Is Lady Audley in fact mad? The novel blurs the issue. Her almost obsessive devotion to the fine things which her marriage to Sir Michael has brought her, and the murderous deviousness with which she seeks to hang on to them and to the social trappings of her marriage could easily be seen as signs of monomania or madness. Similarly, her erratic, ‘unwomanly’ behaviour might be attributable either to puerperal fever, or to the nervous hysteria to which all women were prone according to many Victorian medical practitioners and theorists. Alternatively her deviousness and violence might be rooted in the insanity she latterly claims she has inherited from her mother, another simpering, childlike woman who ended her days in an asylum. At the very least, Dr Mosgrave’s rapid recanting of his initial advice to Robert that the ‘lady is not mad … She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence’ (p. 323), suggests something of the way in which madness was used to label and manage dangerous, disruptive femininity in the nineteenth century.
Having used Lady Audley both to challenge contemporary ideas of femininity and domesticity and to explore and exploit contemporary anxieties about them, Braddon’s novel, like many sensation novels, expels its disruptive heroine and restores domestic peace and order by the end of the final volume. However, Lady Audley’s Secret complicates this pattern by combining elegy and parody: by the end of the novel the noble aristocratic house of Audley Court is closed up and left to the ravages of time, and its former mistress is closed up and left to expire in a Belgian maison de santé, whilst domestic peace has migrated to the bourgeois household in the exaggerated or parodic form of the fairy cottage above Teddington Lock which Robert and Clara share with their children and with George and his son.
Lady Audley’s Secret and the Sensation Novel
According to the current opinions of our journals, ‘sensation’ sermons, ‘sensation’ novels, ‘sensation’ histories, ‘sensation’ magazines, ‘sensation’ pictures, and, in fact, sensational amusements of every kind are the only intellectual food upon which the British public now fatten.24
As noted earlier, from the moment it was first published in volume form, the reviewers for the more upmarket newspapers and periodicals categorized Lady Audley’s Secret as a sensation novel, a development in fiction which caused a great deal of consternation amongst the more conservative critics and cultural commentators in the early 1860s. The sensation label was to stick to Braddon throughout her long and varied career: she was always best known as the author of Lady Audley’s Secret and this novel and its childlike, golden-haired, anti-heroine continued to be synonymous with sensation. What were the main characteristics of sensation fiction, and why did it cause such consternation amongst the critical gatekeepers in the mid-nineteenth century?
As described by contemporary reviewers in the heavyweight press in the 1860s, sensation novels were novels with a secret. Typically, the sensation narrative was a ‘long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance’,25 which was ravelled and unravelled, so as to keep the reader guessing. These complicated narratives which sought to defer the disclosure of their mysteries for as long as possible were usually built around characters (like Lady Audley) whose apparently ordinary, respectable appearance and social position masked a secret about their true nature, their past actions, or their heritage. Sensation novels also revolved around crimes and their detection—indeed many later critics have claimed sensation novels as early examples of detective fiction. The crimes most commonly found at the heart of the sensation novel are bigamy, murder, blackmail, fraud, forgery (especially of wills), impersonation, kidnapping, and wrongful imprisonment. Crimes against or within the family and other family secrets were particularly prominent: as well as bigamy, adultery (or the suspicion of it), the legitimacy or illegitimacy of children, and questions of inheritance all loomed large. Bigamy—whether the intentional bigamy of the woman who marries Sir Michael Audley not knowing whether her first husband is alive or dead, or the inadvertent bigamy of Aurora Floyd, who remarries in the belief that her first husband (whom she had married in secret) was dead—was such a prominent feature of sensation novels that ‘Bigamy Novels’ were identified as ‘an entire sub-class in this branch of literature’ (i.e. sensation fiction).26
Above all, however, sensation novels were seen by both their critics and their devotees as exciting page-turners, which aimed to shock, thrill, and surprise, relying for their effects on ‘incident’ and fast-paced and intricate plotting rather than on the detailed and psychologically realistic portrayal and development of character. Some commentators welcomed the sensation novel as an injection of a new energy into a novel market which they thought had become dull and domestic (for example, courtship novels ending in marriage) and/or too preoccupied with social problems in the 1840s and 1850s (for example ‘Condition-of-England’ novels such as Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South). Others deplored what they saw as sensation fiction’s racy and ‘unpleasant’ subject matter, and its preoccupation with producing a bodily response in the reader. Sensation novels achieved their effects, it was asserted, by ‘preaching to the nerves’,27 ‘drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts’,28 and, as a consequence, ‘destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic avocations of Life’.29 Sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret were condemned as both evidence and cause of a widespread moral degeneration. As Oxford philosophy professor Henry Mansel put it in a much-quoted and often-imitated review of twenty-four sensation novels in the conservative Quarterly Review:
Excitement … alone seems to be the great end to which [sensation novelists] aim … And as excitement, even when harmless in kind, cannot be produced without becoming morbid in degree, works of this class manifest themselves as belonging … to some extent, to the morbid phenomena of literature—indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want that they supply.30
Sensation fiction was regarded as both the symptom and agent of cultural as well as moral decline. Many critics associated its advent and success with changes in the literary marketplace resulting from what they saw as an alarming growth of literacy and consequent expansion of the reading public: a rapid, exponential growth in weekly and monthly magazines publishing serial fiction, the expansion of the circulating libraries, and the rise of railway bookstalls selling cheap paperback novels to divert commuters and other travellers on their train journeys. Like Lady Audley’s Secret many sensation novels were marketed in a range of different formats and at different prices to reach different audiences. Thus, when W. Fraser Rae complained that novelists like Braddon had succeeded in making the ‘literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room’31 he was expressing a more widespread anxiety among middle-class commentators that not only did sensation novelists adapt the fast-paced and melodramatic narratives enjoyed by lower-class readers for a more affluent and higher-class readership, but that they also produced a form of fiction that was read simultaneously by both classes. These anxieties about the promiscuous mingling of readerships were part of a wider anxiety about the erosion of social boundaries in an age of rapid social change.
Many reviewers explicitly linked sensation novels to social change and disruption. As the Christian Remembrancer noted:
The ‘sensation novel’ of our time, however extravagant and unnatural … is a sign of the times—the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental change in the workings of society.32
Margaret Oliphant saw sensation novels such as Lady Audley’s Secret as the product and expression of an age which, far from being the age of peace and progress as proclaimed in the year of the first Great Exhibition in 1851, had turned out instead to be an age of ‘eve
nts’ such as the American Civil War.33 Above all sensation novels were associated with the modern. They were ‘tales of our own times’ whose ‘electrifying’ effects derived from their being set ‘in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting’.34 The murderers, forgers, bigamists, and adulterers of the sensation novel were, as the Saturday Review put it, ‘people like ourselves, such as we might meet any day in the street’.35 Sensation novels were so up-to-date that they often took their plots from newspapers, particularly the sensational reporting of crimes and their detection, murder trials, and the proceedings of the divorce courts created by the Divorce Reform Act of 1857 which provided many tales of marital misfortunes and misdeeds. As Mansel put it:
From vice to crime, from the divorce court to the police-court is but a single step … Let [the sensation novelist] only keep an eye on the criminal reports of the daily newspapers, marking the cases which are … become a nine-days’ wonder … and he has the outline of his story not only ready-made, but approved beforehand as of the true sensation cast.36
The plots and preoccupations of sensation novels were also informed by newspaper reports of prominent bigamy cases, such as the Yelverton bigamy-divorce case, in which Maria Theresa Longworth sought to invalidate the marriage of Major Charles Yelverton to a Mrs Forbes by proving that she herself was the Major’s lawful wife.37 Such cases highlighted the chaotic state of British marriage laws and customs, a state of affairs which Wilkie Collins explored and exposed, as well as exploiting it for narrative complications, most notably in Man and Wife (1870). Other press reports and campaigns which fed into the sensation novel included those concerning women’s property rights, the changing social and familial roles of (middle- and upper-class) women, the plight of fallen women, the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and reports of cases of the wrongful confinement of the unruly or vulnerable in lunatic asylums. Several of these preoccupations find their way into Lady Audley’s Secret.
The sensation novel was both a product and a symptom of Victorian modernity. The product of a machine age, it was criticized for being merely a form of mechanical reproduction: ‘A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop,’ Henry Mansel asserted, ‘[t]he public want novels and novels must be made—so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season’.38 It was also the product of an age of rapid communication in which the railways, steam power, and the electric telegraph changed the physical, mental, and social landscape, transforming existing conceptions of time and space. Both the railway and the electric telegraph are exploited by Lady Audley to further her plans and cover her tracks and by Robert Audley in his attempts to catch her out and expose her secrets. Lady Audley sends herself a telegram in order to provide a pretext for absenting herself from Audley Grange at a crucial point in the narrative, and she dashes up to London by train in order to gain entry to Robert’s rooms when he is not there. Similarly, as he closes on his quarry, Robert takes advantage of speeded-up communication networks to pursue the information he requires to expose her:
Robert Audley had requested Clara Talboys to telegraph an answer to his question, in order to avoid the loss of a day in the accomplishment of the investigation he had promised to perform.
The telegraphic answer reached Fig-tree Court before twelve o’clock the next day.
… Within an hour of the receipt of this message Mr Audley arrived at King’s Cross station, and took his ticket for Wildernsea by an express train that started at a quarter before two.
The shrieking engine bore him on the dreary northward journey, whirling him over the desert wastes of flat meadow-land. (pp. 205–6)
The speed of travel not only changes the relationship between places (diminishing the spaces between them), but it also changes the relationship of the perceiving subject to his surroundings, as he carries his mental distraction with him:
The knowledge of the purpose of [Robert’s] … journey blighted every object upon which his absent glances fixed themselves for a moment; only to wander wearily away; only to turn inwards upon that far darker picture always presenting itself to his anxious mind. (p. 206)
The technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, as well as the increasing concentration of the population in large towns and cities, brought about, as one of Wilkie Collins’s characters put it, an increase in ‘nervous derangement’,39 introducing what later cultural historians have described as a ‘modernization of the senses’.40 The sensation novel is an expression of this modern nervousness. It is also, Nicholas Daly has argued, an attempt to manage it by ‘work[ing] to acclimatize its readers to railway time and space … through its deployment of nervousness—shown in its characters [and] elicited in its readers’.41 The sensation novel thus ‘provides a species of temporal training’ which ‘synchronises its readers with industrial modernity’.42
The Publication, Circulation, and Afterlife of Lady Audley’s Secret
First published in three volumes with an initial print-run of 500, Lady Audley’s Secret was an immediate success with the middle- and upper-class circulating library audience, and by December 1862 it was in its eighth edition. In March 1863 it was circulated again in serial form, this time with illustrations, to the mainly lower-class readers of the London Journal, a penny weekly. Capitalizing on the novel’s success, Tinsley’s published a six-shilling, one-volume edition in April 1863 and a two-shilling edition in April 1866. Two years later Lady Audley was reissued in Ward Lock’s Parlour Library series, priced at three shillings and sixpence.43
As well as reaching a large and diverse audience of readers in these various different publishing formats in the 1860s, and indeed throughout the nineteenth century (new yellowback editions were still appearing in the 1880s), Lady Audley’s Secret also became a great stage success. Among the numerous adaptations of Braddon’s novel staged in London in 1862 were William E. Suter’s (the Queen’s Theatre), George Roberts’s (the St James Theatre), Colin H. Hazlewood’s (the Victoria Theatre), and John Brougham’s Where There’s Life There’s Hope (the Strand Theatre). Focusing on the predicament of the heroine and her cat-and-mouse game with Robert Audley, Suter, Hazlewood, and Roberts all omitted the character of Clara Talboys. Hazlewood’s, the most frequently revived adaptation, revealed the secret of the heroine’s past in a soliloquy at the end of the first scene, relying for its effects on the suspense about when and how her secret will be exposed, rather than on the mystery surrounding Lady Audley. Hazlewood also presented Lady Audley as an adventuress, and a madwoman. Suter was successfully sued for breach of copyright by Braddon and Tinsley Brothers, but this did not prevent his adaptation being successfully staged. In Suter’s melodrama Lady Audley, a more violent character than Braddon’s original, stabs George before pushing him down the well, and kills herself in the final scene.
These nineteenth-century adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret remained a popular part of the stage repertoire well into the twentieth century. There were also a number of new adaptations: in Brian Burton’s Lady Audley’s Secret or The Lime Tree Walk, first performed at the Little Theatre, Leicester (1966), the heroine poisons herself in order to avoid the asylum; in Constance Cox’s one-act melodrama (published by Samuel French in 1976), she stabs herself following George’s reappearance and Sir Michael’s death; Sylvia Freedman’s 1991 adaptation (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith) updated Braddon’s narrative for a late twentieth-century audience by allowing Lady Audley to escape from the asylum and adopt a new identity. There has even been a comic, musical melodrama based on Braddon’s novel (music by George Goehring, book by Douglas Seale, and lyrics by John Kunz), which had a short run at the Eastside Playhouse Theatre, New York, in 1972.
Like other successful sensation novels, Lady Audley’s Secret and its various nineteenth-century dramatic adaptations was a valuable plot resource for the makers of early twentieth-century silent movies. Two American-produced versions appeared in 1912
and (under the title The Secrets of Society) 1915. The first British silent version in 1920 (directed by Jack Denton) developed the novel’s ‘back story’ in scenes showing the heroine’s meeting with and marriage to George and intercutting scenes depicting her progress from the drab, shabby gentility of her home to the splendour of Audley Court with shots of George maintaining a lonely watch by his campfire in Australia. Denton also updated Braddon’s heroine, making her a feisty, cigarette-smoking, bobbed-haired new woman, but he followed earlier stage adaptations by making her ultimately a figure of pathos who swallows a handful of pills after seeing what she takes to be George’s ghost.
Following its largely feminist-inspired rediscovery in the latter part of the twentieth century Lady Audley’s Secret has also been dramatized for radio and television. Two different adaptations were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999 and 2009 respectively. In 2000 ITV and US Public Broadcasting showed an ITV, Carlton Television, and Warner Sisters co-production of an adaptation by Donald Hounam (directed by Betsan Morris Evans). Many Braddon aficionados were displeased by Hounam’s transformation of her heroine into a dark-haired beauty with an implausibly sympathetic relationship with her stepdaughter, who helps her to escape from the asylum. Hounam also dispenses with Clara Talboys and emphasizes Robert’s infatuation with his aunt, whom he last sees at a railway station with a man—perhaps her third husband?
The numerous adaptations and mediations of Lady Audley’s Secret in a range of formats and media in the century and a half since it first appeared, together with the wealth of new and diverse critical readings which it has generated in the last thirty years, indicate that Braddon’s story continues to exert its fascination; it is likely to divert many more readers, as well as to puzzle, intrigue, and disturb them, well into the twenty-first century.
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