Mary Elizabeth Braddon

This Victorian bestseller, along with Braddon's other famous novel, Aurora Floyd, established her as the main rival of the master of the sensational novel, Wilkie Collins. A protest against the passive, insipid 19th-century heroine, Lady Audley was described by one critic of the time as "high-strung, full of passion, purpose, and movement." Her crime (the secret of the title) is shown to threaten the apparently respectable middle-class world of Victorian England.

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.

"I am simply steeped in Miss Braddon."--Alfred Lord Tennyson Tennyson was not the only Victorian reader to be captivated by Mary Elizabeth Braddon's fiction. While still in her mid-twenties, Braddon scored two remarkable hits with the sensational Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd. In John Marchmont's Legacy, Braddon offers a plot charged with drama and mystery, its eerie atmosphere and, above all, the depiction of an extraordinary woman. In remote Lincolnshire, `fenny, misty, and flat always', Olivia Arundel can find no outlet for either her intellectual abilities or her fierce passions, but is compelled to look on as the man she loves has thoughts only for a woman whose gifts are vastly inferior to her own. Braddon once declared that Wilkie Collins, the master of the `sensation novel', was `assuredly my literary father'; she herself has the same skill in weaving a story of mystery, conspiracy, menace and violence, while the energy and vivacity of her narrative are all her own. Expertly edited with an introduction by Norman Page and Toru Sasaki, this is the only edition available of this work that deserves its place alongside Braddon's great works.

This comprehensive bio-critical dictionary evaluates 117 widely read historical and contemporary women mystery writers and over 1,000 novels. From the sensationalist women mystery writers of the 19th century to the mid-1990s practitioners such as Margaret Maron, Karen Kijewski, and Sue Grafton, this work celebrates the contributions of women writers to mystery fiction, with an emphasis on contemporary writers. Signed interpretive and evaluative essays by 86 scholar-critics who are experts in the field are 4-5 pages in length and review the totality of the writer's work. A complete mystery bibliography and selected critical bibliography are also included in each entry, and helpful appendices conclude the volume. Great Women Mystery Writers is a full-fledged critical companion by noted scholars and critics, and can be used for its critical interpretations, as a reader's advisory, and as an essential reference tool for librarian and patron alike.

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day.Both genres, with their shocking, 'fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the 'proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire.By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced, The 'Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diegrave;cle periods.

This book looks at how differences among women have been textually represented at a variety of historical moments and in a variety of cultural contexts, including Victorian mainstream fiction, African-American mulatto novels, late twentieth-century lesbian communities, and contemporary country music. Sororophobia designates the complex and shifting relations between women's attempts to identify with other women and their often simultaneous desire to establish and retain difference. Michie argues for the centrality to feminism of a paradigm that moves beyond celebrations of identity and sisterhood to a more nuanced notion of women's relations with other women which may include such uncomfortable concepts as envy, jealousy, and competition as well as more institutionalized ideas of difference such as race and class. Chapters on literature are interspersed by "inter-chapters" on the choreography of sameness and difference among women in popular culture.