Lady Audley’s Secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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.

In conversation with

Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She has written essays and criticism 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, Scoundrel, and The Real Lolita, winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award in Nonfiction. She also edited several anthologies, including Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning; Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Nonfiction/Critical Work; Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America); and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin). Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review. She lives in New York City.