Lady Audley's Secret
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy Victorian suspense and family secrets
- Literature lovers interested in the sensation novel genre
- Readers who want to understand nineteenth-century issues of women and marriage
- Readers of English classics who want a tightly plotted, highly readable book
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer modern fast-paced thrillers or hardcore detective fiction
- Readers impatient with Victorian long sentences and slow buildup
- Readers expecting strict realism and moral didacticism
Reading tips
- In the early chapters, note details at characters' first appearances; they will be echoed repeatedly later
- Compare the narrator's evaluations of characters with their actual behavior to appreciate the irony
- Halfway through, try to predict where the secret is heading, then see how the narration manipulates expectation
- Read alongside background on Victorian marriage and property law to understand the roots of the conflict
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book a detective novel?
Can I read it without a background in Victorian literature?
Will the "secret" in the title be revealed early?
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About the author
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was an English novelist of the Victorian era, known for her intricate, suspenseful popular fiction. Her representative work, Lady Audley's Secret, revolves around concealed identity and hidden secrets and is regarded as part of the "sensation novel" tradition, enjoying wide popularity in its day. The collection holds 35 of her works, including, besides the above, the three-volume Aurora Floyd, Wyllard's Weird, the three-volume John Marchmont's Legacy, All along the River and Run to Earth. She excelled at weaving crime, deception and emotional entanglements into domestic settings, with brisk pacing and dramatic turns of fortune; her work has had a lasting influence on later popular and suspense fiction. Public information on the details of her life is limited, so they are not elaborated here.
