SOURCE: “Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Most Despicable of Her Sex,” in Double Jeopardy, The University Press of Kentucky, 1990, pp. 88-104.

In the following essay, Morris discusses the ways in which Lady Audley's Secret fits into the pattern of criminal women in Victorian fiction.

The women who shoot, poison, stab, steal, and blackmail their way through the sensation novels of the 1800s changed the nature of crime and criminals in Victorian fiction. These women are more ambitiously independent and less sexually repressed than traditional heroines, and their criminality is pervasive, violent, and even bizarre. Like comparable characters in other Victorian literature, they reaffirm the nineteenth-century precept that female sexuality and criminality are inextricably intertwined. But they also introduce the revolutionary idea that women are capable of committing almost any crime to achieve their personal goals. Ironically, those goals are almost always highly conventional: romantic happiness and financial security through...