In Lady Audley's ShadowMary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres

Provides critical readings of a wide range of Braddon's novels and short stories

• Reassesses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s literary significance by showing she was more than a sensation writer, arguing for a renewed appreciation of her role in nineteenth-century literature
• Explores Braddon’s innovative use of Victorian literary conventions, highlighting how she manipulated established codes and genres to challenge literary expectations
• Examines Braddon’s dialogue with past and present, drawing on a wide range of texts and sources to reveal her complex engagement with Victorian culture and its continuing relevance today

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. The book explores Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction Lady Audley's Secret as a paradigmatic novel and as a 'haunting' textual presence across her literary career.

Through an analysis of Braddon's negotiations with Victorian narrative, ideological and cultural issues, this monograph offers readers a refreshing view of gender, female identity and subjectivity, the treatment of insanity, questions related to technology and progress, the impact of evolutionism and Darwinism, the intersemiotic dialogue between pictorial art and novel-writing, the role of the (female) writer in the new literary market and the changing notion of capital in an increasingly fluid social context.