Mary Elizabeth Braddon

English novelist

• Born: October 4, 1835
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 4, 1915
• Place of death: Richmond, England

Although Braddon outraged reviewers and moralists with her sensational plots and her unconventional lifestyle, she wrote some of the best-selling novels of the Victorian period, most notably Lady Audley’s Secret. She attempted serious fiction with less success and advised other novelists, including Henry James.

Early Life

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the younger of the two daughters of Henry Braddon, a ne’er-do-well English solicitor originally from Cornwall, and his wife Fanny, née White, who was Irish by birth. Her gravestone and memorial tablet both give 1837 as her date of birth, but the 1835 date of her parish register entry is incontestable. When she was about five years old, her parents separated, something extremely unusual at the time, after her mother discovered her father’s infidelity. Mary Elizabeth then lived with her mother and went through several moves, including a brief spell at St. Leonards on Sea in East Sussex and time at various London addresses. She and her mother also experienced considerable financial hardship.

When Mary Elizabeth reached her late teens, she became an actor and took the stage name of Mary Seyton, though she seems to have been more dependent on her looks than her talent. Many of her later novels use theatrical allusions or metaphors, but women actors were not considered respectable, and her time on the stage was one of many things for which reviewers of her novels later criticized her. At the same time, she was also writing poetry and plays. Through her poems, she came to the attention of John Gilby, an eccentric Yorkshire squire who established her in Beverley, near Hull, and paid her to write a verse epic on on the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi ; he apparently intended to propose marriage to her after he had helped preserve her delicacy by ensuring her financial independence. However, Mary Elizabeth actually used the time to complete a novel, Three Times Dead . It was printed by a Hull publisher in 1860, and her literary career was launched.

Life’s Work

The successful publication of her first novel took Braddon back to London, where she soon met the Irish-born publisher John Maxwell. They fell in love, but Maxwell already had a wife. Like the mother of Braddon’s most famous heroine, Lady Audley, Maxwell’s wife had been stricken with insanity (presumably puerperal psychosis) after the birth of her sixth child and was permanently incarcerated in a mental asylum in Dublin, Ireland. Nevertheless Braddon and Maxwell became lovers and their first child, Gerald Maxwelll—who later became a novelist himself—was born in March, 1862. He was followed by five more children, of whom four survived infancy. Braddon eventually married Maxwell and seems to have been an affectionate and valued stepmother to his five surviving children by his first wife. She also continued to write at a furious pace.

After 1862, Braddon regularly produced serials for Maxwell’s two magazines and also for others, which then went on to be separately published as novels, as well as short stories, essays, and plays. In 1866, she became editor of the magazine Belgravia, which was published by Maxwell. Her most notable work during this period was the three-volume novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which she first published in serial form in one of her husband’s magazines. This powerful and gripping book cleverly and teasingly inverts both the story of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) and the ideal of the “angel in the house.”

Lady Audley’s Secret tells a tale of bigamy, but bigamy committed not by a Byronic hero but by a blond, seemingly innocent governess, who also twice attempts murder and—like Bertha in Jane Eyre—succeeds in committing arson. The novel scandalized reviewers, who objected both to the sensuality and selfishness of its heroine and her ability to act alone, something considered entirely beyond the capacity of a woman. Reviewers were also shocked that the book appealed to women of all classes and thus seemed to work toward the obliteration of class distinctions. According to the magazine The Living Age, it was “one of the most noxious books of the modern times.”

While Braddon was buoyed by the success of Lady Audley’s Secret, she was also distressed by the vitriolic nature of many of the reviews of it and of her other works, several of which darkly referred to her own status of “living in sin” with a man already married. In 1867, the much more respectable novelist Margaret Oliphant discussed Lady Audley’s Secret in Blackwood’s Magazine and scathingly charged that it

brought in the reign of bigamy as an interesting and fashionable crime, which no doubt shows a certain deference to the British relish for law and order. It goes against the seventh commandment, no doubt, but it does it in a legitimate sort of way, and is an invention which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attraction of impropriety, and yet loving the shelter of law.

Braddon’s response to such criticism was to seek respectability wherever she could find it. In 1874, Maxwell’s first wife died, and Maxwell was finally able to marry Braddon. Even before her marriage helped make her more respectable, Braddon took care in her writing to ensure that none of her new novels would offend reviewers by not creating heroines who acted independently. Even in “sensation novels” that were otherwise similar in style to Lady Audley’s Secret—such as Eleanor’s Victory (1863) and The Fatal Three (1888)—she used heroines who rely on male friends or relatives to act for them. The heroine in The Doctor’s Wife (1864) is too innocent even to understand when the man she loves is suggesting adultery to her.

The Doctor’s Wife is also an example of a style of novel that Braddon sought increasingly to develop: clearly a response to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), and apparently an influence on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), it is obviously an attempt at serious writing. Indeed, one of its characters, Sigismund Smith, is a parodic version of a sensation novelist. Braddon’s aim was to produce one such serious novel each year to sit alongside her more commercially successful and more easily written sensation novels; however, it is the latter that offer the most interesting examples of her work.

Braddon never stopped writing, and Mary , the last of her ninety-plus novels, was published in 1916, the year after her death. She did, however, gain undoubted respectability. Her many literary visitors at Richmond during the last decades of her life included the novelists Henry James and Bram Stoker. A handsome brass tablet to her memory in the parish church in Richmond, Surrey speaks fulsomely, if not entirely convincingly, of her “rare and refined scholarship.” Indeed throughout her life she was always careful to advertise in her novels her knowledge of the fashionable world and of exotic locations such as Paris.

Significance

Mary Elizabeth Braddon challenged contemporary ideologies of both the nature of women and the purpose and value of prose fiction. In a post-Darwinian world, she represented seemingly respectable society as a jungle in which women must struggle to survive, and the ostensibly happy Victorian household as a bitter battlefield. She tackled previously taboo subjects such as postnatal depression and women’s sexuality, as well as more topical issues such as Great Britain’s Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Act and the Victorian crisis of faith, the subjects of her novel The Fatal Three.

Braddon’s focus on the domestic helped sensation fiction break entirely away from the Gothic to become securely established as a genre in its own right. She also exerted a considerable influence on a number of younger novelists, including two of her own sons, Gerald Maxwell and W. B. Maxwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and George Eliot.

Braddon’s Novels

1860

• Three Times Dead: Or, The Secret of the Heath (revised as The Trail of the Serpent, 1861)

1861-1862

• The Black Band: Or, The Mysteries of Midnight (also as What Is This Mystery?)

1862

• The Captain of the Vulture (also as Darrell Markham: Or, The Captain of the Vulture)

1862

• Lady Audley’s Secret

1862

• The Lady Lisle

1863-1864

• The Outcast: Or, The Brand of Society (also as Henry Dunbar: The Story of an Outcast)

1863

• Aurora Floyd

1863

• Eleanor’s Victory

1863

• John Marchmont’s Legacy

1864

• The Doctor’s Wife

1864

• The Lawyer’s Secret

1865

• Only a Clod

1865

• Sir Jasper’s Tenant

1866-1867

• Diavola: Or, The Woman’s Battle (also as Run to Earth and Nobody’s Daughter: Or, The Ballad-Singer of Wapping)

1866

• The Lady’s Mile

1867

• Birds of Prey

1867

• Circe: Or, Three Acts in the Life of an Artist

1867

• Rupert Godwin

1868

• Charlotte’s Inheritance

1868

• Dead Sea Fruit

1868

• The White Phantom

1869

• The Factory Girl: Or, All Is Not Gold That Glitters

1869

• The Octoroon: Or, The Lily of Louisiana

1869

• Oscar Bertrand: Or, The Idiot of the Mountain

187?

• The Blue Hand: Or, The Story of a Woman’s Vengeance

187?

• Leighton Grange: Or, Who Killed Edith Woodville (also as The Mystery of Leighton Grange)

1871

• Fenton’s Quest

1871

• The Lovels of Arden

1872

• Robert Ainsleigh (also as Bound to John Company: Or, The Adventures and Misadventures of Robert Ainsleigh)

1872

• To the Bitter End

1873

• Lucius Davoren: Or, Publicans and Sinners (also as Publicans and Sinners)

1873

• Strangers and Pilgrims

1874

• Taken at the Flood

1874

• Lost for Love

1875

• Hostages to Fortune

1875

• A Strange World

1876

• Dead Men’s Shoes

1876

• Joshua Haggard’s Daughter

1876

• Only a Woman

1878

• An Open Verdict

1879

• The Cloven Foot

1879

• George Caulfield’s Journey

1879

• Vixen

1880

• Just As I Am

1880

• The Story of Barbara, Her Splendid Misery and Her Gilded Cage (also as Her Splendid Misery)

1881

• Asphodel

1881

• His Secret

1881

• Le Pasteur de Marston

1881

• Wages of Sin

1882

• Flower and Weed

1882

• Mount Royal

1883

• The Golden Calf

1883

• Married in Haste

1883

• Phantom Fortune

1883

• Under the Red Flag

1884

• Ishmael (also as The Ishmaelite)

1885

• The Fatal Marriage: Or, The Shadow in the Corner

1885

• Wyllard's Weird

1886

• The Little Woman in Black

1886

• Mohawks

1886

• One Thing Needful, and Cut By the County (also as Penalty of Fate: Or, The One Thing Needful)

1887

• Like and Unlike

1888

• The Fatal Three

1889

• The Day Will Come

1889

• Rough Justice

1889

• Whose Was the Hand?

1890

• One Life, One Love

1891

• Gerard: Or, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (also as The World, the Flesh, and the Devil)

1892

• The Venetians

1893

• All Along the River

1894

• Thou Art the Man

1895

• Sons of Fire

1896

• London Pride: Or, When the World Was Younger (also as When the World Was Younger)

1897

• Under Love's Rule

1898

• In High Places

1899

• His Darling Sin

1900

• The Infidel

1903

• The Conflict

1904

• A Lost Eden

1905

• The Rose of Life

1906

• The White House

1907

• Dead Love Has Chains

1907

• Her Convict

1908

• During Her Majesty's Pleasure

1909

• Our Adversary

1910

• Beyond These Voices

1911

• The Green Curtain

1913

• Miranda

1916

• Mary

Bibliography

Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of her Life and Work. Hastings, England: The Sensation Press, 2000. Uses new evidence to update previous accounts of Braddon’s biography and explore the full range of her literary activity.

Hopkins, Lisa. “Monsters Under Domestication: Mary Elizabeth Braddon.” In Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2004. This chapter in Hopkins’s book examines Braddon’s novels as part of a wider investigation into the impact of Darwinian theory on literature.

Tromp, Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, eds. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. Collection of recent essays that range widely across Braddon’s work.

Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Garland, 1979. Now obtainable only from libraries or secondhand, this book still deserves attention as the first serious study of Braddon.