Lady Audley's Secret (ME Braddon, 1862)

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Pub. 1862. Ed. Natalie M. Houston. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003.

General Notes

• 60 Talboys goes to Australia for the gold rush beginning in 1851, same that the characters rob a convoy for in Sherlock Holmes "Boscombe Valley Mystery"
• 103 "Indeed I believe all ghosts to be the result of damp." (Robert A)
• 109 Talboys' perceived sensitivity to the weather (by Robert), reminiscent of Lucy Villette
• 222 time an impt motif: the clock at Audley Court, train timetables, Clara Talboys says she thought she had to "trust to time", then Talboys' death described on 223 as "untimely"
• 226-7 "Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasonable rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables...this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and the tempest, the riot and confusion within"
  • key bringing together of image clusters: time (before quote), objects, the storm
  • then tied somewhat cheekily to ideas, "the young philosopher of the modern school...the nothingness of everything"
• 229 kind of amazing mix of feminism and misogyny
• 232 storm metaphor for Robert's revelations
• 261 Robert becoming more detective-like (barrister-like?), he used a notebook to interview old Mrs. Vincent and now again with the hotel owner in Yorkshire
• 263 RA dreams of a storm over Audley Court
• 268 the phrase circumstantial evidence keeps being used - was it in currency in the news or something? Or just legalese?
• 297 she goes into Eliotian mode to didactically analyze RA as a type of character but interestingly does it at least in part in print/literary terms:

 "the mute inglorious Miltons who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher;"

• 326 emotions taking up Textual space in "closely printed volumes" quote
• 356-66 Lady A confesses to sir Michael and Robert
• 366 Robert calls for his valet - can we assume he's been tacitly traveling around the country with him?
• 377 here and repeatedly the figuration of Clara Talboys as having eyes like George's -- reminiscent of a piece of Dracula criticism (Mighall? Craft?) about how same sex desire is authorized through heterosexual relationships
• 380 RA "Physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century"
• 406-9 RA thinking of his situation in specifically popular/sensation fiction terms, Dumas, Wilkie Collins

Theme Tracking

Shakespeare references

• 179 describing the locksmith "there was nothing that he need have been ashamed of in his face, except the dirt, and that, as Hamlet'smother says, "is common""
• 211 Talboys' father reminds RA of John Philip kemble
• 264 houses on Yorkshire seaside look "as if built for the especial accommodation of some modern Timon"
• 281 RA references "the Scottish leech" (Macbeth V.3.43-7) in confronting lady a
• 339 free indirect discourse as narrator speculates that Sir Kichael mentally compares Robert and Alicia to Benedick and Beatrice in Much ado