SOURCE: “Disclosure as ‘Cover-up’: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley's Secret,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 334-55.

In the following essay, Matus argues that the conclusion of madness in Lady Audley's Secret serves as a distraction from the gender and class issues raised throughout the novel.

For a work that addresses itself in many ways to the question of madness, Lady Audley's Secret broaches the topic only as it nears its conclusion. In terms of the mechanics of this sensation novel, madness is the most melodramatic of a series of scandalous disclosures. Other revelations may have been anticipated, but this one, conventional as it is, startles even the canniest reader, since Lady Audley appears throughout the novel to be perfectly sane. This last secret is also the means by which the novel effects closure. After she has been certified, Lady Audley can be...