Lady Audley's Secret

Aug 29, 2025 9:16 PM

Author:Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Penguin English Library Edition of Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

'Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair'

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.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Reviews

We are so lucky to have Anna Quindlen in our literary lives. With her big heart and her amazing humanity she reminds us all of our blessings

—— Alice Hoffman

Qualities and shades of love are this writer's strong suit, and she has the unusual talent for writing about them with so much truth and heart that one is carried away on a tidal wave of involvement and concern.

—— Elizabeth Jane Howard

Intelligence, clarity and heartrending directness

—— Newsday

The honest of her storytelling is exemplary.

—— Sunday Telegraph

Quindlen writes with power and grace.

—— The Boston Globe

Relationships and family life are captured by Anna Quindlen in a beautiful, intelligent way.

—— Good Housekeeping

An intelligent, highly entertaining novel laced with acute perceptions about the nature of day-to-day family life

—— Anne Tyler , New York Times Book Review

Tender, taut, full of insight, yet with a darkness at its centre

—— Margaret Forster

Excellently done; the minutiae of domestic landscapes, the lunatic irrationality of family quarrels, the torments of sibling rivalry

—— Sunday Telegraph

Funny, heart-hammering, wise...superb entertainment

—— New York Times Book Review

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life

—— Anna Chancellor

A classic of contemporary Americana... variously funny and horrifying and finally, quietly, terribly moving

—— Los Angeles Times

A book that should join those few that every literate person will have to read

—— Boston Globe

A novelist who knows what a proper story is . . . [Tyler is] not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well

—— Newsweek

In her ninth novel she has arrived at a new level of power

—— The New Yorker

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