ABSTRACT
Mary Elizabeth Braddon is now one of the most popular Victorian 'sensation' novelists, best known for Lady Audley's Secret, in which the upwardly mobile heroine manoeuvres her way, via bigamy, arson and attempted murder, into an aristocratic marriage before being exposed by her husband's nephew and committed to an asylum in Belgium. Braddon's own life was almost as extraordinary and unstable. Her parents, Henry Braddon, a solicitor, and his Irish wife Fanny White, separated when Mary Elizabeth, the youngest of their three children, was only four. Her style is episodic and digressive, so that she often interrupts herself to describe rooms, homes, gardens and streets while recounting memories of her education, her reading or her early enjoyment of writing. Money was always short in the family, and Braddon was soon contributing to her support by acting on stage under the name Mary Seyton, before abandoning this in favour of a literary career.
