Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Lady Audleys Secret (Oxford Worlds Classics)

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Editorial material Lyn Pykett 2012

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1987
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998, 2008
New edition 2012

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ISBN 9780199577033

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

LYN PYKETT

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LADY AUDLEYS SECRET

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON was born in London in October 1835, the youngest daughter of Henry Braddon (a feckless solicitor and writer on sporting subjects) and Fanny White, his Irish wife, who left him when Mary was 4 years old and brought her daughter up alone. In 1856 Braddon began producing magazine stories in an unsuccessful attempt to augment the family income, and in 1857, using the name Mary Seyton, she began a brief career as an actress, an experience on which she was to draw in several of her novels. In 1860 she wrote her first novel, Three Times Dead (later published as The Trail of the Serpent)and met the publisher John Maxwell. From this point onwards Braddons life and career became intertwined with Maxwells. The first of their children was born in 1862 (they married in 1874, following the death of Maxwells first wife), the year in which she had her first commercial success with Lady Audleys Secret. Partly as a result of the precariousness of Maxwells publishing ventures, Braddon continued to produce fiction at an extraordinary rate throughout the rest of the nineteenth century as well as conducting several magazines, including Belgravia (186676). One of the most notorious sensation novelists of the 1860s, Braddon later developed the satirical talents evident in some of her earlier work to produce sharply observed novels of contemporary social life. Several of Braddons novels were adapted for the stage, and Aurora Floyd was made into a silent film in 1913. The last of her eighty novels was published posthumously in 1916, following her death in February 1915.

LYN PYKETT is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She has published widely on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture. Her books include Emily Bront (1989), The Improper Feminine: The Womens Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone (1994), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995), Charles Dickens (2002) and Wilkie Collins (2005) for the Oxford Authors in Context series. She is also the editor of Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (1998).

LADY AUDLEYS SECRET was one of the publishing sensations of the 1860s. An immediate best-seller when it appeared in three-volume form in 1862, it was also one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. However, book sales figures do not tell the whole story. In the early 1860s Braddons novel reached a wide and diverse audience through its serialization in three magazines aimed at different kinds of readership. In addition its plot and main characters were known to many who had not read the novel in any form through the numerous stage adaptations which appeared from 1862 and were frequently revived throughout the century. Given its initial success and its continuing circulation in nineteenth-century culture it is, perhaps, unsurprising to discover that in 1899 Lady Audleys Secret was selected as one of the Daily Telegraphs 100 best novels of the nineteenth century by the papers outgoing and incoming editors Sir Edwin Arnold and W. L. Courtney and H. D. Traill (the satirical poet, biographer, literary journalist, and sometime political Telegraph leader writer). By the middle of the twentieth century, when Braddon was dismissed (when remembered at all) as merely the erstwhile favourite of the circulating library, most novel readers would have been as surprised by the inclusion of Lady Audleys Secret in the Telegraphs list as they would have been by about half of the other titles found there. However, since the 1970s, a renewed focus on women writers and a new interest in popular nineteenth-century cultural forms such as the sensation novel and the crime novel have returned