Aurora Floyd Reading Order

Aurora Floyd (1863) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was her follow-up to Lady Audley's Secret and, by many accounts, her best novel — the story of Aurora Floyd, the beautiful heiress of a banker and a racehorse trainer's daughter, whose hasty first marriage to a groom (concealed) complicates her subsequent marriage to the respectable John Mellish. Braddon's treatment of Aurora is more psychologically developed than Lady Audley — Aurora is not a criminal but a woman whose impulsive first marriage was a genuine mistake, and the novel's concern is with how she navigates the exposure of that mistake in a society with one set of rules for women and another for men. Aurora Floyd is more sympathetic than Lady Audley, more interesting than the sensation convention required, and the novel as a whole represents Braddon's attempt to move beyond the simple scheming-villainess formula she had established.