The flaxen-haired beauty of the childlike Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets.But M.E. Braddon's classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot revolving bigamy, arson and murder.It challenges assumptions about the nature of fernininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as ts focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines. Cornbining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romance of upper class ife. Lady Audley's Secret was one of the most popular and successful novels of the nineteenth century and still exerts a powerful hold on readers.

One reason for this popularity was that Lady Audley"s Secret catered for, and helped to foster, a growing appetite for the lurid, scandalous and melodramatic in Victorian fiction. These elements, as well as plots dependent on mysterious identities and guilty secrets, were the hallmarks of sensation fiction; the novel which originated the fashion is often taken to be Wilkie Collins"s The Woman in White (186o).Braddon adds an extrafrisson by focusing the mystery and guilt on the figure of the heroine. In the process, she subverts and tests to the limit the image of the idealised heroine of much Victorian fiction. Lucy Graham, the poor governess, has a childlike beauty: the ageing Sir Michael Audley cannot resist "that slender throat and drooping head,with its wealth of showering flaxon curls": he makes her his wife. Yet the gradual uncovering of her secrets - she has several - indicates that this apparendy docile and girlish creature, whose "very childishness had a charm which few could resist", is a calculating bigamist with an abandoned child. It appears that she has murdered George Talboys (her first husband, inconveniently returned from Australia) and she attempts two further murders to cover her trail. In much of this she is shadowed by her maid, Phoebe Marks, who closely resembles her, but whose ghastly pallor and servant status provide an oblique comment on the heroine"s own ambiguous identity.

VOLUME ONE

Lucy

On Board the Argus

Hidden Relics

In the First Page of The Times

The Headstone at Ventnor

Anywhere, Anywhere out of the Worm

After a Year

Before the Storm

After the Storm

Missing

The Mark upon My Lady"s Wrist

Still Missing

Troubled Dreams

Phoebe"s Suitor

On the Watch

Robert Audley Gets His Conge

At the Castle Inn

Robert Receives a Visitor Whom He Had

Scarcely Expected

The Blacksmith"s Mistake

VOLUME TWO

The Writing in the Book

Mrs Plowson

Little Georgey Leaves His Old Home

Coming to a Standstill

Clara

George"s Letters

Retrograde Investigation

So Far and No Farther

Beginning at the Other End

Hidden in the Grave

In the Lime Walk

Preparing the Ground

Phoebe"s Petition

VOLUME THREE

The Red Light in the Sky

The Bearer of the Tidings

My Lady Tells the Truth

The Hush that Succeeds the Tempest

Dr Mosgrave"s Advice

Buried Alive

Ghost-haunted

That Which the Dying Man Had to Tell

Restored

At Peace