Identify Books Supposing Lady Audley's Secret
| Original Title: | Lady Audley's Secret |
| ISBN: | 0192835203 (ISBN13: 9780192835208) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Paperback | Pages: 455 pages Rating: 3.76 | 19603 Users | 1181 Reviews
Rendition To Books Lady Audley's Secret
whatever could be Lady Audley's secret? could it be... murder? miscegenation? malfeasance? misdirected malevolence ending in tears, tragedy, and general tawdriness? an assumed identity? flatulence? that not-so-fresh feeling? bigamy? bigotry? child abuse? child abandonment? une affaire de coeur? une affaire de blanchiment d'argent? well, all or some of those things may or may not be a part of this novel - but they are not the secret in question. Lady Audley's terrible, terrible secret is... (view spoiler)[ha! did you actually think i was going to tell you? think again, sucker! (hide spoiler)] this ripping victorian yarn is a tale of deceit and possible death, of class barriers breached, a man gone missing, long-held love and quick infatuation, uptight upper class twits mercilessly skewered and drunken lower class buffoons broadly lampooned. it has brilliant and ambitious Lady Audley and her equally ambitious but rather less brilliant servant. it has one of the more charming protagonists i've come across - the lazy, well-meaning, animal-loving young barrister Robert Audley, whose favored activities are smoking his pipe and napping. it has mystery, intrigue, vengeance, and dark rainy nights where evil deeds are afoot. and hey, guess what, it subverts paradigms! sorta. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a popular writer of what appears to be a million potboilers during everyone's favorite english time period, The Victorian Era. nowadays she is practically unknown. that's rather sad because she deserves much better. the novel is stylish and very easy going down. it is the opposite of a torturous experience - it is delightful! and beautifully written as well: a winding but briskly paced narrative with fascinating and often amusing characters, fun twists and turns, overstuffed with lavish description and poetic imagery, and - best of all - an ironically formal and sneakily caustic authorial voice. the wonderful wit in this novel is delicious. delicious! i just used that word to describe a novel! i feel like Oscar Wilde. or Dame Edna. if you've read this one, then you know the real selling point: LADY AUDLEY ROCKS! the english class system is no barrier to her dreams. i'd hesitate to call her a feminist icon, but she knows how to make things happen and how to take care of business. such a great villainess. and i barely consider her to be villainous. some spoilers follow ... but i'm still not giving away Lady Audley's secret. mainly because i think it is a rather tedious secret and one of the weaker elements of the novel. i am confident that Braddon knew exactly what she was doing when she crafted the character of Lady Audley. this wondrous psychopath utterly rejects her so-called 'place in life' as some drudge in a small town. she uses the weapons she has at her disposal to get ahead: her doll-like beauty, her sweet and cheery smile that lights up a room and makes you feel like you are the most important person in that room, her perfect poise and her perfect manners, her truly phenomenal talent at lying, and her quick-thinking ability to promptly push an annoyingly threatening fellow right down a well. throughout the novel, i was 100% on Lady Audley's team. i love seeing class systems scorned by the underclass and i love seeing them mercilessly dismantled - even if it is a brief and inevitably foiled uprising. Spartacus! so yeah, Lady Audley: i love her. her pride, her machinations, her capacity for violence, her elegant skill at avoiding public confrontations with annoying nobodies like resentful stepdaughters, clingy first husbands, and nosy young barristers. oh, Lady Audley, you are the dreamiest of mercenaries!
Details Epithetical Books Lady Audley's Secret
| Title | : | Lady Audley's Secret |
| Author | : | Mary Elizabeth Braddon |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Oxford World's Classics |
| Pages | : | Pages: 455 pages |
| Published | : | 1987 by Oxford University Press (first published 1862) |
| Categories | : | Classics. Fiction. Mystery. Historical. Victorian. Gothic. Literature. 19th Century. Historical Fiction |
Rating Epithetical Books Lady Audley's Secret
Ratings: 3.76 From 19603 Users | 1181 ReviewsJudgment Epithetical Books Lady Audley's Secret
After around fifty pages or so of reading this I was incredibly disappointed. Id found out what Lady Audleys secret was. I didnt really want to read any further. But, thats what I was meant to think. Her actual secret isnt revealed to the very end. And, I must say, I was rather surprised. I didn't see it coming. It was quite a shocking discovery. Id spent the rest of the novel is a state of absolute certainty regarding the secret. I thought it was quite a crap secret to be honest. Well, notI think this would be a good book either for a teenager looking for "difficult" books or for someone who generally doesn't like literature.About fifty pages in, I realized this book had absolutely nothing to say about people, or morality, or society. However, reading to the end wasn't a chore, and the last fifty pages or so actually moved at a rapid pace. Good writing on the part of Braddon? Maybe I had just clued in to the fact that half of every page was description that neither served the
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.-Sir Walter ScottShes crafty, and shes just my type.-Beastie Boys
"What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter?"I was both intrigued and hesitant to read this mid-nineteenth century work. First of all, I just had to know this huge secret that Lady Audley would presumably be keeping from us! Secondly, this is labeled as a sensation novel, which to me goes hand in hand with that dreaded term: melodrama. I dont necessarily mind a bit of verbosity here and there in my classic fiction, in fact I somewhat expect it. However, melodrama is
Like reading a Georgette Heyer Regency mystery as written by Jane Austen from a male perspective.
This book was really good fun. A 19th century who-dunnit complete with beautiful but cunning villainess, rambling old houses and an upper-class layabout-turned-detective. Fabulous!This was one of the first "sensation" novels ever written, and while it doesn't have the sophisticated and multi-layered plots of today that keep us guessing until the very end and on the edge of our seets, it is nonetheless a great page turner and so much fun. This book was originally serialised in a paper back in
The underlying situation of this book is an older man who loves a young woman who has loved before, and may still love her first love. I quickly made a comparison to Trollope's An Old Man's Love which I note was written 20 years after the publication of Lady Audley's Secret. Braddon takes her old man/young woman in an entirely different direction - so different that, after the opening pages, I completely disregarded the comparison.Some GR readers have this shelved as gothic. To me, it falls
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