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** spoiler alert ** Compared to Dickens, Collins and Trollope, "Lady Audley's
Secret" is a very ordinary written book (I thought if I
read one more description of Lady Audley's blonde curls
and fairy bower I would scream) but the sensational story
involving murder, missing people and madness keeps the
reader on a roller coaster ride until the end.
Braddon wrote "Lady Audley's Secret" when she was 27 and
it created a stir the whole world over. Distinguished
writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens and Henry
James all admitted to reading her novels passionately,
eagerly and then impatiently waiting for her next one.
Her private life was almost as exciting as one of her books
- she hurriedly wrote the first instalment of L.A.S so that
her live in lover, fiery publisher John Maxwell would have
a serial for his new magazine "Robin Goodfellow". Insanity,
double lives, drugs etc were not a huge stretch of the
imagination for Mary - Maxwell's first wife was still alive
in a Dublin mental institution and even though Mary bore
him 5 children, they couldn't marry for another 12 years.

Robert Audley is determined to find out what happened to his
missing friend George Talboys who was grief stricken at
finding that while he was out of the country his wife had
mysteriously died. Robert visits his uncle and is immediately
under the spell of Lucy, his uncle's bewitching young wife.
One person who isn't amused is Alicia, a ward of her uncle.
She thinks there is something secretive and almost evil about
the beautiful Lucy but she can't get any of the men to listen
to her. By the end of the book there is nothing the sweet
Lucy, without a heart, almost without a soul is not capable
of - murder, madness, obsession, mono mania!!!
A real page turner that explains why the "sensation novel"
was so popular.