Lady Audley's Secret
Part of the Smith & Taylor Classics series, this elegant edition revives one of Victorian literature’s most thrilling and subversive novels.
Lucy Graham, radiantly beautiful, born to poverty, and Sir Michael Audley, aging aristocratic widower and fabulously wealthy, are married soon after first glance.
Life is peaceful at old Audley Court until the arrival of Robert Audley– Sir Michael’s nephew– and his friend George Talboys, who is home again after making his fortune in Australia.
When George mysteriously disappears, Robert takes it upon himself to find him again. Developing a detective’s eye, following disturbing clue after clue, Robert becomes convinced his alluring Aunt Lucy isn’t as innocent, or possibly as sane, as she seems.
Lady Audley’s Secret first appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine in 1861, establishing it as a “sensational” novel to rival Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860). A cunningly plotted mystery novel as sensual as a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, Lady Audley’s Secret probes mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumerism with the invention of one of literature’s great villainesses who goes to great lengths to secure her greatest desires.
Featuring a conversational afterword from writers Sarah Weinman and Rachel Vorona Cote.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) began writing at the age of eight but it was not until she won an admirer as an actress that she could settle down to write serial fiction. She became a bestselling 'sensation' author and was read avidly by Tennyson, Dickens and Thackery. She wrote over eighty novels.
Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She has written essays and criticisms for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Poetry Foundation, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Washington Post, and a number of other publications. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Sarah Weinman is the author of three books: Without Consent, forthcoming in 2025; Scoundrel, named a Best Book of 2022 by Time, Esquire, CBC, and NPR and a NYT Editor's Choice; and The Real Lolita, named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture, and winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award in Nonfiction. Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review. Weinman also writes (albeit more sporadically) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between. She lives in New York City.