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Critical discussion of Lady Audley's Secret has recently shifted its focus from Lady Audley' s madness to Robert Audley's masculinity. Thus, Richard Nemesvari maintains that through her treatment of Robert Audley's repressed homoerotic desires Mary Elizabeth Braddon critiques the several denials on which Victorian patriarchal society was built, and Lynda Hart has claimed that while Lady Audley stands in for the disavowal of desire between men, she is also necessary to Robert as an object of investigation so that he may take his place in the social order as a man of the law.1 But Robert Audley's pursuit of Lady Audley's past is also his own quest for a professional future, and his investigation of Lady Audley's secret is the means to the establishment of his own identity as a professional man. His pursuit takes him from Audley Court and Mount Stanning (Essex), to Portsmouth (Hampshire), Grange Heath (Dorsetshire), Wildernsea (Yorkshire), and Liverpool (Lancashire). He also visits the London suburbs of West Brompton and Peckham Grove. These various social spaces are linked by a network of communications-the mail, telegraphic messages, railway journeys-through which they are connected to the metropolitan sites of professional authority in Savile Row, whence Dr. Mosgrave is summoned, and Fig-Tree Court, where Robert Audley has his chambers. As Robert Audley moves through these different social spaces, he also moves through several spheres of legal knowledge and activity that configure his identity: specifically, he has to confront the significance of contract, trust, masculine professional relationship, and inductive reasoning. And, in conjunction with these processes, he must exorcize the demon of his misogyny. Braddon's teleological imperative for her hero founders in the "fairy cottage" of the final chapter, for this pastoral space turns out to be a limbo in which. his identity is stalled, confounded by a complex conundrum of gender, work, and class.
On a visit to Southampton to see Georgy Talboys, the son of his missing friend, of whom he is the guardian, Robert Audley is unexpectedly thrust into the world of contract. Brigsome's terrace, the suburb of Southampton in which Georgy lives with his grandfather Mr Maldon, is "perhaps one of the most dismal blocks of building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first mason plied his...