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Books Like Lady Audley's Secret
Victorian Sensation Novels Like Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret is the Victorian sensation novel — the beautiful villain, the suburban gothic, the secret that the barrister Robert Audley cannot let alone. These 8 novels share its pleasure in respectable surfaces that conceal terrible secrets, its morally complex female characters, and its conviction that the Victorian family is a site of crime.
- 1Buy
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
The sensation novel that defined the genre before Lady Audley's Secret — Collins's multi-narrator thriller of stolen identity, Count Fosco's villainy, and Laura Glyde's persecution directly inspired Braddon; where Collins's villain is male and foreign, Braddon's is female and English, a deliberate inversion that made Lady Audley's Secret even more controversial
- 2Buy
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
An unnamed narrator is haunted by the ghost of her husband's perfect first wife — du Maurier's 1938 Gothic descends from the sensation novel tradition that Lady Audley's Secret established: the beautiful, dangerous woman; the house that conceals its secrets; the man who cannot see what is in front of him; the female narrator who gradually uncovers the truth
- 3Buy
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
A Victorian pickpocket hired to help con a sheltered heiress — Waters's 2002 novel is the most brilliant contemporary descendant of the sensation novel that Lady Audley's Secret helped to establish; the stolen identity, the asylum, the female protagonists who are simultaneously victims and agents, and the surprise revelation that recontextualizes everything
- 4Buy
East Lynne
by Ellen Wood
Lady Isabel Vane abandons her husband and child for a lover and returns in disguise as a governess to care for her own children — the third great sensation novel of the 1860s and the direct contemporary of Lady Audley's Secret; more moralistic in its treatment of its fallen woman, but equally sensational in its plot construction
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The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Sugar, a prostitute in 1870s London, works her way into the household of a wealthy perfume manufacturer — Faber's 2002 novel shares Lady Audley's Secret's interest in a woman who uses her position within a household to accumulate power, its period atmosphere, and its willingness to give interiority to a woman Victorian respectability would prefer to ignore
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Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Amy Dunne disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and her husband Nick becomes the primary suspect — Flynn's 2012 thriller is the contemporary heir to Lady Audley's Secret: a brilliant, controlling woman who has carefully constructed the appearance of an ideal femininity and uses it as a weapon; the novel explicitly acknowledges Braddon's influence through the 'cool girl' monologue
- 7Buy
In the Woods
by Tana French
Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan investigates a murder in the woods where he was found as a child, the only survivor of an event he cannot remember — French's debut shares Lady Audley's Secret's structure of a detective who becomes too personally involved in the case and whose investigation reveals more than he bargained for
- 8Buy
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, the mystery of Esther Summerson's parentage, and Lady Dedlock's secret — Dickens's 1853 novel shares Lady Audley's Secret's interest in concealed identity and its Gothic sense that secrets buried in the past will inevitably surface; published a decade before Lady Audley's Secret and directly influential on Braddon
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