Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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Standard Name: Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
Birth Name: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Pseudonym: Mary Seyton
Pseudonym: Babington White
Pseudonym: Lady Caroline Lascelles
Pseudonym: Aunt Belinda
Pseudonym: The author of Lady Audley's Secret
Self-constructed Name: M. E. Braddon
Married Name: Mary Elizabeth Maxwell
Used Form: Miss M. E. Braddon
MEB
made her name, scandalously, in the early 1860s as a founder of the intricately plotted sensation novel, and was particularly known for her transgressive heroines. Although still most strongly associated with this and the related genres of gothic, mystery and detective stories, she also contributed significantly during her 56-year career to the psychological and realist novels, in addition to writing several dramas (some of them produced) and publishing in her youth one long poem in a collection with shorter ones. Dedicated to writing for the new and expanding mass reading public (including fiction for the penny press), and associated from the outset with novel advertising and publishing practices, she issued her work serially, edited Belgravia magazine from 1866 to 1876 (as well as a Christmas annual), and survived the demise of the triple-decker novel.
In a Book Buyer article of January 1897, American novelist and short story writer Stephen Crane
called this novel Ouida's Masterpiece and a song of the brave. He particularly liked the character Cigarette, a figure...
Reception
Ouida
Within a few years of her first novel's publication, Ouida
had attained some celebrity as a writer, but not all the attention she received was positive. While her sales were strong, she was attacked for...
Education
Henry Handel Richardson
The child Ethel Richardson was a great reader. She identified with male fictional characters, and cherished three books which her father gave her almost on his death-bed: The Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan
, Robinson Crusoe...
Publishing
Charlotte Riddell
CR
's next publishers, Tinsley Brothers
, had close ties to the circulating libraries and provided a real boost to her career. Their biggest recent success had been Mary Elizabeth Braddon
's Lady Audley's Secret...
Textual Features
James Malcolm Rymer
The penny dreadful genre borrowed much from the chapbook tradition both in textual production and readership, as well as from the gothic, depicting scenes of violent crime, horror, and the supernatural. E. F. Bleiler
...
Textual Features
Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Edith J. Simcox
EJS
could be unreservedly critical in her reviews: she deemed Mary Elizabeth Braddonanother victim to the diseased appetite of the class that would rather read half-a-dozen bad novels than one good one, and...
Occupation
Constance Smedley
Since the Langham Place Group
had provided a social space for women in 1860, several organizations had already challenged the flourishing institution of men's clubs. The Lyceum Club
came on the scene at a time...
Literary responses
Anna Steele
AS
has been largely ignored by readers and critics since her death, and her works remain out of print. Her name occurs in biographies of her more famous relatives, and in 1929 her niece Minna Evangeline Bradhurst
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
Several shorter stories are gems. Two of them explore respectively the experiences of birth and of death, from the viewpoint of those on the fringes of the central event. Many stories are hard on women...
Intertextuality and Influence
Flora Thompson
From her account it is clear how she respects, even loves, the people she describes, but also how she is not one of them, but is marked off by tiny gradations of knowledge and privilege...
Education
Katharine Tynan
Owing to what KT
calls an extraordinary wave of Puritanism throughout the Irish Catholic Church,
her reading was censored: her mother forbade her to read Mary Elizabeth Braddon
's Aurora Floyd (1863). She thought...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Tytler
Clearly delighted with the opportunity to mix in literary circles, ST
recorded her personal observations of these authors in Men and Women Met by the Way, the final 100-page-long section of her family autobiography...
Textual Features
Sophie Veitch
The interdependence of her passionate feelings, athleticism, and goodness is made evident in her foil, Edith Cranley (later Edith Mason). Edith is a perfect little lady,
Veitch, Sophie. The Dean’s Daughter. National Publishing Company.