Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), the "Queen of Sensation" — Life and Works (2024)

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Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), the"Queen of Sensation" — Life and Works (1)

f the title "King of Sensation" rightly belongs to Wilkie Collins for inaugurating the genre of the Sensation Novel withThe Woman in White in 1860, the title "Queenof Sensation" probably should be awarded to the prolific and highly influential Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), to whom more than eightynovels can be attributed, the exact number being a matter of debatebecause her husband John Maxwell published some of her work under a variety of pseudonyms in his various literary magazines for the workingclass.

Memorial plaque for Mary Braddon at St Mary Magdalene Church, Richmond.

Some accounts of her life use the year 1837 as the year of herbirth, apparently because, as she grew older, she attempted to lopseveral years off her age. Today chiefly remembered for the furore which her best-selling potboiler Lady Audley'sSecret (1862) engendered, M. E. Braddon (eventually Mrs. Maxwell)wrote novels and plays; contributed essays, short stories, and poems to such high-circulation periodicals as Punch andThe World; and edited the two literarymagazines most closely associated with the Sensation Novel, Temple Bar and Belgravia.In 1899, the London newspaper the DailyTelegraph named Lady Audley's Secret, which had been staged in countless adaptations, as one of the world'sbest one hundred novels, despite the fact that it had been publishedalmost four decades earlier. Braddon and a handful of other young, revolutionary novelists in their artistic responses to the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 had created dangerous, scheming heroines embroiled in the complications of what negative reviewers termed the "Bigamy Plot." She, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Ellen Price Wood,Edmund Yates, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu created a new genre whilechampioning the rights of women against an obviously male-biased law that determined that, while a wife's adultery alone was sufficient causefor a divorce action, a husband's adultery was insufficient unlessaccompanied by physical abuse. In the 1860s, the decade that was the high-water mark of Sensation, M. E. Braddon wrote at least twentynovels, sometimes at the rate of three per year, all while giving birthto six children and raising her own plus six step-children.

One of three siblings, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born at No. 2,Frith Street, Soho Square , London, on 4 October 1835. Her mother, FannyWhite, was Irish; her father Henry Braddon, a Cornish solicitor, attempted to get himself out of debt by writing for such periodicals asThe Sportsman's Magazine. In 1839, whenBraddon's parents separated, she remained with her mother, who was an avid reader of Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer-Lytton. For a short time,she and the family lived at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, but most of herchildhood was spent in London. In 1847, when Braddon was just twelve, the family unit was depleted by the departure of her brother Edward(1829-1904) to work in a cousin's mercantile establishment in Calcutta,India (he afterwards managed a number of indigo factories nearKrishnagar, volunteered to serve with the British forces in 1857 to put down the Sepoy Mutiny, and from 1894 to 1899 served as Premier ofTasmania). Beginning at age seventeen, with her mother's help, Braddonpursued a career on the stage under the pseudonym "Mary Seyton," acting mainly in provincial theatres from 1852 to 1859. For one season sheperformed at the Royal Surrey Theatre, London, but in February 1860decided, after writing the novel The Octoroon; or, The lily of Louisiana (1859), to leave the stage and become a writerfull time. The year 1860 was a turning point in her life as her playThe Loves of Arcadia was staged at The Strand Theatre, London, her second novel, Three TimesDead; or, The Secret of the Heath was published, and Yorkshiresquire John Gilby of Beverley commissioned her to write a lengthy poem about the exploits of Garibaldi, liberator of Italy. That same year, shemet publisher and editor John Maxwell (1824-1895), who brought outseveral of her short stories such as "The Cold Embrace" in his various magazines. The two felt an instant attraction.

In February 1861, she published Garibaldi andOther Poems for Gilby, who quickly stepped aside as her mentor because of Maxwell's growing influence over her personal andprofessional life. John Maxwell inaugurated his new magazine Robin Goodfellow with Lady Audley's Secret in serial, after which she began living withMaxwell. On 1 July 1861, her novel The Black Band;or, The Mysteries of Midnight began its serial run in The Halfpenny Magazine. Despite the lack of publicresponse to the Robin Goodfellow serial,Maxwell, believing that she was fully capable of producing a best-seller, reworked her second novel, Three TimesDead, retitled it The Trail of theSerpent, and sold a thousand copies within its first week of publication. Quickly she went from being Maxwell's literaryprotégé to a surrogate wife and mother to his children,after his first wife, Mary Anne Crowley, had been confined to a Dublin asylum after she lost her sanity. Braddon and Maxwell began livingtogether in 1861, and celebrated the birth of a son, Gerald, in March1862. Subsequently they had five more children. On 26 May 1862, hernovel The White Phantom began its serial run in The Halfpenny Journal. Maxwell recommencedthe serialization of Lady Audley's Secret inhis Sixpenny Magazine. Braddon dedicated the novel when it appeared in three volumes in October 1862 to Sir EdwardBulwer-Lytton, the contemporary novelist she both admired and emulated.Meanwhile, Aurora Floyd had been running serially in Temple Bar. Simultaneously, John Marchmont's Legacy ran in serial, and waspublished in volume form in 1864. Andrew Sanders has recently praised this still-little-known novel as "tautly constructed, with a series ofunexpected contrivances and cliff-hanging twists to the plot which seemto oblige a reader to collude in the process of solving the central mystery" (446).

Although she soon established herself as a versatile and prolificwriter, Braddon had few illusions about the tastes of her largelyworking-class readership, which, as she lamented in a December 1862 letter, tended towards "crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning, &general infamy . . . . " She might have added that her readers enjoyedher attacks on both smug, middle-class morality and upper-class respectability; she revealed the hypocrisy of both governing classes asshe attacked their marginalization of women and their socialpretensions. She regarded serial writing as a "curse" since it forced her to write more than one novel at once--mere "hand to mouthcomposition," as she remarked in a letter to Bulwer-Lytton.Serialization, like her youthful reading and seven years on theprovincial stage, however, served her well. In terms of narrative pace and construction, sharply defined characterization, narrative flair, andtheatrical scene changes, her knowledge of contemporary comedy andmelodrama enabled her to write quickly and with emotional intensity.

In 1863, her second-most-popular novel, AuroraFloyd, was published in three volumes. A son, Francis, and adaughter, Fanny, were born in January and December 1863 respectively. Loosely adapted from Gustave Flaubert's radical French novel Madame Bovary (1857), which like Braddon's workschallenged Victorian morality and the doctrine of separate spheres for the sexes, The Doctor's s Wife was published.In turn, it may well have influenced Hardy's treatment of marriage inThe Return of the Native (1878), which ran serially in Belgravia. In 1866, M. E. Braddontook up the post of editor for the monthly Belgravia, a literary magazine which John Maxwell owned, and which published the short fiction of Wilkie Collins. At this time,riding a tide of prosperity and literary celebrity, she and John Maxwellpurchased Lichfield House, Richmond-upon-Thames. Although they spent a great deal of time at their country house at Annesley Bank, nearLyndhurst, Hampshire, Lichfield was their principal residence. Theborough often appears in the novels she wrote after the mid-1860s, as,for example, The Conflict (1903), which is set in Richmond and Twickenham, and London Pride,which utilizes Hampton Court and Mortlake. In the King's Road area ofRichmond-upon-Thames Maxwell made a number of real estate investments, naming some of the expanding borough's new roads after characters fromhis wife's novels, including Marchmont Road and Audley Road. "TheWinning Sequence," a short story set partly in Suffield House, Richmond, near Braddon's own residence, appeared Lloyd'sMagazine on 27 December 1896.

Braddon and Maxwell lost one son, Francis, in 1866, but had another, the future novelist William Babington Maxwell, later that same year. In1868, Braddon published Charlotte'sInheritance. On 1 November, Braddon's mother died, just weeks after Braddon had received the news of her sister Maggie's death inItaly. In December, Braddon gave birth to a daughter, Winifred, thensuccumbed to a nervous breakdown complicated by puerperal fever. In December 1870, Braddon's last child, Edward, was born. When JohnMaxwell's wife died on 5 September 1874, he and Braddon were finallyfree to marry, and did so on 2 October. In 1876, Braddon published Joshua Haggard's Daughter, and resigned hereditorship of Belgravia. But in 1878 shefounded another publication, the Christmas annual The Mistletoe Bough, to which she frequently contributed over thenext fourteen years as well as edited. There followed a succession ofsensationally-plotted novels: The Vixen (1879), Ishmael (1884), London Pride (1896), and TheInfidel (1900) being but a few examples. Unfortunately, in 1891, John Maxwell's health markedly declined, and he died on 5 March 1895.Ten years later, having enjoyed her workspace at Lichfield for almostfifty years, M. E. Braddon died of a cerebral hemorrhage, aged 79, in February 1915, and was buried in Richmond Cemetery. The following year,Braddon's last novel, Mary was publishedposthumously.

Related Material

  • A Mary Elizabeth Braddon Chronology
  • The Rediscovery of Mary Elizabeth Braddon(1835-1915) — "Queen of Sensation"

Bibliography

Carnell, Jennifer. "About Elizabeth Braddon." Accessed 19 December 2006.http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/b/elizabeth-braddon/

Beattie, J. W. "Sir Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon (1829-1904). Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library ofTasmania. AUTAS001125880757. Australian Dictionary ofBiography--Online Edition. Accessed 20 December 2006. http://www.abd.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A070389b.htm

Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of M. E. Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work. Hastings,England: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ford, Boris. From Dickens to Hardy. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol.6. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958, rev., 1964.

Ford, George H., ed. Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research. New York: The ModernLanguage Association, 1978.

Houston, Natalie M., ed. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862). Peterborough, Ontario:Broadview, 2003.

London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames Public Library. "Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1837-1915." Local History Notes. Accessed 18December 2006.http://www.richmond.gov.uk/local_history_m_braddon.pdf

Marshall, Gail. VictorianFiction. London and New York: Arnold and Oxford U. P., 2002.

Mitchell, Sally, ed. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York and London: Garland, 1988.

Sanders, Andrew. The Short OxfordHistory of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2004.

Tromp, Marlene; Gilbert, Pamela; and Haynie, Aeron;editors. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon inContext. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Willis, Chris. "Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915)." TheLiterary Encyclopedia. Posted 28 March 2001. Accessed 18 December 2006. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5053.

Willis, Chris. "The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Website."Accessed 19 December 2006. http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/braddon.html

Wolff, Robert Lee. SensationalVictorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Garland, 1979.

VictorianWeb AuthorsM. E. Braddon

Last modified 1 November 2020

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), the
"Queen of Sensation" — Life and Works (2024)
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