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"If the test of genius were success, we should rank Miss Braddon very high in the list of our great novelists," W.F. Rae allowed in the North British Review in 1865, recalling that "Almost as soon as Lady Audley's Secret appeared, it was lauded by distinguished critics, and eagerly purchased and read by an enthusiastic section of the public" (92, 93). Reputedly one of the three most popular books of 1862, with a following sustained until the early twentieth century aswell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret in recent years has regained some prominence. Current interest in noncanonical women writers has redirected readers to the story of the beautiful, impoverished young woman who skillfully creates a new identity for herself after her husband has suddenly abandoned her to seek his fortune in Australia and who intends to do whatever she must to maintain her disguise. Her bigamous marriage to a wealthy elderly baronet prospers until his nephew detects her imposture while searching for his friend (the first husband) who has mysteriously disappeared soon after return to England; the nephew suspects her of her husband's murder. The book has been admired for its sensational and feminist qualities and its contribution to detective fiction. With context figuring more heavily than text, it has been explored with regard to contemporary medical, political, and class issues. Jill L. Matus, in "Disclosure as 'Cover-Up'," for example, discusses Braddon's novel in relation not only to contemporary conceptions of insanity but also to topical issues of incarceration, while Jonathan Loesberg in "The Ideology of Narrative Form" relates the book instead to controversy over expansion of the franchise, anticipating the Second Reform Bill.1 Possible homoeroticism has also been pursued-in more than one direction. For if Ann Cvetkovich in Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism claims that the central male character has an erotic attraction to his friend, Natalie Schroeder in "Feminine Sensationalism, Eroticism, and Self-Assertion in M.E. Braddon and Ouida" instead insists that Lady Audley has such an attraction to her maid.(2)
Meanwhile, however, regard for the formal qualities of Braddon's novel apart from subgenre concerns has been almost nonexistent, at the expense of Braddon's ideas. It has become unfashionable to undertake formalist criticism of a literary work rather than deconstruct...