NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE text of this edition is the same as that used in David Skilton’s previous Oxford World’s Classics edition and is set from the ‘eighth edition revised’, which incorporates the changes which Braddon made for the third edition (referred to below) and corrects a few obvious errors, in some cases after consulting a later one-volume edition.
As noted in my Introduction, Lady Audley’s Secret has a complicated publication history. It first appeared in weekly instalments in Robin Goodfellow, running from 6 July 1861 until 28 September 1861 when the magazine closed. It was then serialized in monthly instalments in the Sixpenny Magazine between January and December 1862 (or February 1862 and January 1863, depending on whether one is using the date of the magazine’s appearance or the date on its cover). The first three-volume edition was published by Tinsley Brothers in October 1862 and was in its eighth edition by December 1862. Apart from minor corrections and changes to punctuation the only significant alterations occur in the third ‘revised’ edition, in which Braddon made additions to two chapters in the final volume. In Chapter VI of Volume III (‘Buried Alive’) she added two passages to the details of the description of Lady Audley’s incarceration in the maison de santé: the paragraph beginning ‘Mr Audley left my lady in a dreary coffee-room’ (p. 328), and a shorter passage—‘the inmates dine together … utmost efforts being exerted to ensure her comfort’ (p. 332). Braddon also added approximately three hundred words to the novel’s penultimate chapter (‘Restored’) expanding George’s description of his escape from the well: ‘George Talboys spoke very briefly … yes he told me all’ (pp. 377–8). The text of the third ‘revised’ edition was used for all subsequent editions, including the one-volume editions, and for the serialization which ran in weekly instalments in the London Journal in 1863.
The first thirty-two chapters of the serialization in the Sixpenny Magazine (i.e. up to and including the first chapter of Volume III) appeared before the first two editions of the three-volume version. The last nine chapters of this serialization, on the other hand, include the changes that Braddon made for the third ‘revised’ edition. There is one significant difference between the text of the Sixpenny serial and all subsequent versions of the novel. Chapter 13 (‘Troubled Dreams’) in the Sixpenny includes a highly wrought, ‘sensational’ passage about Robert’s dreams that does not appear in any other editions—possibly because it ‘gives too much away too soon’.1 The deleted passage, which occurs between the paragraph beginning ‘At one time he was pursuing strange people’ (p. 87) and the one-sentence paragraph beginning, ‘He started from his dreams’ (p. 87), reads as follows:
In another dream he saw the grave of Helen Talboys open, and while he waited, with the cold horror lifting up his hair, to see the dead woman arise and stand before him with her stiff, charnel-house drapery clinging about her frigid limbs, his uncle’s wife tripped gaily out of the open grave, dressed in the crimson velvet robes in which the artist had painted her, and with her ringlets flashing like red gold in the unearthly light that shone about her.
But into all these dreams the places he had been in, and the people with whom he had last been concerned, were dimly interwoven—sometimes his uncle; sometimes Alicia; oftenest of all my lady; the trout stream in Essex; the lime-walk at the Court. Once he was walking in the black shadows of this long avenue with Lady Audley hanging on his arm, when suddenly they heard a great knocking in the distance, and his uncle’s wife wove her slender arms about him, crying out that it was the day of judgement, and that all wicked secrets must now be told. Looking at her as she shrieked this in his ear, he saw that her face had grown ghastly white, and that her beautiful golden ringlets were changing into serpents and slowly creeping down her fair neck.
Although there are few variations between the text of the serial and volume versions of Lady Audley’s Secret there are significant differences in its organization. The serial versions in both the Sixpenny and the London Journal were organized into forty-one chapters, whereas the volume version had forty-two, Braddon having subdivided the Sixpenny’s nineteenth chapter to form Chapter XIX of Volume I and Chapter I of Volume II. The concluding paragraph of Chapter 31 of the Sixpenny serial became the opening paragraph of the following chapter in the volume version (Volume II Chapter XIII). The serializations also subdivided some chapters across instalments. Thus the Sixpenny split its Chapter 38 (3:7) at ‘It shone from the window of the cottage in which Luke Marks lay, watched by his wife and mother’ (p. 347), starting the next instalment with ‘Chapter 38 Continued’, beginning ‘Mr Dawson lifted the latch’ (p. 348). The London Journal also split this chapter across instalments, but made its division at the end of the paragraph beginning ‘But Clara Talboys had written to him’ (p. 348). Because of the length requirements of weekly serialization the London Journal divides several of the chapters across instalments, so its readers had a different experience of reading Lady Audley’s Secret from those who first read the novel in either the Sixpenny or the three-volume edition.
Note on the Organization of the Serial Versions
The twelve monthly parts of serial version in the Sixpenny were organized as follows (instalment number followed by volume number and chapter number in brackets):
1 (I:I–III); 2 (I:IV–VII); 3 (I:VIII–XII); 4 (I:XIII–XVI); 5 (I:XVII–II:II); 6 (II:III–V); 7 (II:VI–VIII); 8 (II:IX–XI); 9 (II:XII–III:I); 10 (III:II–V); 11 (III:VI–VII [ending at ‘wife and mother’, p. 348]); 12 (III:VII [starting at ‘Mr Dawson lifted the latch’, p. 348]—III:X).
The twenty-two weekly parts of serial version in the London Journal were organized as follows (instalment number followed by volume number and chapter number in brackets):
1 (I:I–II); 2 (I:III–V); 3 (I:VI–VII); 4 (I:VIII–IX); 5 (I:X–XIII); 6 (I:XIV–XV); 7 (I:XVI–XVIII); 8 (I:XIX–II:II); 9 (II:III–IV [ending at ‘any other side’, p. 158]); 10 (II:IV [starting at ‘Robert Audley’s heart sank’, p. 158]—II:VII [ending at ‘what was he thinking?’, p. 186]); 11 (II:VII [starting at ‘Robert Audley had been seated’, p. 186]—II:VIII); 12 (II:IX–X); 13 (II:XI–XII [ending at ‘henceforth motherless’, p. 242]); 14 (II:XII [starting at ‘Sir Michael Audley rose’, p. 242]—II:XIII); 15 (III:I); 16 (III:II); 17 (III:III); 18 (III:IV–V); 19 (III:VI–VII [ending at ‘upwards of six miles’, p. 341]); 20 (III:VII [starting at ‘He had a long time’, p. 341]); 21 (III:VIII); 22 (III:IX–X).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibliography
Wolf, Robert L., Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Catalogue, 5 vols. (London and New York, 1981–6).
Biographies, Memoirs, and Letters
Braddon, M. E., ‘My First Novel: The Trail of the Serpent’, Idler, 3 (1893), 19–30.
—— ‘The Woman I Remember’, in T. Catling (ed.), The Press Album (London: John Murray, 1909).
‘Miss Braddon at Home’, Daily Telegraph, 4 Oct. 1913, p. 9.
Carnell, Jennifer, The Literary Lives of M. E. Braddon (Hastings: The Sensation Press, 2000).
Holland, Clive, ‘Fifty Years of Novel Writing’, Pall Mall Magazine, 14 (1911), 697–709.
Maxwell, William M., Time Gathered (London: Hutchinson, 1937).
Sadleir, Michael, Things Past (London: Constable, 1944).
Wolff, Robert L., ‘Devoted Disciple: The Letters of Mary Elizabeth Braddon to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1862–1873’, Harvard University Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), 1–35 and 129–61.
—— Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland, 1979).
Critical Studies of Braddon and General Studies of Sensation Fiction
Brantlinger, Patrick, ‘What is Sensational about the Sensation Novel?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), 1–28.
—— The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Casey, Ellen Miller, ‘Other People’s Prudery: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’, in D
on Richard Cox (ed.), Sexuality and Victorian Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 72–82.
Cox, Jessica, ‘From Page to Screen: Transforming M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Journal of Gender Studies, 14 (2005), 23–31.
Cvetkovich, Ann, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Fahnestock, Jeanne, ‘Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36 (1981), 47–71.
Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader, 1937–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Garrison, Laurie, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels; The Pleasures of the Senses (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010).
Gilbert, Pamela, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Harrison, Kimberly, and Fantina, Richard (eds.), Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2006).
Hughes, Winifred, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Loesberg, Jonathan, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction’, Representations, 13 (1986), 115–38.
Matus, Jill L., Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Palmer, Beth, ‘Are the Victorians Still With Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century’, Victorian Studies, 52 (2009), 86–94.
Phegley, Jennifer, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
Pykett, Lyn, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992).
—— The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994).
Radford, Andrew, Victorian Sensation Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Robinson, Solveig, ‘Editing Belgravia: M. E. Braddon’s Defense of “Light Literature”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 28 (1995), 109–22.
Rubery, Matthew, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Trodd, Anthea, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Tromp, Marlene, Gilbert, Pamela, and Haynie, Aeron (eds.), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
Contemporary Essays and Reviews
‘The Archbishop of York on Works of Fiction’, The Times, 2 Nov. 1862, p. 9.
‘Mrs Wood and Miss Braddon’, Littell’s Living Age, 18 Apr. 1863, pp. 99–103.
‘Sensation’, Literary Times, 9 May 1863, pp. 102–3: 102.
‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, 46 (1864), 209–36.
[Dallas, E. S.], ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, The Times, 18 Nov. 1862, p. 4.
James, Henry, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 9 Nov. 1865, pp. 593–5.
[Mansel, H. L.], ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), 481–514.
[Oliphant, Margaret], ‘Sensational Novels’, Blackwoods, 91 (1862), 564–80.
—— ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 102 (1867), 257–80.
[Rae, W. Fraser], ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British Review, 43 (1865), 180–204.
Sala, G. A., ‘The Cant of Modern Criticism’, Belgravia: A London Magazine (Nov. 1867), 45–55.
—— ‘On the Sensational in Literature and Art’, Belgravia: A London Magazine (Feb. 1868), 449–58.
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Aurora Floyd, ed. P. D. Edwards.
—— The Doctor’s Wife, ed. Lyn Pykett.
Collins, Wilkie, Man and Wife, ed. Norman Page.
—— The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland.
—— The Woman in White, ed. John Sutherland.
Wood, Ellen, East Lynne, ed. Elisabeth Jay.
A CHRONOLOGY OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON
Life
Historical and Cultural Context
1835
Born (4 October) in Frith Street,
Soho, third child of Henry and
Fanny Braddon.
Dickens, Sketches by Boz (1st series)
Edward Bulwer Lytton, Rienzi
1837
Death of William IV and accession of
Queen Victoria.
1838
Anti-Corn Law League founded; publication of Chartist petitions; opening of London—Birmingham railway.
Dickens, Oliver Twist
1840
Her parents separate owing to her
father’s infidelity and financial
irresponsibility.
Penny Post introduced; birth of Thomas
Hardy; marriage of Victoria and Albert.
Darwin, Voyage of HMS Beagle
Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
1842
Chartist Riots; founding of
Metropolitan Detective Department;
opening of Mudie’s circulating
library.
1845
Attends Dartmouth Lodge
School, Kensington.
Boom in railway speculation.
Disraeli, Sybil
Engels, The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844
Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
1847
Her brother Edward goes to
work in Calcutta in India.
There are now 4,000 miles of
telegraph lines in Britain, owned by
the Electrical Telegraph Company.
Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Thackeray, Vanity Fair (serialized 1847–8)
1848
Revolutions in Europe; Chartist
demonstrations in England; formation
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
1851
Great Exhibition opens at the Crystal
Palace in Hyde Park; Australian gold
rush.
Mayhew, London Labour and the
London Poor
1852
Goes on the provincial stage as
‘Mary Seyton’.
Collins, Basil
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Thackeray, The History of Henry
Esmond
1854
First meeting with Edward Bulwer
Lytton, who had long been her
literary hero.
Charge of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava in the Crimean War.
Dickens, Hard Times
1855
Foundation of the Langham Place
Group of feminists urging changes in
marriage laws.
1856
London stage debut.
1857
Poem by Mary Seyton published
in the Beverley Recorder (9 May).
Her brother Edward Braddon
in India.
Matrimonial Causes Act establishes
Divorce Court and allows limited
access to divorce; Indian Mutiny.
Collins, The Dead Secret
Dickens, Little Dorrit
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Trollope, Barchester Towers
1858
Poem by Mary Seyton published in
the Brighton Herald (9 January).
Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.
Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
1859
Gives up the stage; attempts to
write a novel entitled Master
Anthony’s Record after reading
Thackeray’s Henry Esmond.
War of Italian liberation.
Collins, The Woman in White begins
serialization in All the Year Round.
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household
Management
Darwin, Origin of Species
Eliot, Adam Bede
Mill, On Liberty
Samuel Smiles, Self Help
1860
Publishes Three Times Dead, her
first novel. Her play, The Loves
of Arcadia, is staged at the Strand
Theatre, London. First meets the
publisher John Maxwell (b. 1824) in
April.
Opening of W. H. Smith’s circulating
library.
Dickens, Great Expectations begins
serialization in All the Year Round.
Wood’s East Lynne begins serialization
in the New Monthly Magazine (January).
Collins, The Woman in White (3 vols.)
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
1861
Begins to live with Maxwell, who cannot
marry her since his wife is alive,
and confined in a lunatic asylum; is
stepmother to his five children.