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BOOK REVIEW

Jessica Cox, ed. New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. 282 pp., ISBN 9789042035799, hb., $84.

Reviewed by Gabrielle Malcolm.

From the earliest days of her career, Mary Elizabeth Braddon created heroines that railed, retaliated, and repudiated. She did not originate this rebellious attitude in literary representations of the softer and fairer sex, but she certainly perpetuated and helped determine its thorough invasion of nineteenth-century fiction. Her authorial choices made for good fictive logic and riveting effect, and guaranteed audience appeal.  If a female character is supposed to be compliant and docile, then, for the sake of conflict and drama in the novel, disruption of the established archetype and the concoction of the new created a range of possibilities. So, Braddon made her doll-like heroine (Lady Audley) sinister, and her sporty, outdoor girl (Aurora Floyd) sentimental and passionate.

Jessica Cox’s new volume of critical essays on Braddon certainly reflects this disruption and destabilization of the social and literary types. However, despite Braddon’s fifty-plus year writing career and hugely prolific output of novels and stories, only one half of this collection is dedicated to an appraisal of only Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The essays of the first section gauge the novel’s cultural impact from various angles, and offer some of those “New Perspectives” on Braddon’s most famous work. The selections indicate just how influential this novel has become, and that it can sustain this range of analysis, attests to how far it has travelled into any appraisal of Victorian popular culture. The second half of the collection is titled “Beyond Lady Audley’s Secret.”  Cox has inserted a distinct critical boundary within the framework of this single collection for readers to embrace first, the scope of the book’s influence, and then, to encourage scrutiny of Braddon’s lesser-known works. A similar exercise, along generic lines, was undertaken by Pamela K. Gilbert, Aeron Haynie, and Marlene Tromp in their Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (2000). Here, now, from Cox and her collaborators, is a timely and much-needed expansion of the critical landscape within which Braddon should be considered.

This collection of essays has its roots in a 2006 symposium on the life and work of Braddon at the University of Wales, Swansea. The Swansea symposium and other recent collected essays and journal articles have helped make Braddon canonically fixed.  This new book makes clear the substantial number of established scholars and recent graduate researchers who have an enthusiasm for investigating the scope of Braddon’s career in such a study.  The next challenge, perhaps, is to wrestle the novelist’s reputation from the sole and firm grasp of Lady Audley’s scheming hands. This volume is another step along the way, and although the criticism may remain deeply enthral to that heroine’s mystique, the great range in the book’s first section ensures that progress.

Nancy Knowles and Katherine Hall, for instance, tackle the “problematic aspects of some feminist readings of Lady Audley’s Secret” (37) in their chapter “Imperial Attitudes in Lady Audley’s Secret.”  Probably the most frequent theoretical reading applied to this novel, the feminist perspective, according to Knowles and Hall, comes into conflict with the imperialist, masculine dominance that the narrative finally asserts. So, while rebelliousness and even criminality are all within Lady Audley’s capabilities, the question of actual power is a very different matter. Her “ultimately futile resistance” in the face of male imperial power is as doomed to failure as the “decay” of Audley Court is inevitable, “warped by the systems of power in which they operate”’ (58).

Slightly less bewitched by the blonde beldam is Michelle Lin in “’To Go Boldly Where No Woman Has Gone Before’: Alicia Audley and the New Woman.”  Lin argues that Alicia, in her language and manner, represents a proto-New Woman who, at the end, settles for a comfortable marriage to a suitable member of the local gentry, Harry Towers.  Lin states she has a brief flowering as a promising young pioneer of a young woman’s place outside the home, but capitulates to the role of Angel in the House. However, her containment within these female types is fraught with difficulty.  Braddon challenges Victorian ideals with Alicia’s characterization and attempts to “restrain the threat Alicia poses” (72). Assessing Lady Audley in such a prototypical form is reasonable and well-established: from the beginning of her writing career in the late 1850s Braddon not only reflected the various social roles of women, but countered them and contributed to new ones as the century progressed.  In a bold and persuasive clarification of her sensation plotting, Lin identifies and navigates the structural and narrative snags that Braddon presents for the critic, contending Braddon attempts rebellion and change with Alicia, no matter how temporary, even while she absents her heroine from much of the action. She courts controversy, but then resolves all safely and well in marriage. Braddon, time and time again, appears contradictory in this way in her writing. In Lin’s argument, The New Woman is prefigured by Braddon although that figure was not yet ready to emerge fully formed into society at such an early date as 1862.

Victorian anxiety regarding mental illness and the exploration of insanity within domestic spaces is considered by Tabitha Sparks in “To the Mad-House Born: The Ethics of Exteriority in Lady Audley’s Secret” and by Grace Wetzel in “Homelessness in the Home: Invention, Instability and Insanity in the Domestic Spaces of M.E. Braddon and L.M. Alcott.” The latter offers another refreshing new perspective, employing a comparative literary analysis of British and American sensation fiction with these two writers whose works were deeply embedded in the debates about the domestic spheres and female identity within those spheres. Sparks highlights the different concepts of living space, the occupation of those spaces, and the parallel definitions of sanity, insanity, and identity. Sparks and Wetzel each remind us that uneasiness could accompany entertainment when reading sensation novels. This experience was made possible, as Wetzel suggests, by Braddon’s and Alcott’s abilities to blend elements of sentimentality with realism in their plot twists.

The collection’s second section, “Beyond Lady Audley’s Secret,” shifts the perspectives away from the confines of Audley Court and the asylum and to themes and features in Braddon’s sensation and early career fiction that can be charted throughout her life’s works. Key to understanding and fully appreciating her contributions and influences on mid- to late-Victorian writing is Braddon’s sense of theatre and drama and her creative ability to contain a simultaneous reflection and rejection of social ideals. This is a legacy from her time as a performer. As a former actress, Braddon knew a theatrical scene can be composed of various elements; encounters, actions and symbols which can project various meanings and mislead or deceive if required. From her teenage years, she was grounded and schooled in this heritage, as well as in the notions of rebellion and resolution at the heart of many melodrama plots.

Kate Mattacks, in “Sensationalism on Trial,” examines this theatrical legacy via Braddon’s little known 1899 novella His Darling Sin. This book had been out of print for a century and was reissued in a limited run by The Sensation Press in 2001. In it, Braddon, at this late phase in her career, still approaches her writing with formulae recognizable from sensation fiction, melodrama, and sleuthing and detection tales. Coming at the threshold of the twentieth century, the novella is significant in demonstrating that Braddon’s continued exploration of these tropes. Mattacks examines “Braddon’s … problematic relationship with a [professional] respectability founded upon the [unrespectable] sensation fiction” (213). The essay exposes how she was consistently alert to the fraught dynamics in the commercial, popular, public, and performative spheres of her working life even when she had attained what should have been a comfortable degree of professional and personal respectability. 

Carla E. Coleman examines another neglected, but brilliant, work, the novel Rupert Godwin (1867) in tandem with the equally underestimated and significant later text, A Lost Eden (1904).  Coleman’s essay, “’The Stage! Oh, Flora, the Very Idea Frightens Me!’: Representations of Victorian Professional Theatre in Rupert Godwin and A Lost Eden ,” offers an exciting new perspective that identifies the persistence of theatrical influences on Braddon at both ends of her career. Coleman observes how Braddon wrote with an authenticity about the professional theatre that is absent from the descriptions of other novelists of the period. Many aspired to theatrical endeavours, but none had the experience of Braddon’s eight years as a touring performer. Braddon chronicled the exhaustion and exhilaration of such a career for a young performer. Coleman explains how A Lost Eden compares the “potentially dangerous situation” (243) of, in Braddon’s eyes, the unjustly maligned theatrical profession with those risks surrounding socially sanctioned performance. The portrayal of the Rodney family, who all work in different capacities on the London stage, shows the theater community’s respect and care for others; they are protective of newcomers to the profession. The representation aids Braddon in her project to “desensationalize [sic] the stage” (242) in this novel.

Joanne Knowles’s essay, “The French Connection: Gender, Morals and National Culture in Braddon’s Novels,” identifies the geographic reach of and influences on Braddon’s fiction. This is an area ripe for more investigation; the equation between Braddon’s work and French literature and drama is still developing as more of her novels are appraised and more archival evidence from her manuscripts confirms the connections. Knowles highlights how Balzac and Zola are “models” for some of Braddon’s fiction, and she examines the “icons, tastes, and expectations” (158) from French literature found in Charlotte’s Inheritance (1868) and Vixen (1879). These novels show Braddon’s Francophile influences, which also reinforced Henry James’s admiration for her work. The evidence from Braddon’s unpublished manuscripts shows the infusion of French popular culture, as in, for example, her story about the anti-hero Chevalier Robert Macaire from the 1832 play L’Auberge Des Adrets  by Antier & Lacoste. She was keen to play on her readers’ expectations and prejudices about French literature in order to critique them and invite different interpretations of intercultural exchanges.  According to Knowles, “she used her knowledge of French language and culture to develop her fascination for French cultural developments and moral codes into an expedient Other in her fictions, readily invoked by her English characters as the seat of immorality and iniquity” (156-157).

Braddon’s crime fiction occupies a particularly entertaining and disturbing place in the body of her work, and Andrew Mangham’s chapter, “’Drink It Up Dear; It Will Do You Good’: Crime, Toxicology and The Trail of The Serpent,” shows how in tune she was with the stirrings and suspicions in society about secret poisoning. Mangham gives examples of the real-life cases Braddon used, some from as early as the eighteenth century. Publications from the 1850s that Braddon might well have seen cited the trials of Marie Lafarge (from the 1840s) and Mary Blandy (a notorious eighteenth-century poisoner), both of which “cast an ominous shadow over mid-Victorian uses of medicine” (97).  Mangham reinforces that the range of her referencing in The Trail of The Serpent is extensive and impressive, and all the more so considering it is her first complete novel.  The Victorian audience, “haunted” as it was “by a number of notorious criminal cases in which family members had murdered their loved ones with no warning” (97), was susceptible to the tactics that Braddon could employ.  Jabez North (the “Serpent” of the title) is one of Braddon’s great villainous inventions, and he exploits and manipulates the other characters, including the heiress Valerie de Cevennes whose lover is the victim of the poison plot.  Peters, the novel’s detective, is an inspired character, a brilliant sleuth who communicates via sign language because he is mute.   Through the employment of secret poison plots, intrigue, and narrative twists Braddon repeatedly shattered the tranquillity of domesticity with attacks on the very fabric and fundamentals of the home.

Other topics this collection covers are well represented in essays such as Anne-Marie Beller’s exploration of Braddon’s 1860s novels that looks at “female maturation” in what she terms the “Sensational Bildung” (113), and in Juliette Atkinson’s study of greed and “Literary Transgression” (133).  Tamara S. Wagner’s study of plotting in The Fatal Three (1888) and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas’s analysis of “textual secrets” (195) in the gripping Thou Art the Man (1894) both continue the scrutiny of Braddon’s lesser-known texts.

In its scope and its specificity, New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes significant contributions to the appraisal and understanding of this author’s varied career. It is extremely difficult to summarize such a prolific output and to develop a standard critical position about Braddon’s works, and, in any case, neither is desirable or helpful. When Lady Audley’s Secret does not form the preface to every analysis of Braddon’s work, definite progress will have been made in piecing together her career and cultural importance. In her introduction Cox tackles the tired argument that runs thus: because Braddon was popular and successful she, therefore, cannot be a writer of quality. Braddon’s detractors in the nineteenth century, mostly conservative critics, did their best to reinforce this point, but as Cox points out “[Her] work defies easy categorization” (8). She could be high- and low-brow, subversive and conservative, and quasi- and anti-feminist. Throughout her career Braddon sought to extricate herself from the clutches of her earliest and best-known villainess, Lady Audley.  It is high time she was at last set free.

Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm is Visiting Research Fellow in English at the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers, Canterbury Christ Church University, United Kingdom. The focus of her research is the Mary Braddon Archive of unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, and letters. She has published widely on Braddon in The Dickensian and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. She is currently working on Braddon’s unpublished childhood memoir, Before The Knowledge of Evil (1914), due for publication in 2015, the centenary of Braddon’s death.