Discussion points and sources, Lady Audley’s Secret (1861)

1.“It lay in a hollow…mass said in this house”. Discuss the presentation of Audley Court and compare it to the other ‘English’ houses that we have encountered in this module. What kinds of thematic/stylistic importance do houses acquire in novels of crime?

2.“For you see Miss Lucy Graham…with a smile”. Compare Lucy Graham’s ‘magic power of fascination’ to other women of similar charms in the crime novels that you have studied. What does this tell us about the intersections between discourses on criminality and women in Victorian Britain?

3.“it was a ring wrapped in an oblong piece of paper…folding”. Are crime novels also novels about fragments of texts and documents?

4. “what was she but a servant like me…now look at her”. How do wealth and status define points of anxiety in the Victorian novels of crime?

5. Sensation Fiction, popularity and morality

  • Read the various sources below and consider the style and purpose of the novel.

I am always divided between a noble desire to attain something like excellence – and a very ignoble wish to earn plenty of money.

(Mary Braddon, 1864, cited in Robert Wolff, Sensational Victorian, 1979)

Excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim…And as excitement, even when harmless in kind, cannot be continually produced without becoming morbid in degree, works of this class manifest themselves as belonging….to the morbid phenomena of literature.

(Henry L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, 1862)

She may boast….of having temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room.

(W.F.Rae, ‘Sensation Novelists’, 1865)

But the [sensation] fictions….have special structural qualities as well, which can perhaps be summed up historically as their unique mixture of contemporary Domestic Realism with elements of Gothic romance, the Newgate Novel of criminal ‘low life’, and the ‘silver fork’ novel of scandalous and sometimes criminal ‘high life’.

(Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation” novel?’, 1982)

Nothing ‘boring’ about the Victorian sensation novel: the excitement that seizes us here is as direct as the ‘fight-or-flight’ physiology that renders our reading bodies…theaters of neurasthenia.

(D.A.Miller, ‘Cage aux faulles’, 1986)

Greatly inferior to man in reasoning powers, extent of views, originality and grandeur of conception, as well as in corporeal strength, woman possesses more acuteness of external sensation, or apprehension, and of emotion, though a smaller range of intelligence and less permanence of impression.

(John Elliotson, 1840)

6. Secrets and Chambers

  • Find examples in this novel of the spaces and places of crime fiction, and the use to which they are put. What are the public/private spheres and how are they transgressed?

High Victorian Gothic [in architecture]…was broadly eclectic in its inspirations and ready to use medieval precedent from a very wide range of sources both geographically and chronologically.

(Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘High Victorian Gothic’, 1957)

Place….is a site of meaningful action for the individual…such action…is derived from linkages across space and time…It is in this way that place becomes the geographical expression of the interactions between interaction and abstract historical process.

(Timothy Oakes, ‘Place and Paradox of Modernity’, 1997)

What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter? If I were to go tomorrow into that common-place, plebian, eight-roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror….I believe that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely.

(Lady Audley’s Secret, Vol.1, ch.18)

7. Servitude and economy

  • How does the novel represent “the governess”?
  • What is the depiction/position on social mobility?
  • How are ideas of masculinity related to ideas of economy?
  • What role do the “lower orders” play?

The novel, in sum, stages the ideological conflict between the domestic angel in the house and her other (the worker or servant), exposing through the female characters the mechanisms of middle-class control, including those mechanisms that were themselves fictions, stratagems of desire.

(Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 1995)

8. Disease, Madness and Detection

  • How is madness, in its different forms, gendered in the novel (find examples)?
  • What are the physical characteristics of madness, according to the novel?

When women are…put forward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position…The novelist finds that to make an effect he has to give up his heroine to bigamy…

(E.S. Dallas, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, 1866)

Lady Audley’s unfeminine assertiveness must ultimately be defined as madness.

(Elaine Showalter, ‘Desperate Remedies’, 1976)

‘On Monomania’ Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 9:4, (1856) 501-521.

Selected Reading

Brantlinger, Patrick (1982). What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation” novel? Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37.1, 1-28.

Chang, J. (2010). The Victorian Newspaper and Sensation Novel: Personal advertisement and Lady Audley's Secret. Nineteenth Century Literature in English, 14(1), 101-126.

Heinrichs, R. (2007). Critical masculinities in Lady Audley's secret. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies, 33(1), 103-120.

Knowles, N., & Hall, K. (2012). Imperial attitudes in Lady Audley's Secret. In J. Cox (Ed.), New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (pp. 37-58) Rodopi.

Langland, E. (2000). Enclosure acts: Framing women's bodies in Braddon's Lady Audley's secret. In M. Tromp, P. K. Gilbert, A. Haynie, J. R. Kincaid & L. Pykett (Eds.), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (pp. 3-16) State U of New York P.

—————- Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995)

Mansel, Henry L. (April, 1862). Sensation Novels, Quarterly Review, 113. 481-514

Montwieler, K. (2000). Marketing sensation: Lady Audley's Secret and consumer culture. In M. Tromp, P. K. Gilbert, A. Haynie, J. R. Kincaid & L. Pykett (Eds.), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (pp. 43-61) State U of New York P.

Nemesvari, R. (1995). Robert Audley's Secret: Male homosocial desire in Lady Audley's Secret. Studies in the Novel, 27(4), 515-528.

Rae, W.F. (1865). Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, North British Review, 4. 180-204

Robbins, Bruce (1986). The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Duke University Press)

Showalter, Elaine (1976). Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s’. Victorian Newsletter, 49. 1-5.