SOURCE: “Gothic Maidens and Sensation Women: Lady Audley's Journey from the Ruined Mansion to the Madhouse”¹ in Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 19, AMS Press, 1991, pp. 189-211.

In the following essay, Briganti discusses the ways in which Lady Audley is and is not a typical sensation novel villainess and Braddon's ambivalence toward her character.

And I also have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize to the point of not having a name, I shall answer everytime someone says: me.

(Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.)

On the surface, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret seems to endorse Patrick Brantlinger's thesis that paradoxically “sensation novels—and mystery novels after them—conclude in ways that liquidate mystery: they are not finally mysterious at all” (21). The plot is deceptively simple: Robert Audley suspects that his uncle's child-bride is not the angel she seems to be and...