Product Description

With Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of `sensation novelists'. Aurora Floyd (1862-3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward's introduction evaluates the novel's leading place among `bigamy-novels' and Braddon's treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #306055 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 498 pages

Times Literary Supplement
"invaluable...provides copious explanatory notes, appendices containing reviews and writings on femininity, and a thorough introduction."

About the Author
P. D. Edwards is Darnell Professor of English at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also the editor of several Trollope titles in World's Classics.

Customer Reviews

If you liked Lady Audley's Secret...
To modern eyes, as with Braddon's other cracking bestseller, Lady Audley's Secret, the plot revelations may seem a bit transparent, but to the contemporary readers of a genre which was self-consciously pushing back the boundaries of what could be incorporated into literature, there must have been a guilty tension between what they imagined in their heads and what they scarcely dared to imagine could be set down on the page. A thoroughly gripping read, rich in mid-Victorian domestic and social detail, with Braddon equally adept at comedy, suspense and melodrama. (Presumably George Eliot was an admirer, since she used the name of one of the heroes, Bulstrode, for a character in Middlemarch, a decade later.)

Old Favourite
This is one of my very favourite novels. I've read it over and over again, and sometimes I just dip into it for pleasure. The characters almost walk off the pages, and it's a wonderful period piece if you are keen on Victoriana.