Recommendations
Books Like Aurora Floyd
Best books to read after Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon's follow-up to Lady Audley's Secret (1863) — Aurora Floyd's concealed first marriage to a stable groom and its consequences when Conyers reappears to blackmail her into her second marriage with the respectable John Mellish; a more psychologically developed treatment of the sensation formula than Lady Audley's Secret, featuring a heroine whose mistake is more human and whose response more sympathetic. These recommendations extend the experience through Victorian sensation fiction and through the tradition of the morally complex Victorian woman protagonist.
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Lady Audley's Secret
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Braddon's preceding novel and the one that established her formula — where Aurora Floyd is more psychologically sympathetic (Aurora's concealed marriage was a genuine youthful mistake), Lady Audley is more sensationally villainous (Lady Audley's bigamy is calculated); the two together define the range of the Braddon sensation heroine.
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's sensation masterwork was Aurora Floyd's most important literary rival — where Braddon's novel is organized around a concealed marriage and its social consequences, Collins's is organized around an impersonation conspiracy; both define the sensation genre's interest in the suppressed identity of a woman in the grip of legal and social constraint.
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Armadale
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's most ambitious sensation novel features Lydia Gwilt, the most fully realized female character in Victorian sensation fiction and the most serious competitor to Aurora Floyd for the most psychologically complex sensation heroine; where Aurora Floyd is fundamentally innocent (her secret was a mistake, not a crime), Lydia Gwilt is genuinely criminal — the comparison shows the full range of the sensation heroine.
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
Brontë's earlier novel covers the concealed-marriage territory from a very different angle — Helen Graham's escape from her dissolute husband is legally precarious and socially unsupported in the same ways that Aurora's concealed marriage creates legal and social peril; both novels are organized around the question of what a woman can do when her marriage has become a trap.
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's masterwork approaches the Victorian sensation novel's central concern (a woman whose romantic choices violate social convention) from a very different perspective — where Braddon regards Aurora's concealed marriage as an understandable mistake deserving sympathy, Tolstoy regards Anna's choices as more tragic and less forgivable; the contrast defines Victorian vs. Russian approaches to the fallen woman.
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East Lynne
by Ellen Wood
Wood's sensation novel is the most direct companion to Aurora Floyd in the fallen-woman tradition — where Aurora Floyd conceals a hasty marriage and is ultimately vindicated, Lady Isabel Vane flees her marriage for a lover and is destroyed; the two represent the spectrum of Victorian moral judgment on female romantic transgression.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satirical novel is Aurora Floyd's most important predecessor in the tradition of the beautiful, ambitious woman who manages men — where Thackeray regards Becky Sharp's manipulation of male admiration as comic, Braddon regards Aurora's use of her beauty as a form of survival; both novels ask what a beautiful woman of limited options is supposed to do with her situation.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's twentieth-century Gothic inherits the sensation novel's interest in the first wife's secret — Aurora Floyd's concealed marriage to Conyers recalls the Rebecca plot's organization around the question of what Maxwell de Winter's first wife was really like; both novels are Gothic in their treatment of a threatening past marriage.
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