Lady Audley's Secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon had a secret of her own.

While she was writing Lady Audley's Secret in 1861, she was living with a man named John Maxwell. They had children together.

Everyone who mattered assumed they were married.

They weren't.

Maxwell already had a wife. She was still alive, living apart from him, and could not be divorced under the law at the time. Braddon knew. Maxwell knew. Almost no one else did.

So when critics accused Lady Audley's Secret of glamorising deception, of making bigamy and hidden identity feel almost sympathetic, they had no idea how close to home it was.

Braddon wasn't just writing about a woman with a secret. She was living as one.

The novel became a sensation in every sense of the word. It sold in numbers that stunned even Braddon's publisher, was adapted for the stage before she'd even finished writing the book, and helped invent an entire genre that critics sneered at and readers couldn't put down.

They called it sensation fiction. They meant it as an insult.

Lady Audley's Secret is coming very soon to The Weekly Serial on iOS and Android.