Book description
With an essay by Elizabeth Tilley.
'Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her
arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair'
In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new
Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful - and very
mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the
dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her? A huge success
in the nineteenth century, the book's anti-heroine - with her good
looks and hidden past - embodied perfectly the concerns of the
Victorian age with morality and madness.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) first burst onto the public scene
at the age of eight when she played the role of 'Fairy Pineapple' in a
pantomime. In a long career of overwhelming activity she edited
magazines and wrote at least seventy-five novels, including such
unrevived works as
The Octoroon, Publicans and Sinners
and
Dead-Sea Fruit
but also including the phenomenal
Lady Audley's Secret
which made her, at the age of twenty-seven, rich for life.
