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

Franzi

"Fishing is much better than shooting; you've only to lie on a bank and stare at your line; I don't find that you often catch anything, but it's very pleasant."

His pretty g...y-faced cousin migh've been head over ears in love with him ...

"Justice for the dead first," he said. "mercy to the living afterwards." 

His first thought being of his bestie's child is absolutely adorable <3

"God knows I was prepared for the worst, and the worst has come. I can understand all now. My next visit must be to Southampton. I must place the boy in better hands." 

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief should have gone a little further and seen ywhy it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. [...] to call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators - anything they like - but let them be quiet - if they can. 

🏹

He knew he was about to shatter the daydream of his uncle’s life; and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them.

I was also a witness to the blow which struck him to the very heart—which changed him from the man he had been to a creature as unlike that former self as one human being can be unlike another.

Lady Audley's Secret quotes

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