East Lynne Reading Order

East Lynne (1861) by Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood was the bestselling sensation novel of the Victorian era — a story of Lady Isabel Vane's flight from her husband Archibald Carlyle, her liaison with the aristocratic seducer Francis Levison, and her eventual return in disguise as the governess to her own children. The novel was adapted for the stage (its most famous line, 'Dead, dead — and never called me mother!' derives from these adaptations), and its plot became so widely known that parody of it was possible for the rest of the Victorian era. Where Braddon's Lady Audley is a calculating schemer who drives the plot, Wood's Lady Isabel is a passive victim of her own emotional impulsiveness — her flight from Archibald is a mistake she recognizes almost immediately and spends the rest of the novel paying for in the standard Victorian currency of female transgression: suffering and death.