Books by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

When beautiful Lucy Graham becomes Lady Audley, her future looks secure. But her past is shrouded in mystery, and the disappearance of a young man sparks an investigation that will reveal her dark secret... This new edition explores the novel in the context of nineteenth-century sensation fiction and the lively debates it provoked.

The Doctor's Wife is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in which she explores her frustrated heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. This is the only edition of a fascinating work, and reproduces uncut the first edition of 1864.

Weathering critical scorn, LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET quickly established Mary Elizabeth Braddon as the leading light of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, sharing the honour only with Wilkie Collins. Addictive, cunningly plotted and certainly sensational, LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET draws on contemporary theories of insanity to probe mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumer culture. What is the mystery surrounding the charming heroine? Lady Audley's secret is investigated by Robert Audley,aristocrat turned detective, in a novel that has lost none of its power to disturb and entertain.

The flaxen-haired beauty of the child-like Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But this novel uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder. It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity.