Braddon, Mary Elizabeth

An extremely prolific and successful novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote thrilling, often melodramatic, novels in magazines and newspapers aimed at both middle‐class and working‐class readers. Best known for her sensation novels, such asLady Audley's Secret, Braddon also wrote novels of crime and detection, and historical fiction. Since the late twentieth century she has been rediscovered and reassessed by feminist scholars and students of popular culture as a highly readable and culturally fascinating author whose books reveal a great deal about nineteenth‐century attitudes to women as writers, readers, and fictional subjects; legal discourses on marriage and divorce; changing attitudes to marriage and the family; gendered social roles and class identities; nineteenth‐century medico‐legal discourses on insanity; the aesthetics and meanings of melodrama; the construction of the modern nervous subject in the mechanized, high‐speed culture of modernity; and the rise of consumer culture.