Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (March 13-14,
2004)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret is a suspenseful story that will keep you turning the pages until the very end. The well-crafted plot never falters as you follow the exploits of Lady Audley, a deceptive homicidal bigamist and villainess.
It was surprising to see the angelic, haloed, blond Lady Audley turn out to be as evil and conniving as she was. I think if Wilkie Collins wrote the story, Lady Audley would have been dark-tressed and eyed. So often is evilness associated with darkness, maturity and strength in Victorian tales, that to see Lady Audley’s evil ways come from a frail, child-like figure played against expectation.
The story begins when the child-like and bewitching Lucy Graham marries Sir Michael Audley. The reader soon suspects that Lady Audley is a bigamist and using a false name. Meanwhile, George Talboys arrives in England and meets his old friend, the lazy Robery Audley (Sir Audley’s nephew). George has returned to his wife Helen Maldon Talboys with gold from Australia. He had abandoned Helen and their infant son with her father three years prior to earn money for them. George reads a newspaper on his first days ashore and learns Helen is dead.
Robert brings George to visit his Uncle, and Lady Audley avoids meeting with George by leaving town. Alicia, Robert’s cousin, hates her "wax-doll" step-mother and has lost her role as mistress of the home. While Lady Audley and Sir Michael are gone, Alicia wants to show Robert and George around the home, but she learns Lady Audley has locked her doors. Instead of giving up, she remembers a secret passage that lead from her nursery to Lady Audley’s dressing room. There they can see the most beautiful paintings and a new incomplete portrait of Lucy. Robert sees a beautiful fiend in the portrait, which the narrator describes as "so like, yet so unlike." George looks at the portrait next, and the silence that Robert notices in his friend startles him. Soon afterwards George is missing
Robert is transformed from an apathetic wanderer without goals to a detective and man-of-action. He raises his eyebrows in the face of all information, not giving away his ideas on who is responsible for George’s disappearance. Robert meets George’s sister Clara in his investigations and wants even more to do justice to his friend, who he now believes is dead. He tracks the life of Helen Talboys and Lucy Audley in the clues she’s left behind. Eventually, Lady Audley tries to kill Robert by burning down the inn he sleeps in to hide her secret. Robert escapes, and finally Lady Audley is forced to confess. She confesses a new secret. Her mother was mad.
Robert is left with a moral dilemma to protect Lady Audley from the law (and his family from shame) by sending her to a madhouse or punishing her publicly in a trial. The doctor from who he seeks counsel gives him an important diagnosis: Lady Audley is perfectly sane. Robert gives him more information, but still is reserved, and the doctor gives orders to admit her to a madhouse. Lady Audley dies there, while the virtuous live happily. Clara and Robert marry and George stays with them.
What is perhaps the most interesting about the story is the purpose of Lady Audley. At every moment she knows what her goal is to survive and succeed, although she is underestimated throughout. Though she is evil, she is in full control over her choices and actions, which lead to her downfall.
