Robert Lee Wolff

MEB completed the penny parts of her first novel, Three Times Dead; or, The Secret of the Heath, in the ground-breaking genre of the detective novel. Begun in February of this year, it was...

Harvard 's Houghton Library has a number of significant manuscripts by MEB including notebooks as well as novels. The extensive collection of her printed titles and manuscripts owned by Robert Lee Wolff of Harvard University

Later in life, she did Latin translation with her children and taught herself some Greek, in hopes, according to biographer and critic Robert Lee Wolff , of remedying the deficiency in her education that caused...

Margaret Oliphant 's critique of the sensation novel in 1867 relied heavily on attacking MEB 's reputation. The best she would say was that some of Braddon's works deserved some of their success. Braddon's sole...

While appearing on stage MEB must have found it a challenge to protect herself from unwanted sexual attentions. She attracted the attention, apparently without meeting disapproval from her mother, of newspaper proprietor Charles Bray (who...

A dashing East India Company officer bilks the heir to a baronetcy of his fortune by kidnapping him and substituting the murderous son of a gamekeeper, who is in turn murdered by the family of...

From late 1861 MEB published in her future husband John Maxwell 's Temple Bar, edited by George Augustus Sala , a periodical which aimed to compete with the prestigious Cornhill Magazine. In...

A subplot excised in revision as Henry Dunbar was recycled into the short story Lost and Found: this removed the bigamy and blackmail from the novel. This time the novel in book form was...

The philanthropic aristocrat Charles Raymond in this story is based on MEB 's friend Charles Bray .Wolff sees Isabel (who during her youth lives as did MEB in Camberwell) as a kind...

As Robert Lee Wolff argues, The Lady's Mile represents an innovation in the portrayal of male character in Victorian fiction: MEB 's brave officer sells his commission and leaves the army in order to pursue...

But despite reminiscence of other MEB fiction—emphasis on a providential Hand guiding the action, reference to a private lunatic asylum as a living tomb— the novel is a considerable drop in quality from...

Critic Robert Lee Wolff sees MEB in her novels of the 1870s as satirizing the hypocrisy of middle-class Low-church values while seeming to espouse them, in part because she was trying to compete with...

Robert Lee Wolff argues that this is one of MEB 's very best Wilkie Collins -style investigations. As in much of MEB 's other fiction in this style, the reader can easily and...

Robert Lee Wolff considers this, with Joshua Haggard's Daughter, one of her two masterpieces.

The Athenæum praised MEB 's command of English and avoidance of sensationalism in this work. Her biographer Robert Lee Wolff judged it to be the best of all her sensation novels.