Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What a romp. Thoroughly enjoyed this, and it’s not often I read anything Victorian. The language is surprisingly, well, readable. Not something that experience has often allowed me to say about novels from the 1860s. Dickens this ain’t. Mary Elizabeth Bradden was an unashamed potboiler and she knew how to entertain. Research made me pick it up. I’ve been familiar with a period stage adaptation of this story for years, and have always loved it, and this recently made me want to discover the original. The murderous plot is pretty much the same but the approach is very different. The stage version follows the villainess, the secretive Lady Audley, while the novel follows the progress of her nemesis, the hellbent Robert Audley in his relentless pursuit of the truth. Frankly, I’m a fan of both. Poor Lady Audley, she still has all my sympathy, despite her dreadful web of lies. She’s just a girl on the make trying to better herself with the few gifts God has given her: boobs, blondness and sewer rat cunning. Squint your eyes and add a century and a half and she’s Katie Price. Or Anna Nicole Smith.
