Lady Audley's Secret

A detailed Summary of Lady Audley's Secret

The Style and Genre of Lady Audley's Secret

Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is a novel of many elements. It has been placed in many different style or genre categories since its publication. I feel that it best fits under the melodrama or sensational genre, and under the subgenre of mystery. It contains significant elements of both types of writing, so I feel it is best to recognize both, keeping in mind that melodrama is its main device and mystery is a type of Victorian melodrama. In order to understand how the story fits into these categories, it is necessary to explore the Victorian characteristics of each, and apply them to the text. In addition to establishing the genres, it is important to explain why and how these genres fit into Victorian culture.

The term melodrama has come to be applied to any play with romantic plot in which an author manipulates events to act on the emotions of the audience without regard for character development or logic (Microsoft Encarta). In order to classify as a Victorian melodrama, several key techniques must be used, including proximity and familiarity to the audience, deceit rather than vindictive malice, lack of character development and especially the role of s

Everything that Lady Audley does seems calculated. Unlike violent stories of the past in which a criminal kills for the sake of killing, Lady Audley is brilliant in her bigamy, her arson, and her "murder". The nature of her crimes reflect a general fear of intimate and buried violence, suggesting a growing anxiety about being threatened from within. Her moves are calculated and planned. Murders and robberies spring from a specific social context, not from psychosis or vindictive malice (Kalikoff, 81). Murders in Victorian melodramas are often the result of elaborate plans to conceal identity, right a wrong or improve social status.

With the aspects of melodrama in mind, it is now possible to explore the book's role as a mystery. Like their predecessors in the thirties and forties, mid-Victorian melodramas on crime found large and devoted followers. It has been remarked that the Victorian style of murder mystery originated in a book called The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins. Collin's tale is about a daughter who is bound to marry a man her father has chosen for her on his death bed, and the investigation by her half sister and a man named Walter Hartright into her mysterious death (Peterson, 41). Braddon's novel mimics several of the key devices and themes used in Collins' tale, like making the hero the sleuth who solves the underlying mystery, rather than using a professional detective and including the idea of madness and/or its connection to insane asylums. Another more famous author that preceded Braddon in writing mysteries was Charles Dickens. In his novel Bleak House, Dickens uses a mansion, a baronet doing on a wife of unknown antecedents, the wife's exhaustion when anything reminded her of that earlier history, and the grave warning she received from the lawyer who had investigated it to contrive a suspenseful plot (Horsman, 217). These concepts are mirrored in Braddon's tale as Audley Court, Sir Michael's uncertainty when he first proposed to Lucy about her past, Lady Audley's attempts to avoid any talk of her past, and of course, Robert's grave warning to Lady Audley that he was on to her scheme. In Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Braddon took to the new form like a duck to water. Using these two works as example, Braddon evolved the mystery and created what is her best selling work ever, Lady Audley's Secret.

In Lady Audley's Secret, crimes logically emerge from an environment in which social status is valued above everything. Crimes committed to improving social status usually focus around a man or woman with a past. Married to a man three times her age, Lady Audley would raise anyone's eyebrows, yet she successfully ensnares Sir Michael and very nearly achieves her ambitions. Who is safe when the most ruthless conniver insinuates herself into the aristocracy? (Kalikoff, 84). In Lady Audley's Secret, aristocrats are not dangerous, those who intrude into higher social classes are. Because she committed a social crime by marrying Sir Michael, Lady Audley is suspect from the start. Of particular offences in Victorian melodramas, the most popular tends to be bigamy. Many novels of the Victorian time hung their narrative on bigamy in act, bigamy in intention, or on the supposed existence of two wives to the same husband, or two husbands to the same wife. Indeed, so popular has this crime become, as to give rise to an entire sub-class of this branch of literature, which may be distinguished as that of Bigamy Novels (Manse, 6). Lady Audley's cunning bigamy and eventual murder represent the mid-Victorian fear of a wicked woman whose manipulative sexuality allows her to pursue dreams of wealth, social status, an

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Approximate Word count = 2472
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels