Invisible ink no 273: Mary Elizabeth Braddon

There are authors whose lives mirror their novels, none more so than Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who was born in London’s Soho in 1835 and took to playing matronly roles on the stage, even when young, in order to support herself and her mother.

With Britain’s burgeoning youth addicted to penny dreadfuls, she soon found a more rewarding career in churning out serials filled with lurid incident. It was wearying work, ramming every episode with escalating drama, so Braddon turned to novels, by which time she and her mother were living in her married publisher’s home, acting as stepmother to his five children and delivering six more of her own while his actual wife languished in an insane asylum.

If not quite bigamy it was close enough, and found a strong echo in her first and most sensational “sensation” novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, which was published in serial form in 1862. Braddon’s bigamous heroine dumps her child, shoves her first husband down a well, nearly poisons the second one, and burns down the hotel that’s housing her other male friends.

The novel is packed with Victorian anxieties, and echoes the sensational real-life murder case of Constance Kent, throwing traditional images of blissful domesticity and dedicated motherhood into confusion. Is Lady Audley insane, faking madness, or acting deceitfully in a proto-feminist attempt to wrest control of her life, as is current fashionable thinking? Other puzzles abound in the plot, which blurs the lines between gender and class, and asks questions about Victorian identity.

Yet there’s evidence to suggest that Braddon had not thought greatly about any of this; the last third of the serial was written in under two weeks, and she may merely have been channelling the spirit of the times. As a result, it’s hard to know what exactly she thought of her villainess/heroine, although one suspects she had a kindlier eye than her critics, who weren’t happy that the literature of servants had been dragged into the main house.

Certainly it was the greatest success of more than 80 novels, most of which have utterly vanished, the last being written in 1908. Success brought the author material wealth, but also disaster; when her partner’s wife died in the asylum, letters of condolence were sent to the house, and the staff walked out upon realising that Mrs Braddon was not the first wife but a “bigamous” mistress. The scandal of her novel had been reproduced in her life.