Mary Elizabeth Braddon

In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful - and very mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her? A huge success in the nineteenth century, the book's anti-heroine - with her good looks and hidden past - embodied perfectly the concerns of the Victorian age with morality and madness.

Lady Audley's Secret

The Christmas Hirelings

`Isabel Gilbert was not a woman of the world. She had read novels while other people perused the Sunday papers...she believed in a phantasmal world created out of the pages of poets and romancers.' The Doctor's Wife is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in which she explores her heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life married to a good natured but bovine husband who seems incapable of understanding his wife's imaginative life and feelings. A woman with a secret, adultery, death and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. Yet, The Doctor's Wife is also a self-consciously literary novel, in which Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre. This is the only edition of a fascinating and engrossing work, and reproduces uncut the first three-volume edition of 1864.

The Doctor's Wife

Peter David Edwards

With Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of 'sensation novelists'. Aurora Floyd (1862-3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward's introduction evaluates the novel's leading place among 'bigamy-novels' and Braddon's treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

Aurora Floyd

Starting in the riverside town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy, Jabez North commits a series of atrocious criminal acts as he is pursued by Detective Peters.

The Trail of the Serpent

A young girl whose love for her fiance continues even after her death; a sinister old lady with claw-like hands who cares little for the qualities of her companions provided they are young and full of life; and a haunted mirror that foretells of approaching death for those who gaze into its depths. These are just some of the haunting tales gathered together in this macabre collection of short stories. Reissued in the Tales of the Weird series and introduced by British Library curator Greg Buzwell, The Face in the Glass is the first selection of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's supernatural short stories to be widely available in more than 100 years. By turns curious, sinister, haunting and terrifying, each tale explores the dark shadows beyond the rational world.

The Gothic Tales of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Face in the Glass

This carefully crafted ebook: "MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON – Ultimate Collection: Sensation Novels, Detective Mysteries, Victorian Romances & Supernatural Tales" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Introduction: My First Novel by M. E. Braddon Novels: The Trail of the Serpent Lady Audley's Secret Aurora Floyd The Captain of the Vulture John Marchmont's Legacy Eleanor's Victory Henry Dunbar The Doctor's Wife Birds of Prey Charlotte's Inheritance Run to Earth Fenton's Quest The Lovels of Arden A Strange World The Cloven Foot Vixen Mount Royal Phantom Fortune The Golden Calf Wyllard's Weird Mohawks All Along the River Gerard (The World, the Flesh, and the Devil) London Pride His Darling Sin The Infidel Beyond These Voices Short Stories: Ralph the Bailiff and Other Stories: Ralph the Bailiff Captain Thomas The Cold Embrace My Daughters The Mystery of Fernwood Samuel Lowgood's Revenge The Lawyer's Secret My First Happy Christmas Lost and Found Eveline's Visitant – A Ghost Story Found in the Muniment Chest How I Heard my Own Will Read Flower and Weed and Other Tales: Flower and Weed George Caulfield's Journey The Clown's Quest Dr. Carrick If She Be Not Fair to Me The Shadow in the Corner His Secret Thou Art the Man Milly Darrell Good Lady Ducayne At Chrighton Abbey Children's Book: The Christmas Hirelings

Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd, The Trail of the Serpent, Run to Earth…

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON Ultimate Collection: Mystery Novels, Victorian Romances & Supernatural Tales

Good Lady Ducayne', is a gothic novella by Mary Elizabeth Braddon originally published in 1869. It is a nineteenth century incarnation of the popular vampire myth, setting it against the backdrop of an Anglicised region of the Italian Riviera during the Victorian era. This is a great read and an excellent addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in the genre. To this republication is added a specially commissioned brand new short biography of the author.

Good Lady Ducayne

Nevil Shute

Michael McDowell

Valancourt Books has earned a reputation as one of the foremost publishers of lost and rediscovered classics, reissuing more than 400 unjustly neglected works from the late 18th century all the way to the early 21st. In this second volume of rare horror stories, the editors of Valancourt Books have selected fourteen tales - all by Valancourt authors - for this new collection spanning two centuries of horror. This volume features a previously unpublished ghost story by Nevil Shute, a brand-new tale by award-winning author Stephen Gregory, and twelve other tales that have never or seldom been reprinted. In this volume, you will encounter tales of ghosts, haunted houses, witchcraft, possession, demonic pacts, and ancient, nameless horrors. Stories of the weird and macabre, of a man tormented by an age-old evil, a corpse returned from the dead, a brutal killer with a shocking secret, a contraption with the power to trap its victims eternally inside a nightmare. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly humorous, by a lineup of authors that includes both masters of horror fiction and award-winning literary greats, this is a horror anthology like no other. Features stories by: Mary Elizabeth Braddon - John Buchan - R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Isabel Colegate - Basil Copper - Thomas De Quincey - Stephen Gregory - Michael McDowell - John Metcalfe - Beverley Nichols - Nevil Shute - Bernard Taylor - Russell Thorndike - Robert Westall

Volume Two

The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

At Crighton Abbey and Other Horror Stories

The Face in the Glass and Other Gothic Tales

Norman Page

Tōru Sasaki

"I am simply steeped in Miss Braddon."--Alfred Lord Tennyson Tennyson was not the only Victorian reader to be captivated by Mary Elizabeth Braddon's fiction. While still in her mid-twenties, Braddon scored two remarkable hits with the sensational Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd. In John Marchmont's Legacy, Braddon offers a plot charged with drama and mystery, its eerie atmosphere and, above all, the depiction of an extraordinary woman. In remote Lincolnshire, `fenny, misty, and flat always', Olivia Arundel can find no outlet for either her intellectual abilities or her fierce passions, but is compelled to look on as the man she loves has thoughts only for a woman whose gifts are vastly inferior to her own. Braddon once declared that Wilkie Collins, the master of the `sensation novel', was `assuredly my literary father'; she herself has the same skill in weaving a story of mystery, conspiracy, menace and violence, while the energy and vivacity of her narrative are all her own. Expertly edited with an introduction by Norman Page and Toru Sasaki, this is the only edition available of this work that deserves its place alongside Braddon's great works.

John Marchmont's Legacy

Henry Dunbar

Allen W. Grove

A village in Cornwall is thrown into turmoil after a young girl falls from a train to her death. Was this an accident? Or murder? The mystery deepens when clues link the girl to a double homicide committed ten years earlier. Braddon's sensational novel takes us to the estates of aristocrats, the haunts of tabloid writers, the homes of Bohemian artists, and the dark alleyways of Paris. Braddon, one of Victorian England's best-selling novelists, is at the height of her powers in Wyllard's Weird. The novel shakes the foundations of 19th-century social order as it questions the sanctity of marriage and exposes the vices hidden beneath masks of gentility. First published in 1885, Wyllard's Weird has been for too long either out of print or available only in expensive facsimile editions. The novel holds an important place in literary history as it forecasts the appearance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 and Sherlock Holmes in 1887.

Wyllard's Weird

This Elibron Classics title is a reprint of the original edition published by Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1894, Leipzig

Thou Art the Man

Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel.” The novel depicts a heroine trapped in an abusive and adulterous marriage, and effectively dramatizes the extra-legal pressures which kept many such unhappy marriages out of the courts: fear of personal scandal, and of betraying one’s family through the publicity and expense of the process. Aurora’s bigamous marriage dramatizes the need for expeditious divorce without the enormous social cost, but the overt sexuality of the heroine shocked contemporary critics. “What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshy and unlovely record,” wrote Margaret Oliphant. Braddon’s text is studded with references to contemporary events (the Crimean War, the Divorce Act of 1857) and the text has been carefully annotated for modern readers in this edition, which also includes a range of documents designed to help set the text in context.

In the pocket classics series, this is the story of Fay, the ward of John Fausset, who is taken into the family. A mystery surrounds her, if she is an heiress, why does she arrive with torn embroidery on her under-linen. What is the nature of her relationship with John Fausset, and why does his wife so resent her?

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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