Barrister Robert Audley is suspicious. His friend George Talboys recently returned a rich man from the goldfields of colonial Australia but is shattered to find that the wife he left behind has died. Now George has vanished, leaving only a note saying that he's returned to Australia. Fearing foul play, Robert attempts an investigation into his friend's sudden disappearance but his every move is hampered by his uncle's lovely young bride, Lady Audley, whose placid, doll-like exterior concea...

Five fantastic mystery stories from prolific Victorian author Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Cold Embrace The Shadow in the Corner Good Lady Ducayne At Chrighton Abbey Eveline’s Visitant

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a British Victorian-era novelist famous for her sensationalist writing."The Cold Embrace" is a ghost story about a pair of lovers who promise to be true to each other. The young man declares he will even return from beyond the grave to be with his lover, but she declares that only a suicide can do this, as they are denied entrance to heaven. Shortly after this, the young man travels away and after some time neglects to write anymore. He has fo...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret.Table of ContentsThe Cold EmbraceThe Shadow in the CornerGood Lady DucayneAt Chrighton AbbeyEveline's VisitantLady Audley's SecretBirds of PreyCharlotte's InheritanceThe Doctor's WifeMilly Darrell

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Christmas Hirelings is a compact Christmas novella that blends domestic realism, melodrama, and fairy-tale coincidence. Its story turns on a lonely, embittered gentleman who, seeking to manufacture holiday cheer, hires children to inhabit his house for Christmas; what begins as an artificial performance of family feeling becomes an occasion for emotional renewal, recognition, and reconciliation. Written in the Victorian tradition of the Christmas tale, the book...

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

First published in 1860 as Three Times Dead, The Trail of the Serpent is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's audacious entry into the emerging sensation novel and one of the earliest English detective narratives. Its plot braids murder, imposture, wrongful accusation, and social disguise into a melodramatic yet sharply plotted pursuit, distinguished by brisk pacing, theatrical scene-making, and a fascination with hidden criminality beneath respectable surfaces. The novel stands at a crossroads betwee...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864) is a subtle and unsettling study of romantic illusion within ordinary provincial life. Often read as an English reimagining of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the novel follows Isabel Sleaford, whose imagination has been shaped by circulating-library romances, as she enters a respectable marriage to the kind but prosaic Dr. Gilbert. Braddon's style blends sensation fiction with domestic realism, replacing overt crime with the quieter perils of fa...

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON Ultimate Collection gathers the many faces of one of Victorian fiction's most agile imaginations: sensation mystery, domestic romance, crime narrative, and supernatural tale. Across these works, Braddon combines intricate plotting, theatrical pacing, and a sharp eye for social hypocrisy, exposing the anxieties beneath respectable households, inheritances, marriages, and class ambition. Her prose moves between melodramatic intensity and precise psychological observati...

Thrilling Chronicles of the World's Greatest Pretenders – 5 Classic Secret Identity Novels is an exhilarating exploration of mystery and masquerade themed literature. This compelling anthology assembles a medley of narrative styles and suspenseful tales from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Each story unveils a character's secret life, illuminating the depths of human ingenuity and the art of deception. These classic novels transcend the ordinary, plunging into themes of identity, mo...

Lady Audley's Secret is a landmark of Victorian sensation fiction, weaving bigamy, disappearance, forged identity, and domestic unease into a plot of remarkable narrative propulsion. Braddon sets the apparent tranquility of the English country house against the instability of modern urban life, exposing the anxieties beneath respectability, marriage, inheritance, and female beauty. Written in lucid, melodramatic prose sharpened by psychological insight, the novel belongs beside Wilkie Coll...

Collected together, Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd display Mary Elizabeth Braddon's mastery of the Victorian sensation novel, a mode that imported crime, secrecy, bigamy, madness, and social transgression into the supposedly safe domestic sphere. In Lady Audley's Secret, the angelic heroine becomes a figure of concealment and danger, while Aurora Floyd offers a bolder, more passionate woman whose past threatens aristocratic respectability. Braddon's prose is brisk, theatrical, and p...