrote a play, and then she started writing novels and serialized her first novel in 1860, which was called Three Times Dead. And she had a wealthy patron whose name was John Gilbey. Um, but then she sort of severed ties with him when, uh, she started publishing stories with another publisher, a man who had magazines that were published for the working class in the middle class, and his name was John Maxwell. And so he became her publisher.

AMY: She started writing Lady Audley’s Secret for one of his periodicals called Robin Goodfellow, and then for whatever reason, his venture flopped. Like when your favorite TV show is canceled and you didn't get closure, you're upset when your favorite story is being serialized and you can't find out what happened. Especially with this one in particular. You're like, what the hell was the secret? 

KIM: Got a lot of great cliffhanger pieces. 

KRISTINE: Yes. Yeah. 

AMY: So she was able to, um, get it republished elsewhere in another periodical and ended up writing the last third of the book in two weeks time. 

KIM: So let's start talking a little bit more about the novel. Initially, Braddondon introduces the reader to this palatial country manner. It's called Audley Court. It was once a convent and has evolved over the years. It's now the home of Lord and Lady Audley. and Braddon really takes her time in describing the house and the grounds before she introduces us to any characters.

KRISTINE: Yeah, I think this is very typical of Victorian novels in that they really do like to set the stage. The grounds of Audley Court are so important to the story and to what happens and to setting the stage for the life that she has married into. And so Audley Court obviously is this stately manner with incredible grounds. And then of course there's a very important set piece there that I will refrain from talking about, but obviously that really becomes important in the third act of the novel. 

KIM: So Michael, Audley, age 56, lives at Audley Court with his 18-year-old daughter Alicia and his young second wife, Lucy. She was formerly a governess for a neighboring family. Lucy, who is now Lady Audley, is gorgeous, charming. She's described as having “a face like a sunbeam” and being “the sweetest girl that ever lived.” 

AMY: And of course, because we know the title of this novel, we are immediately thinking this description is pretty suss, right? We're like, “Something's off here. She's got a secret, and I wanna know what it is.” So there are hints of something much darker that actually emerge in a flashback scene that Braddon presents when Lord Audley asks this young Lucy for her hand in marriage. Kristine, why don't you read from that scene and first of all. (Real quick, Michael. Audley, I would just roll my eyes every time Lord Audley comes into the scene. I'm like, oh God.”

KIM: Yeah, I mean, he's literally so smitten and Lucy has him around her little finger to the point of It's annoying. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KRISTINE: I think one of the things with Lucy, and obviously we can get into this more later: appearance versus reality is a big, big theme in Victorian literature in general, and especially in this book, and I think her appearance is the pinnacle of Victorian womanhood. Obviously this is what draws this wealthy man to marry this penniless young governess which is sort of shocking in and of itself. So, yeah, let me jump in:

“Don't ask too much of me,” she kept repeating. “I have been selfish from my babyhood.”

“Lucy, Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me?”

“Dislike you? No. No.”

“But is there anyone else whom you love?”

She laughed out loud at his question. “I do not love anyone in the world,” she answered. He was glad of her reply, and yet that and the strange laugh jarred upon his feelings. He was silent for some moments and then said with a kind of effort. “Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. Dare say, I am a romantic old fool. If you do not dislike me, and if you do not love anyone else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it a bargain, Lucy?”

“Yes.” 

The baronet lifted her in his arms and kissed her once upon the forehead. Then after quietly bidding her goodnight, he walked straight out of the house. This foolish old man, because there was some strong emotion at work in his heart, neither joy nor triumph, but something almost akin to disappointment, some stifled and unsatisfied longing which lay heavy and dull at his heart as if he carried a corpse in his bosom. He carried the corpse of that hope, which had died at the sound of Lucy's words. All the doubts and fears and timid aspirations were ended. Now he must be contented like other men of his age to be married for his fortune and his position and. 

Lucy Graham went slowly up the stairs to her little room at the top of the house. She placed her dim candle on the chest of drawers and seated herself on the edge of the white bed, still and white as the drapery hanging round her. No more dependence. “No more drudgery. No more humiliation,” she said. “Every trace of the old life melted away. Every clue to identity buried and forgotten. Except these. Except these.” She had never taken her left hand from the black ribbon at her throat. She drew it from her bosom as she spoke and looked at the object attached to it. It was neither a locket, a miniature, nor a cross. It was a ring wrapped in an oblong piece of paper. The paper partly printed, partly written yellow with age and crumpled with much folding. 

KIM: There it is. 

AMY: Okay, we see what's happening. She's not marrying for love. Um, she's got some keepsake that we don't really know what it's connected to. But even before this section that you read, she remarks to, Lord Audley, “You have to remember where I come from? I'm a nobody. I came from poverty,” basically. And I think that's important too, because there's an element of class distinction throughout this. She's not in the right sphere, right? She shouldn't be here and she knows it. I feel like when you're reading this novel, it's almost like there's two novels. There's the one that you read the first time around, not knowing anything, just completely blind. And then you just see things so differently the second time around because you have all the information. And I'm not a big rereader of novels, but in this case it is a really interesting exercise because it was all there just hiding in plain sight.

KIM: I totally agree. It's so interesting how you perceive Lucy initially, even just in the first little bit as she's introduced, and how your feelings about her personality start to evolve as you're reading it. 

KRISTINE: Obviously, you know from the title she has secrets, but as you read and you know her secrets, um, it's interesting. And especially that she held onto the ring. It kind of brings into question if she is cold as she presents herself later. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So we drew the comparison already between Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and in Collins' novel there's a male protagonist who ends up acting as an unwitting detective in a family drama. Kristine, can you talk a little bit about the character of Robert Audley in Braddon's book and the mystery that he's trying to get to the bottom of?

KRISTINE: Yeah, so Robert is presented as a little bit of a dilettante, a little bit lazy. He is a lawyer, but he doesn't work too hard. He has his best friend, George Talboys. George has returned from Australia where he went to make his fortune to terrible, terrible news, and that's that his wife Helen, has passed away. Their son, Georgie, has been left with her father, um, who's a bit of a dissolute character. So George is just bereft and then Robert gets George to come with him to Audley Court and meet his uncle's new wife, lovely Lady Lucy Audley. But before that can happen, they kind of go around the house and they sneak into Lucy's chambers and George lays eyes on a picture of Lady Audley, a portrait. Uh, and he is stunned into silence. He goes for a walk and he doesn't come back. And so that kicks off the mystery, because Robert. who again, before this has been presented as lazy and layabout, suddenly has a purpose. And that's finding out what happened to George. 

AMY: Yeah, he's a reluctant detective if ever there was one. He has this whole, um, passage that I thought was great where he is talking about circumstantial evidence. 

KIM: Oh, I loved all that stuff. It was very dramatic, completely. 

AMY: He says: Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable hereto for to the wisest upon the earth. A scrap of paper, a shred of some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped in cautiously from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment of a letter. The shutting or opening of a door, a shadow on a window blind, the accuracy of a moment, a thousand circumstances, so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer and lo, the gallows is built up. The solemn bell tolls through the dismal gray of the early morning. The drop creaks under the guilty feet, and the penalty of crime is paid. 

I mean, how dramatic is that? 

KIM: I loved that passage. I love the science, 'cause I've. I, uh, in grad school wrote a paper on the science of detection in Victorian novels. So I'm like, yes. And he talks about clues all the time, which I loved. I think it's spelled C-L-E-W-S in this novel. But yeah, the clues are dropped all the time. Yeah, I love that.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: But what also about his almost obsession with George? 

AMY: Yes. So I didn't see this theory until later. Is Robert gay? Like, what did you guys think? 

KIM: He says he loves George more than anyone else, and he says that he would give up his money, years of his life, everything, if he could just be standing next to George again.

AMY: Yeah. Maybe Robert has a secret! 

KRISTINE: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because then he's struck by George's sister, Clara, who looks a lot like George, right? Yes, 

AMY: Totally. Yes. And he had no interest in Alicia before. you know? 

KRISTINE: None at all. 

AMY: He strikes me as a bit of a misogynist. Um, do you remember that passage? He goes on for two or three pages about how manipulative women are, and they're actually the stronger and more powerful sex because they're dastardly, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he goes on and on and on in a very powerful tirade about women in society.

KRISTINE: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: And we mentioned in the introduction that Braddon was actually inspired by a real life crime. What do you know about that? 

KRISTINE: I know a little about this. So there was a young girl named Constance Kent, who allegedly murdered her brother, Francis, like her little brother, like I think he was four years old. This would've been a sensation, you know, in the same way that we're currently following the Savannah Guthrie's mom's kidnapping. Like this would've been that kind of thing for Victorian readers. They would've been following this just as closely, so that was very shocking and, and supposedly she drew some elements from that.

AMY: Yeah, it's unexpected that a woman would do anything even remotely approaching something like that, right? So that gets us back to Lady Audley’s Secret, and we're trying to talk about this novel, listeners, without giving everything away. Um, but it doesn't really take too long in the novel to deduce what Lady Audley’s secret is. It comes out, I'd say in the first third of the book, right? If not earlier. Um, which is surprising because I thought it would take until the end of the book. I thought we'd be strung along the whole time, as in most mysteries and then, voila, like the last few pages, you'd find something out. So while I'm reading it, I'm thinking “This is way too early that we would know what her secret is and what she did.” So I kept thinking there was gonna be a twist along the way. What do you think, Kristine? I mean, did Braddon have a strategy here in showing her card so early with the actual technical secret? 

KRISTINE: Yeah, I mean, I think she was really smart about that because. I don't think she could hide the ball the way she wanted to tell this story. Like you're making the connections and what's so subversive about it is the way she just goes on with her life. The perfect, you know, angel in the house, Victorian wife, and then obviously when you get to that end where she finally, you know, tells the details that Robert in no way wants to hear. She has to, when he is literally taking her off to the insane asylum, has to tell him, confront him with it, and he does not wanna hear it. And that again goes to convention. Like, “you don't wanna know the details about this little angel.” That was so interesting. And I think her secret is that she didn't have any remorse. Like she was willing to do whatever it took to maintain her life. 

AMY: The audacity.

KRISTINE: The audacity of it. What's so interesting about her is that she was trying to make a better life for herself, and the only way up until even very recently, the only way for women to better themselves was through marriage, marrying somebody with money. That's why I hate the term gold -digger.

KIM: Society completely made that construct. It was either starve, be a prostitute, or marry up. 

KRISTINE: Yeah. Those were the options. Yeah. And so she did what she could with the options that were available to her, um, and didn’t have any remorse about that.

AMY: Yeah, and I think this idea of madness runs throughout the whole book, right? Monomania, like obviously madness had to have prompted her to do what she did, and she admits that that's true. But as the reader, I think as a modern reader, we're like, “Well, was she mad?” I think Victorian readers would be like, “Yes, she is a lunatic.” And that's another thing that runs throughout the book, is just this fear of madness. In this day and age, we're all about wellness and mental health and things like that. It seems like in the Victorian era, they were paranoid that everyone was gonna fall into madness and everyone's just walking on the brink of it. I feel like there's a line. Oh, Braddon says, “There is nothing so delicate as that invisible balance on which the mind is always trembling.” So it's like any one of us could succumb to what befell Lady Audley, if we're not careful. 

KIM: Completely. 

AMY: So yeah, I don't think we can read this novel in the same way a Victorian reader would have read it. I think coming to it with a modern perspective totally changes how you see the whole thing in a way. Mm-hmm. Um, and I mentioned that I kept waiting for the twist because I was like, “Well, there's no way Braddon … she would not vilify this woman this way.” You know what I mean? Like there has to be something else. And I started mistrusting Robert. I thought for sure Robert was like playing a fast one on us and that he was the crazy one. 

KRISTINE: Yeah. You kind of wonder is Robert …?  and then I thought it was so interesting when he confronts her and she's like, “You're mad and I'm gonna convince everybody you're mad and I'm gonna have you thrown in a mad house.” Like she threatens him with that, and she could have, in theory, pulled that off. She will do anything to protect her standing, because that's all she has. 

KIM: Even the narrator, you know, there's the point where the narrator describes (and the men start talking about) the Pre-Raphaelite painting of her and how she appears in that painting, and it's so creepy and weird, but yet everything about her is so light and wonderful and sweet, and the juxtaposition of that is like, what is going on here? What is the truth about her? 

KRISTINE: The sinisterness of that, of where they're seeing … the sinisterness of that painting. And that was another big thing with the Victorians, you know, I mean, obviously the portrait of Dorian Gray, where the painting could reveal your true self and your sins. I do think it's easier for Victorians to write her off as mad. We're seeing a little bit more of this in literature right now. We have the unreliable narrator, almost the villain narrator who's like, “Here are all the bad things I'm doing and you're gonna root for me 'cause I'm your point of view character.” Like in the show, “Dexter” and the book series Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, you have a character who is a serial killer, but you're rooting for him because you're in his point of view. And so with Lady Audley, you know, you're kind of following her and you're sort of like, “Well, is she gonna get away with this?” I mean, she definitely plays with your sympathies because at one point I think Robert's even like, “Oh, should I just stop? Like, I feel bad for her. Like here she is trembling on the ground and crying.” Like, could he just leave her alone? 

KIM: Yes. It's like she had gone down that path and then every little step, it's like, she's gotta keep, she's already done this, so now she's gotta do the next thing. 

KRISTINE: Yeah. 

AMY: So Kim, you mentioned the portrait and it's described as very Pre-Rafaelite. Um, I feel like Mary Elizabeth Braddon writes the way a painter would paint. You almost see the brush strokes in some of her descriptions, and I'm thinking in particular of a scene where she describes Lady Audley’s boudoir. Let me just read an excerpt here. Braddon writes:

If Holman Hunt could have peeped into the pretty boudoir, I think the picture would have been photographed upon his brain to be reproduced by-and-by upon a bishop’s half-length 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, and the luminous, rose-colored glitter of her yellow hair — beautiful in herself, but made bewilderingly beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the shrine to her loveliness. Drinking cups of gold and ivory, chiseled by Benvenuto Cellini; cabinets of buhl and porcelain, bearing the cipher of Austrian Marie Antoinette, amid devices of rosebuds and true lovers’ knots, birds and butterflies, cupidons and shepherdesses, goddesses, courtiers, cottagers, and milkmaids; statuettes of Parian marble and biscuit china… 

And that description of the room just goes on and on from there. I'm just giving you a little taste of what she's describing of the bedroom. Kim, I can see you salivating right now. 

KIM: This is my dream aesthetic and I have to tell you both, while I was reading the book, I would stop and pull out my art books that have like pre-Raphaelite painting and things like that in it. I was going through looking for people and trying to match them up. You know, paintings and match them up with the characters in the book. Um, and this passage specifically, it symbolizes so much more than just that surface level decor, right, Kristine? 

KRISTINE: Yeah. So it just shows the incredible material world that she's coming to, and also like the beauty she's surrounded by that she, in turn, thinks she is due because she's so beautiful and she is the picture of the ideal Victorian woman. She is that, you know, angel in the house, she's always described as as. Delicate and that her curls, which… 

KIM: Huge blue eyes…

KRISTINE: Huge blue eyes. I mean, she's just, you know, in her tiny hands, her slender hands, this is where she belongs and that's what she believes so passionately. But that of course, that beautiful appearance masks her true nature. 

KIM: The darkness beneath. 

AMY: Yeah. And the idea that like the angel of the house is the terror. How scary is that for men and women of the Victorian era to be like that thing that we were taking for granted and think of as safe and like just pretty and fragile and delicate? She's a monster. 

KIM: And who and what created that monster?

AMY: Yeah. It's like “the call is coming from within the house” or whatever.

KIM: The monster in the house. Yes. Yes. 

KRISTINE: And that's why they have to dismiss her as mad, right? Because that's the only explanation. Madness is a way to dismiss her rather than looking at what made her do this, what her motivations were. They have to call her mad because otherwise they have to confront the societal problems that made her do this. Uh, and I think we can look at parallels even in our own time, to things like that, things we don't wanna confront and turn away from and just dismiss as insane or crazy or not real. Because you have to confront reality, uh, in a way that society has been constructed to benefit certain people and disadvantage others.

AMY: And getting back to the whole class divide there, you know, all those tchotchkes in her bedroom are kind of symbols of consumerism. I think the introduction in the Penguin classics version, I have the introduction, talks about that a lot. And like that people were scared of people jumping out of their station in life. You know, there was something threatening about that. So all of the things that she's collected in her little bedroom are sort of representative of that, I guess.

KIM: Yes. Her sables. 

AMY: Yeah. She always talks about her sables. Yeah.

KRISTINE: She takes them with her! She takes them with her to the madhouse! Yeah. 

KIM: Yes. As one would or should do. 

AMY: That madhouse sounded pretty nice. That was like the fanciest madhouse. 

KIM: For the rest. 

KRISTINE: It did sound nice, but I will say like the idea of imprisonment is a big theme in gothic and sensation fiction. The idea that you're not free to leave and you're trapped in this bubble of madness. Because obviously, at least in our minds, she's not mad. I think Victorian readers would have to decide. I think that was part of what Braddon was asking is, you know, “Is she mad or is she just manipulative and calculating?” But then she's trapped there with presumably other people who are mad. So it is a kind of hell, even though it seems like he is putting her in the world's nicest madhouse. 

AMY: But yeah, but the fact that he put her in that particular place, he's still treating her like she's a delicate beauty that she gets to go to that one in particular. 

KIM: Yeah. And by the way, he did almost fall in love with her a little bit in the beginning too. I think she was the person he was most interested to up until that point. You know, she was mesmerizing to him as well. 

AMY: I don't even know that we need to defend her. I'm just thinking back to Kim, the book we did in October, Moths, where we talked about like, it's okay to have a woman be the bad guy. You know? There doesn’t have to be extenuating circumstances. She can just be a bitch. 

KIM: Completely. 

AMY: Yeah, 

KIM: And I kept thinking about Moths in even that painting and the quote unquote “evil” side of the painting that they talk about. That was making me think of Moths too, like and the men's perspective. 

AMY: Yeah. They didn't know her at all. They thought they knew her as this quaint little doll and that wasn't who she was at all. 

KRISTINE: One of the things that's so fun, I obviously read a lot of contemporary books for Booklist for review, and right now, female thriller writers are on top. And the way Braddon was so popular in her day, and I think you know the books of Frieda McFadden, Jessica Noll, Alice Feeney, I mean, these are books people are all flocking to and a lot of times they will have female narrators or their points of view where they're not entirely sympathetic. They're layered and sometimes they do bad things, um, but they have a point of view and they have a rationale for doing them. And in the Victorian era, they'd probably be labeled mad like Lady Audley. But Lady Audley’s descendants are certainly in literature today, and I think that's really, really cool.

AMY: Perfectly said. Can I just really quickly read, um, something from the introduction of my Penguin classics version, and it was about sort of the, um, response to books like this during the Victorian era. This was an eminent Oxford philosopher Henry Mansell. Um, he wrote for Quarterly Review about 24 “sensation” novels, including Lady Audley’s Secret, and he wrote:

Excitement and excitement alone seems to be the great end to which they aim … and as excitement, even when harmless in kind, cannot be produced without becoming morbid in degree, works of this class manifest themselves as belonging, some more, some less, but all to some extent, to the morbid phenomena of literature — indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want that they supply. 

So they're worried about books like this. They're like horrified and worried and think it's a corrupting influence. Yeah. 

KRISTINE: They're worried it'll give women ideas. Like, “Oh my God. are women thinking that? Is that how they are?” And it's like, “Yeah! Yeah, sometimes!” you know? 

KIM: Yep. And for, as we've talked about on this podcast many times, good reason.

AMY: And we should say that Braddon herself was writing from experience when she wrote this book. Kristine, why don't you tell us a little bit about her scandal that she was involved in around the time she was writing this book — for decades, actually.

KRISTINE: Yeah, so she fell in love with and, and was involved with her married publisher, John Maxwell. He, at the time, he was married, he and his wife had five children together. His wife though, had an episode and was in an insane asylum in Dublin, and so he and Mary Elizabeth got together. They had six children out of wedlock, and at one point John tried to sort of cover this up. He went and put in a newspaper in 1864 that they were actually married. Well, his wife's brother sent a letter and said, “No, no, no, they're not married. That's not true.” So it was really scandalous, but they stayed together. Even though they moved in kind of more bohemian circles, it was still scandalous and they weren't considered respectable for the Victorian era. This was not something people … (I mean, it was something people did) but it wasn't something people did with the, uh, approval of society. And so when his wife died, I believe in 1874, they did then get married. And because I think of their position in society, they were able to wash away a little bit of that scandal, and suddenly they were welcomed into polite society because here they were, they were married. The kids were still illegitimate. Like a big thing in British society, if your parents get married like one second after you're born, you're still illegitimate. So unfortunately it didn't help there, but it did help their position in society. But it was a very, very shocking thing to do. 

AMY: So she's writing about bigamy and women who have descended into madness and in her real life she is experiencing some of that. She's writing what she knows. Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Yep, for sure. 

KRISTINE: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think these were issues of the day that definitely weighed on her mind, both personally and then, just in general, these were things the “sensation” authors did write about because they were so shocking. I mean, people knew they happened, obviously, but it wasn't considered okay in any sense of the word. Uh, and it also wasn't something people would really discuss in polite society or associate with. So being able to read about it in a novel, Braddon's other big novel, uh, Aurora Floyd also was about bigamy, so that did weigh on her mind, even though they weren't actually committing bigamy. She did not marry John until his wife was dead, but they tried to say they were married.

KIM: Yeah. Soft bigamy. 

KRISTINE: Yes. Soft bigamy.

AMY: Yeah. It reminds me of George Eliot as well, she had that same set up with her life partner. 

KIM: Without all the kids. 

KRISTINE: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. Well, he had kids, but yeah, I don't think she had, yeah, they, yeah, they didn't have kids together. Yeah. 

KRISTINE: But she would call herself his wife, even though she wasn't. George Eliot also touched on some of these themes. I mean, I remember writing about Daniel Deronda and that was about a woman, in part, who was trapped in a very unhappy and abusive marriage, and she thought about ways to get out. 

KIM: Yeah. An interesting book. 

KRISTINE: Mm-hmm. 

KIM: Um, so you mentioned Aurora Floyd, um, you know, 

KRISTINE: Yeah. I think Aurora Floyd is is probably the other big one, and it'll be the one that would be easier to find in print. And that one is also about a woman who commits bigamy, but she's like the true heroine as opposed to Lady Audley who's morally gray, we might say. Or maybe, maybe a little more on the other side than that. Um, Aurora is much more sympathetic. Um, so that's one. The other two that might still be in print or easier to find are The Trail of the Serpent and The Doctor's Wife. And The Doctor's Wife, I believe, was her response to another novel that was big at the time. And that was Madame Bovary, by Flaubert. And so she wrote her kind of response called The Doctor's Wife. So those are probably the big four. Um. I was also trying to remember, I have a fun little personal story. I went to University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and they had a really nice graduate library. And so, uh, I went in the stacks one day and I found out, and I'm not gonna remember which of her books it was, I think it was an early one. Uh, but they had a volume by Mary Elizabeth Braddon that was actually autographed by her, and that is the only time I've ever thought about stealing from a library. I was like, “Oh my God, what if I just kept this and paid the $75 fine?” 

KIM: What if you had done it and then it had led to murder? 

AMY: A little bit of Lady Audley’s spirit got inside you in that moment and you were tempted. Oh my God. 

KIM: Yeah. 

KRISTINE: I didn't do it. I checked it out and kept renewing it, and then at the end of the day I did return it because I obviously, as somebody who loves and values libraries, I think I could not have that on my conscience. It would've driven me mad! 

KIM: Oh wow. Oh, that's perfect. Okay. Okay. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much, Kristine. We loved having you on. And actually, since we're all in LA, we wanna hang out. You're a kindred spirit!

KRISTINE: Yes. I would love that. This, I guess thematically like this has been all through my life. I'm a huge thriller lover and fan, like everything, and funny enough, and I didn't mention it, um, but I actually in high school in one of my senior English classes I wrote a sequel to Lady Audley’s Secret. 

KIM: This is brilliant.

KRISTINE: Lady Audley’s Revenge, I think is what I called it. 

AMY: Hey, it's not too late. It is not too late. You can still get it published. So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back with an all new episode in two weeks. But if you hate waiting that long, consider becoming a member of our Patreon community for a nominal monthly fee, you'll get access to our twice-monthly bonus episodes, or you can purchase any bonus episodes and pay as you go. 

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AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.