Braddon, Mary Elizabeth

▪ British writer

married name  Mary Elizabeth Maxwell 

born October 4, 1837, London, England

died February 4, 1915, Richmond, Surrey

      English novelist whose Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was the most successful of the sensation novels of the 1860s.

      Braddon's mother left her father, a solicitor, when Braddon was four years old. Educated at home, Braddon published her first novel, The Trail of the Serpent, in 1861. In the same year appeared Garibaldi and Other Poems, a volume of spirited verse. In 1862 her reputation as a novelist was made by the success of Lady Audley's Secret. A three-volume novel, it told a lurid story of crime in high society, yet it managed not to transgress the Victorian bounds of propriety. She wrote it at the request of John Maxwell, a publisher with whom she was living; she married him in 1874 on the death of his first wife, who had previously been confined to a mental hospital.

      Braddon published more than 70 novels, frequently producing 2 a year, and in the 1880s a number of plays. In the best of her fiction she demonstrated a skill for social observation and the ability to create appropriate atmosphere. Among her novels are Aurora Floyd (1863), John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), Dead Men's Shoes (1876), Vixen (1879), Asphodel (1881), London Pride (1896), and The Green Curtain (1911). Her sons W.B. Maxwell and Gerald Maxwell also became novelists.

Additional Reading

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1979).

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