Three Times Dead reissued as The
Trail of the Serpent. Lady Audley’s
Secret a great success (1861—2).
The Black Band (anon.)
Death of Prince Albert; Offences
Against the Person Act (which
includes provisions on bigamy);
beginning of American Civil War.
Eliot, Silas Marner
Wood, East Lynne (3 vols.)
1862
Gives birth to Gerald, the first of
her six children by Maxwell
(five of whom survive infancy).
Aurora Floyd (1862—3)
Lady Audley’s Secret (3 vols.)
The Lady Lisle (2 vols.)
London Exposition.
Bulwer Lytton, A Strange Story
Collins, No Name
Trollope, Orley Farm
1863
Son, Francis, born (January);
daughter, Fanny, born (December).
Eleanor’s Victory
John Marchmont’s Legacy
The first (steam-driven) underground
train in London; death of Thackeray.
Eliot, Romola
Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard
Oliphant, Salem Chapel
Reade, Hard Cash
Annie Thomas, Sir Victor’s Choice
1864
The Doctor’s Wife
Henry Dunbar
First of the Contagious Diseases Acts
attempts to control prostitution.
Collins, Armadale begins serialization
in the Cornhill.
Le Fanu, Wylder’s Hand; Uncle Silas
Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée),
Held in Bondage; or, Granville De
Vigne
Wood, Lord Oakburn’s Daughters;
Oswald Cray; Trevlyn Hold
1865
Only a Clod
Sir Jasper’s Tenant
End of American Civil War and
abolition of slavery in the USA;
vicious suppression of a slave revolt
in Jamaica by its British governor,
Edward Eyre, leads to public outcry
in Britain; births of Kipling and
Yeats; death of Gaskell.
Florence Marryat, Love’s Conflict;
Woman Against Woman
Ouida, Strathmore
Wood, Mildred Arkell
1866
Maxwell founds Belgravia
Magazine for Braddon, and she
edits it for a decade. Second
son Francis dies; third son,
William, born.
The Lady’s Mile
Second Contagious Diseases Act;
first petition to parliament for female
suffrage.
Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical
Eliza Lynne Linton, Lizzie Lorton of
Grey Rigge
Ouida, Chandos
Charlotte Riddell, The Race for
Wealth
Wood, St Martin’s Eve
1867
Rupert Godwin
Birds of Prey
Second Reform Act extends the male
franchise, increasing electorate to
about 2 million; Paris Exhibition.
Broughton, Not Wisely But Too Well;
Cometh Up As a Flower
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Linton, Sowing the Wind
Marx, Das Kapital
Riddell, Far Above Rubies
Wood, Lady Adelaide’s Quest; A Life’s
1868
Death of sister (October) and mother
(1 November), birth of daughter
Winifred (Rosie) (December);
nervous breakdown complicated by
puerperal fever (1868–9).
Dead Sea Fruit
Charlotte’s Inheritance
Run to Earth
Last public hanging at Newgate
Prison; Report of the Royal
Commission on the Laws of
Marriage; the first Trades Union
Congress.
Collins, The Moonstone
Wood, Anne Hereford; The Red Court
Farm
1869
First women’s college at Cambridge
founded (Girton); Third Contagious
Diseases Act.
Mill, On the Subjection of Women
1870
Birth of last child, Edward.
Education Act to provide state
education for all; Married Women’s
Property Act; death of Dickens.
Collins, Man and Wife
1871
Fenton’s Quest
The Lovels of Arden
First Impressionist Exhibition in
Paris.
Darwin, Descent of Man
Eliot, Middlemarch
Hardy, Desperate Remedies
Meredith, Harry Richmond
Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
Wood, Dene Hollow
1872
To the Bitter End
Introduction of Secret Ballot.
Collins, Poor Miss Finch
Wood, Within the Maze
1873
Begins to write for the stage again,
with only modest success.
Lucius Davoren
Milly Darrell (a collection of stories)
Pater, Studies in the Renaissance
Wood, The Master of Greylands
1874
Marries Maxwell (2 October) on the
death of his first wife (5 September).
Factory Act.
Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
Taken at the Flood (the first of her
novels to be syndicated in a range of
British newspapers via Tillotson’s
Fiction Bureau)
1875
A Strange World
Hostages to Fortune
Artisan’s Dwelling Act; Public Health
Act.
Collins, The Law and the Lady
1876
Founds, edits, and writes for the
Christmas annual The Mistletoe
Bough.
Dead Men’s Shoes
Joshua Haggard’s Daughter
Invention of telephone and
phonograph.
Eliot, Daniel Deronda
James, Roderick Hudson
Lombroso, The Criminal
Riddell, Above Suspicion
Wood, Edina
1880
The Story of Barbara
Just As I Am
First Anglo-Boer War; deaths of
George Eliot and Flaubert.
James, Portrait of a Lady begins
serialization in Macmillan’s
Magazine.
Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter
Gissing, Workers in the Dawn
Ouida, Moths
Riddell, The Mystery in Palace
Zola, Nana
1884
Ishmael
Fabian Society founded; Third
Reform Act; birth of D. H. Lawrence.
Zola, Germinal
1885
Wyllard’s Weird
1887
Victoria’s Golden Jubilee;
Independent Labour Party founded;
death of Ellen Wood. Haggard, She Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
1888
The Fatal Three
Invention of Kodak box camera; death
of Arnold; birth of T. S. Eliot.
Collins, The Legacy of Cain
1889
The Day Will Come
The first electric underground trains
run in London; London Dock strike;
death of Collins.
Gissing, The Nether World
S
haw, Fabian Essays in Socialism
1892
The Venetians
Gissing, Born in Exile
1894
Her brother becomes Prime Minister of Australia.
1895
Death of John Maxwell (3 March).
Lumière brothers invent the portable
motion picture camera; trial of Oscar
Wilde.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Wells, The Time Machine
1896
Publishes her sixty-ninth novel;
‘The Good Lady Ducayne’
(a vampire story) appears in
Strand Magazine (February).
Conrad, Alamayer’s Folly
Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
1899
Boer War (–1902).
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
1901
Death of Victoria, accession of
Edward VII.
1904
Death of brother.
A Lost Eden
Conrad, Nostromo
1907
Dead Love Has Chains
Bennett, A Grim Smile of the Five
Towns
1910
Beyond These Voices
Death of Edward VII, accession of
George V.
Bennett, Clayhanger
Forster, Howards End
1913
Miranda
Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
1914
First World War begins (August).
James Joyce, Dubliners
1915
Dies at Richmond (4 February)
from a cerebral haemorrhage.
1916
Mary, her last novel, is published.
LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET
DEDICATED
TO THE
RIGHT HON. SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON, BART.
M.P., D.C.L., &C., &C.,
IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF
LITERARY ADVICE MOST GENEROUSLY GIVEN
TO THE
AUTHOR
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
I.
Lucy
II.
On Board the Argus
III.
Hidden Relics
IV.
In the First Page of the ‘Times’
V.
The Headstone at Ventnor
VI.
Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World
VII.
After a Year
VIII.
Before the Storm
IX.
After the Storm
X.
Missing
XI.
The Mark upon My Lady’s Wrist
XII.
Still Missing
XIII.
Troubled Dreams
XIV.
Phœbe’s Suitor
XV.
On the Watch
XVI.
Robert Audley Gets His Congé
XVII.
At the Castle Inn
XVIII.
Robert Receives a Visitor
XIX.
The Blacksmith’s Mistake
VOLUME II
I.
The Writing in the Book
II.
Mrs Plowson
III.
Little Georgey Leaves His Old Home
IV.
Coming to a Standstill
V.
Clara
VI.
George’s Letters
VII.
Retrograde Investigation
VIII.
So Far and No Farther
IX.
Beginning at the Other End
X.
Hidden in the Grave
XI.
In the Lime-Walk
XII.
Preparing the Ground
XIII.
Phœbe’s Petition
VOLUME III
I.
The Red Light in the Sky
II.
The Bearer of the Tidings
III.
My Lady Tells the Truth
IV.
The Hush that Succeeds the Tempest
V.
Dr Mosgrave’s Advice
VI.
Buried Alive
VII.
Ghost-Haunted
VIII.
That which the Dying Man had to Tell
IX.
Restored
X.
At Peace
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
LUCY
IT lay low down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes,* bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all.
At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock-tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court.*
A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad gravelled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers,* and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter.
The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions* and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as if they were so broken down by age and long service, that they must have fallen but for the straggling ivy which, crawling up the walls and trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and supported them. The principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building, as if it was in hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep itself a secret—a noble door for all that—old oak, and studded with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick that the sharp iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound; and the visitor rang a clanging bell that dangled in a corner amongst the ivy, lest the noise of the knocking should never penetrate the stronghold.
A glorious old place—a place that visitors fell into raptures with; feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to stay there for ever, staring into the cool fish-ponds, and counting the bubbles as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water—a spot in which Peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower; on the still ponds and quiet alleys; the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms; the deep window-seats behind the painted glass; the low meadows and the stately avenues—ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle handle that was never turned, and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.
A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place—a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to go about it alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its turn, led b
ack into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the farthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder—Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling over now a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall there, and allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a house, there were secret chambers: the little daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealing a ladder leading to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below—a hiding-place so small that he who hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half filled with priests’ vestments which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harboured a Roman Catholic priest, or to have had mass said in his house.