Lady Audley's Secret

Description

Graceful and lovely Lady Audley may not be all that she seems in this Victorian-era equivalent of Gone Girl. A bestseller when it was first published, Lady Audley's Secret shocked readers because it dared to suggest that beneath a perfect surface, a woman might be willing to lie, con, and even kill to obtain the life she wanted. Lady Audley is young, beautiful, and worshipped by her husband, the wealthy Sir Michael Audley, and everyone who meets her. Sir Michael's nephew Robert is equally struck by his new aunt's sweet and thoughtful nature--until, that is, he notices the strange, terrifying effect Lady Audley has on his friend George Talboys. When George mysteriously vanishes, Robert is convinced that Lady Audley is neither as innocent nor as helpless as she appears, and he sets out to discover what secrets lie in Lady Audley's past. Featuring an introduction by Flynn Berry, the Edgar Award-winning author of Under the Harrow and A Double Life.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London in 1835. When she was four, her mother left her father--then an unusual and highly risky decision. Braddon began writing at the age of eight and became an actress at the age of twenty-two in order to support her family. Three years later, she began writing serial fiction for various magazines, some of which were owned by her long-term lover, publisher, and later husband, John Maxwell. She is chiefly remembered for Lady Audley's Secret, the bestseller that made her name. She had a prolific and extremely profitable career, writing more than eighty novels and editing two magazines, thus supporting her husband, their six children, and his five children from his first wife. In 1899, the London newspaper TheDaily Telegraph named Lady Audley's Secret as one of the world's best one hundred novels. Braddon lived to see one of her novels, Aurora Floyd, adapted into a movie in 1913. She died in 1915.