M.E. Braddon
Stories By Braddon
About M.E. Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) stands as one of the most prolific and commercially successful writers of the Victorian era, yet her literary reputation has long been overshadowed by the scandal and controversy that surrounded both her personal life and her sensational fiction. Born in London on October 4, 1835, to Henry Braddon, a solicitor, and Fanny White, an Irish woman with theatrical connections, Mary Elizabeth’s early life was marked by financial instability following her parents’ separation when she was young. This precarious economic situation would profoundly shape her approach to writing as a profession rather than merely a genteel pastime.
Braddon began her working life as an actress in the provincial theater circuit under the stage name “Mary Seyton,” an experience that provided her with invaluable insights into performance, melodrama, and the tastes of popular audiences. However, it was in literature that she would find her true calling and financial security. Her breakthrough came in 1862 with the serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret, a novel that would become the defining work of sensation fiction and establish Braddon as a literary phenomenon. The novel’s bigamous, murderous, and ultimately mad heroine captivated readers across class boundaries, selling over one million copies and spawning numerous theatrical adaptations.
The commercial success of Lady Audley’s Secret allowed Braddon to become a professional writer of remarkable productivity. Over her sixty-year career, she published more than eighty novels, numerous short stories, plays, and edited several periodicals including Belgravia magazine. Works such as Aurora Floyd (1863), John Marchmont’s Legacy (1863), and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) continued to explore themes of female transgression, identity, and social climbing that characterized sensation fiction. Yet Braddon’s output was far from monolithic; she demonstrated considerable range, producing historical novels, detective fiction, and more conventional realist works as her career progressed.
Braddon’s personal life was as unconventional as the plots of her sensation novels. In 1861, she entered into a relationship with John Maxwell, a publisher who was already married but separated from his wife, who resided in an Irish asylum. Braddon and Maxwell lived together openly, and she bore him six children before they could legally marry in 1874, following the death of Maxwell’s first wife. This arrangement subjected Braddon to considerable social censure, particularly from literary establishment figures, yet she navigated these difficulties with remarkable resilience, using her considerable earnings to support not only her own children but also Maxwell’s five children from his first marriage.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s literary achievement has been the subject of considerable critical re-evaluation since the feminist literary scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s rescued sensation fiction from critical dismissal. Where Victorian critics such as Henry James and Margaret Oliphant condemned sensation novels as “dangerous” and morally corrupting—with Oliphant famously declaring them a threat to English womanhood—modern scholars recognize Braddon’s work as a sophisticated engagement with the contradictions of Victorian femininity and the social constraints that produced female criminality.
Braddon’s genius lay in her ability to articulate the anxieties of her age through compulsively readable narratives. Lady Audley’s Secret, with its superficially angelic heroine who conceals a past of bigamy, attempted murder, and possible madness, struck at the heart of Victorian domestic ideology. The novel suggests that the very system that confined women to the roles of wives and mothers, denying them economic independence or social power, might produce monsters rather than angels. Lady Audley’s transgressive acts are presented as rational responses to impossible circumstances—she commits bigamy to escape poverty, attempts murder to protect her position—yet the novel ultimately cannot allow her to escape punishment, confining her to the very asylum she most feared.
This ideological complexity is characteristic of Braddon’s best work. She was simultaneously conservative and subversive, offering readers the thrills of female transgression while ultimately reasserting social order. Yet this apparent conventionality should not be mistaken for simple conformity. Braddon understood the commercial and ideological constraints within which she operated, and she worked skillfully within them to create space for female agency, desire, and even justified anger. Her heroines, whether transgressive or conventional, are vividly drawn psychological portraits rather than mere types.
Braddon’s narrative technique deserves recognition for its sophistication. She excelled at sensation fiction’s characteristic devices—secrets, doubles, mistaken identities, and dramatic revelations—but deployed them with considerable skill. Her plotting is intricate yet clear, her pacing masterful, and her ability to create and sustain suspense across lengthy serialized narratives remarkable. She had an acute understanding of popular taste without pandering to it, and her prose, while rarely ornate, is efficient and often sharp with ironic observation.
The critical dismissal Braddon faced during her lifetime—the accusation that she was merely a popular entertainer rather than a serious artist—reflects the gendered and class-based hierarchies of Victorian literary culture. Male writers of sensation fiction, such as Wilkie Collins, received more respectful treatment, while Braddon’s combination of commercial success, prolific output, and irregular domestic situation made her an easy target. Yet her influence on the development of detective fiction, psychological thriller, and popular women’s fiction is undeniable. Writers from Agatha Christie to Daphne du Maurier to contemporary psychological thriller authors owe a debt to Braddon’s innovations.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was ultimately a survivor—a woman who transformed personal and professional adversity into a remarkable literary career. She wrote to live and lived to write, producing fiction that entertained millions while subtly interrogating the social structures that confined Victorian women. Her work remains vital not only as a historical document of Victorian anxieties but as genuinely compelling narrative art. In Braddon, we find a writer who understood that popular fiction could be both commercially successful and ideologically complex, and whose best work continues to reward serious critical attention while remaining compulsively readable. Her legacy is that of a writer who refused to choose between artistic integrity and commercial success, achieving both on her own uncompromising terms.