by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the pulp fiction star of her day, and she deserves to be read for that historical fact alone. She started her career as an actress to support her mother and herself after her father abandoned them. Her stage name was Mary Seyton. She took up with a married man whose wife was in a mental asylum (madness features prominently in "Lady Audley"), and they had six children together before the wife died and they could be legally married. She kept up a grueling writing schedule from the 1860s to 1915.
Braddon borrowed elements and styles of other writers to suit middle-class magazine readers as well those who enjoyed penny thrillers. In other words, she knew what sold and how to stick to tried-and-true formulae. The intro to my edition of "Lady Audley" notes that Braddon admired Flaubert and lifted liberally from "Madame Bovary" when she wrote "The Doctor's Wife."
"Lady Audley" was originally a serial, and the pacing suffers as a result; the denoument is drawn out, as if the story was pretty much wrapped up four or five installments too early. However, it's a pretty good story with a couple of interesting plot twists, and Braddon, if she is a hack, is a good one. You find out who the perp in this mystery is is early on, but how events will be uncovered by the laconic lawyer-cum-detective, Robert Audley, is the pleasure.
And even while grinding out grist for publication, Braddon showed a special talent for satire that, when it appears, is delightful. Take Alicia Audley, a "bouncing" heiress, who pines for her cousin Robert, and imagines that she might be more interesting to her beloved in ill-health:
I believe she drew a picture of herself in the last stage of consumption, propped up by pillows in a great easy-chair, looking out a window in the afternoon sunshine, with medicine bottles, a bunch of grapes and a Bible upon a table by her side; and with Robert, all contrition and tenderness, summoned to receive her farewell blessing. She preached a whole chapter to him in that parting benediction, talking a great deal longer than was in keeping with her prostrate state, and very much enjoying her dismal castle in the air.
One wishes Braddon had had leisure to write to please herself, if only just a memoir. What a read that would have been!
UPDATE: And, yup, Braddon steals a lot from Flaubert in "The Doctor's Wife." The woman certainly knew how to write a sentence. Here's one:
It was a dear old untidy place, where the odour of distant pigsties mingled faintly with the perfume of the roses; and it was in this neglected garden that Isabel Sleafrd spent the best part of her idle, useless life.
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