Lady Audley's Secret Reading Order

Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the sensation novel that competed with The Woman in White for Victorian readership and outsold every other book of its era — a story of bigamy, arson, and attempted murder organized around the figure of Lady Audley, the beautiful governess-turned-aristocrat who has concealed an earlier marriage and will destroy anyone who threatens her social position. Robert Audley, the languid barrister nephew who investigates his friend George Talboys's disappearance, is one of Victorian fiction's more surprising detective figures — a man who begins the novel as a comic type and gradually develops into a genuine moral center as the evidence against Lady Audley accumulates. The novel is both a product of its sensation moment and a critique of the domestic ideology that produced Lady Audley: a novel that asks what a woman of intelligence and beauty is supposed to do in a world that offers her no legitimate path to security.