M.E. Braddon was a popular British writer during the Victorian Era. Among Braddon’s best known novels are Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd. This edition of Good Lady Ducayne includes a table of contents.

A governess with no past marries a rich baronet, and her new nephew begins to wonder what became of the friend who disappeared the week she arrived. Braddon put the danger not in a foreign villain or a ruined castle but in a charming Englishwoman with a locket, and Victorian readers bought it faster than they bought Dickens. Paintings of country estates, candlelit corridors and the lime-tree avenue; Gilded Library ornament of locket, phial and well.

The Octoroon or The Lily of Louisiana is a dark tale of crime, race and slavery. Cora, educated in Britain, returns to her fathers plantation in Louisiana to explore the truth about her mother's slave origins. This book, originally published as a series between 1861 and 1862, was Braddon's second anonymous novel and is now known as a classic anti-slavery novel. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in Soho, London, England in 1835. She had her first serial novel published in 1861 and was an extr...

Alexis returns to Dorley determined to leave, only to find his feelings for Linda Challice impossible to ignore. At breakfast, she answers village gossip about the child Trot with a quiet, devastating honesty: the boy, christened William but nicknamed for his restless ways, was brought to her half-dead by a starving young mother who refused to name herself, then vanished after leaving only vague promises and anonymous bank notes. Alexis is deeply moved by Linda's steadfast kindness and pro...

Sibyl Faunthorpe begins in the depths of humiliation, alone on Battersea Bridge in shabby clothes, reading a letter that promises a sudden reversal of fortune. Her long-absent Uncle Stephen Trenchard, now a wealthy and eccentric returnee from India, has come back to England and is summoning his nieces to Redcastle, where inheritance, favor, and family ambition begin to shape every hope. But Sibyl—now Mrs. Stanmore—has not escaped into comfort. She lives in shabby Chelsea, burdened by pover...

Sibyl Faunthorpe moves through a world where courtship is never merely personal. Sir Wilford Cardonnel's polished attentions, backed by his formidable sister Phœbe and the prestige of the How, expose the gulf between county aristocracy and prosperous newcomers like the Trenchards, while her uncle Stephen eagerly imagines a brilliant marriage that would secure Sibyl's future and status. But Sibyl resists more fiercely than anyone realizes: beneath her composure lies a secret devotion to ano...

A governess with no past marries a rich baronet, and her new nephew begins to wonder what became of the friend who disappeared the week she arrived. Braddon acted on stage under a false name to keep her mother, then wrote eighty novels; this one made her fortune and defined the sensation novel — bigamy, arson and a body down a well, in the drawing rooms readers actually lived in.

In The Lady's Mile, M. E. Braddon turns from high melodrama to a more observational study of modern social life, using the setting of a fashionable suburban enclave to examine class aspiration, reputation, and the hidden strains beneath domestic respectability. The novel bears the marks of Braddon's sensation-fiction inheritance—careful suspense, moral ambiguity, and an alertness to secrecy—yet its style is also distinctly realist, attentive to manners, speech, and the subtle commerce of e...

First published in 1860 and later revised as Three Times Dead, M. E. Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent is an early sensation novel that fuses melodrama, detective intrigue, and social realism. Set amid urban crime, disguise, and relentless pursuit, the novel follows tangled identities, wrongful suspicion, and the gradual unmasking of criminal design. Braddon's style is vigorous and theatrical yet sharply observant, combining cliff-hanger plotting with vivid depictions of class anxiety and...

M. E. Braddon's *Only a Clod* is a compact Victorian tale of class, feeling, and moral perception, shaped by the author's gift for melodramatic tension and acute social observation. The title itself signals the book's governing irony: those dismissed as dull, common, or insignificant may possess the deepest reserves of loyalty and humanity. Braddon writes in a lucid, emotionally charged prose that combines domestic realism with the suspenseful architecture for which she became famous. Situ...

While enjoying Carnival in Venice, a gentleman named Vansittart meets a beautiful working-class woman. They're enjoying a light-hearted meal in a cafe when her jealous lover unexpectedly attacks—and Vansittart fatally stabs him. Vansittart escapes, assumes a false identity, and resolves to keep the incident secret for the rest of his life. This traumatic event sends Vansittart on a journey of redemption filled with secrecy, jealousy, vengeance, and love. The Venetians is one of M. E. Bradd...

On a cold and stormy night in Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy, Richard Marwood returns after a mysterious and long disappearance. While his rich uncle aids him in starting a new life, his reappearance is quickly upended after he is apparently framed for murder. Meanwhile, Jabez North—prodigal son of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy—schemes to make his fortunes by any means possible. The Trail of the Serpent is M. E. Braddon's first book. Although it initially met with poor sales under its original title ...