I’m pleased to share that Great Tales will soon feature a growing collection of stories by Mary Elizabeth Braddon—one of the most fascinating and influential British writers of the nineteenth century, and a key figure in what we now call sensation fiction. Beginning this week, I will be posting complete, readable editions of several of her shorter works, including lesser-known tales originally published in periodicals between the 1860s and 1890s. These stories are full of the qualities that made Braddon famous in her own lifetime: psychological tension, sharp social observation, moral ambiguity, and an almost wicked pleasure in upsetting the expectations of Victorian readers.
If you’ve encountered Braddon before, it was likely through Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the novel that shot her to fame and scandalized the reading public. But her career extended far beyond that single hit. She wrote more than eighty novels—yes, eighty—along with plays, poetry, and a remarkable number of short stories. Her work appeared in Christmas annuals, family magazines, and popular fiction weeklies, and she became one of the most widely read authors of the late Victorian period. Yet even with that extraordinary output, her short fiction is still not as widely available or discussed as her novels. That makes it especially rewarding to bring these stories back into circulation for modern readers.
Who Was M. E. Braddon?
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was born in London and spent her early years supporting herself as a magazine writer and occasional actress before turning fully to fiction. From the beginning, her writing showed a keen understanding of plot, suspense, and the darker undercurrents of middle-class domestic life. She had an instinct—some would have called it a talent for mischief—for revealing the secrets that polite society preferred to keep hidden. In an era that celebrated the stability and moral uprightness of the home, Braddon used the home as the setting for deception, bigamy, hidden identities, and psychological breakdowns.
What set her apart from many of her contemporaries was not only her flair for melodrama but her ability to lace these narratives with genuine insight into class anxieties, gender expectations, and the precariousness of social respectability. She was also, importantly, a woman writer who achieved financial independence through her craft at a time when such a thing was far from common. Her long partnership with the publisher John Maxwell—whom she later married—placed her at the center of the Victorian literary marketplace, and she helped edit and run family magazines while maintaining her astonishingly productive writing schedule.
While Braddon’s novels dominated circulating libraries, her short stories often appeared in seasonal publications, especially Christmas annuals—lavish, illustrated miscellanies that mixed ghost stories, domestic tales, and light fiction. These were written to be enjoyed by firelight in the darkest months of the year, which may explain why so many of Braddon’s shorter works dip into the eerie, the uncanny, and the morally shadowed. They’re wonderfully atmospheric pieces that feel both Victorian and surprisingly modern in tone.
What You Can Expect on the Blog
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a curated selection of Braddon’s short fiction, beginning with some of the atmospheric tales she contributed to Christmas publications of the 1860s. Each story will appear in a cleanly formatted, easy-to-read version, and whenever possible, I’ll include a short introduction giving historical context or pointing out themes that recur across her writing. My goal is to make these stories accessible both to readers encountering Braddon for the first time and to long-time fans of Victorian literature looking to explore beyond her most famous novels.
Braddon’s work bridges the worlds of sensation, mystery, domestic fiction, and early psychological drama. Reading her today is a reminder of how rich and varied nineteenth-century literature truly is—and how many extraordinary voices remain under-read. I’m excited to bring her stories into the spotlight again and to celebrate a writer who helped shape the landscape of popular fiction for decades.
Stay tuned for the first story, and enjoy rediscovering this remarkable author.