ABSTRACT
Imagine Mary Braddon's novel, Lady Audley's Secret, which first exploded into the literary market place in 1862, as a Religious Tract Society publication. Braddon explains Lady Audley's behaviour in two apparently contradictory ways: criminality, with its attendant religious discourse, and madness, with its discourse of tainted heredity. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood." Female ambition is madness but a woman can choose not to be ambitious. Conversely, the act of choosing madness may be construed as wilful wrongdoing. Ultimately, the madwoman is a criminal and the criminal is a madwoman; the closure is no closure. Arguably, Braddon oscillated between these diagnoses of criminality and madness for two reasons: to create a sensational story which might be enjoyed for its own sake, and to create a discursive space within which to focus upon the late nineteenth-century construction of femininity.
