Lady Audley's Secret

The Penguin English Library Edition of Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
'Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair'
In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful - and very mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her? A huge success in the nineteenth century, the book's anti-heroine - with her good looks and hidden past - embodied perfectly the concerns of the Victorian age with morality and madness.
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Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) first burst onto the public scene at the age of eight when she played the role of 'Fairy Pineapple' in a pantomime. In a long career of overwhelming activity she edited magazines and wrote at least seventy-five novels, including such unrevived works as The Octoroon, Publicans and Sinners and Dead-Sea Fruit but also including the phenomenal Lady Audley's Secret which made her, at the age of twenty-seven, rich for life.