Mary Elizabeth BraddonReseñas

Brilliant! 10 stars, a more perfect sensational novel has not been written!

I enjoyed this Victorian ghost story by an author I knew nothing about. Thanks to Jack Wilson, host of "The History of Literature" Podcast.

Une très belle jeune femme épouse un riche gentilhomme (plutôt vieux!). Un homme disparaît, son meilleur ami mène l'enquête. Cela a été pour moi un grand plaisir de lire ce roman du XIXe siècle. J'y ai retrouvé un style d'écriture que je connaissais bien dans mon enfance, lorsque je lisais Dickens, Féval, Dumas et bien d'autres. Cela n'est pas seulement un divertissement, on découvre la société et les moeurs de l'époque. Une lecture féministe du livre est possible (M. E. Braddon est une femme).

This was a pretty fun book with plenty of Victorian soliloquies and dramatizations. Haha! Very typical 19th century sensation novel---oh, if only Jane Austen could have read it! We might have been treated to something inspired to rival Northanger Abbey in her old age. While I thought the "villain" ultimately deserved a lot worse than was doled out, I was satisfied overall with the ending.

OMG - where has Mary Elizabeth Braddon been all my life? She was a contemporary of Dickens, the precursor of Wilkie Collins, and (the foreward argues) instrumental in establishing the detective fiction genre - so you'd think her works would be more widely available. Alas, no - female writers of "sensational fiction" weren't taken seriously back in the 19th century and didn't fare much better in the 20th century, so her works (excepting her "Lady Audley's Secret") gradually passed out of print. Thank you, Modern Library, for bringing back this gem!

"The Trail of the Serpent" has everything you could want in a "sensational novel" of the Victorian era: foundlings, wastrels, prodigal sons, identical twins separated at birth, bigamy, greed, love, hate, secret marriages, murder, madness, depravity, alchemy, secret societies, abject poverty, egregious wealth, a mute detective (how's that for "woke"?), and practically every other melodramatic trope you can imagine, all tied together by the machinations of a gloriously clever, deliciously evil villain determined to do whatever it takes to rise from obscurity to the heights of European society.

Which could be a hot mess in the hands of a schlock, but make no mistake about it - Braddon can write! She's intelligent, witty, and a gifted storyteller. Yes, her plot is sensational, but it's also stuffed with biting social commentary, delicious satire/irony, and laugh-out-loud comedic set-pieces.

Kirkus Review calls this "exuberantly campy" and it's hard to improve on this as a two-word summary. But Trail of the Serpent isn't just fun; it marks an important transition from the sensational, serialized novels of the day to the more serious literary writing of Dickens and his ilk. So go ahead and read it for the fun, then boast about reading it for the literary cred!

Well. This is quite a long story for something that's pretty obvious upfront. I'm willing to accept that it could have been novel and exciting at the time, and I've just read too many mysteries. Still we spend a lot of time in the minds of men whose entire POV could be summed up as "Ladies! Am I right?"

i'd forgotten this novel but found this it in a pile and heard myself say, wow this one was bananas-fun.

Étrange destin que celui de la jeune Eleanor Vanes. Après des années d'enfance particulièrement heureuses passées dans la maison dé son père, elle ne supportera pas d'apprendre que celui-ci s'est suicidé. Elle a compris qu'un mystérieux individu était seul responsable de la mort de son aïeul et elle jure devant Dieu de le venger... Commence pour Eleanor, transformée en véritable détective amateur, une quête âpre et difficile qui s'accomplit en parallèle avec sa nouvelle vie. Elle est en effet devenue la dame de compagnie de Mrs Darrell dont le fils, Launcelet, ne reste pas indifférent aux charmes de la jeune fille. C'est alors que résonne comme un coup de cymbales, l'insupportable vérité : celui qu'Eleanor recherchait pour le punir n'est autre que... Face à une adversité apparemment insurmontable, la victoire d'Eleanor n'en sera que plus héroïque

Mary Elizabeth Braddon is to my mind one of the most underrated 19th century writers. This is a collection of her ghost stories, a couple at least of which I have previously read in other anthologies. They are generally very well written and quite atmospheric, though some of them do get a bit repetitive when read in order in a collection like this, for example the idea of apparitions or sights appearing to people at the time when they or someone they love is at that moment or is shortly to be dying. I thought the most effective were probably The Shadow in the Corner, The Face in the Glass, The Island of Old Faces and Herself.

Spring 2019, audiobook,

A delightful listen on the free duo from Audible. This was a delightful story by Braddon about the full circle of a family through the love of children. I feel as though it is a lost little Christmas story that I am glad found its way into my life.

This is a book about a young woman in the 19th century in England who is the daughter of a captain in the British India service who has now been let out of the army at half pay. As a result, she's very poor, because he's taken another wife and has a kid with her. So he farms her out to this young woman's boarding school where she is a pupil-teacher and she will get a reference at the end of her time in order to get a good job as a governess. she's best friends with this girl whose family is rich, so this girl invites our protagonist, whose name is Ida, to come for the summer holiday at her family's home. There she meets the whole family, who falls in love with her, and she also meets one of the two brians in the family, cousins of her best friend. Nearby lives Urania ryland, who is Ida's sworn enemy, mainly on account of Ida's great beauty. She loves to rub salt in the wound of Ida's poverty. She has heard ita mentioned to her best friend bess that she would marry for money. So she has the idea to play a practical joke on Ida and pretend that the Brian that shows up on Bessie's birthday is the rich Brian and not the poor brian. when Ida goes back to school, the poor Brian comes along the river path and flirts with her and let's her think that he's the rich brian. Well there's all kinds of enemies that Ida has at the school because she's so pretty, so one of them lays a trap for her, and tells the head mistress that she has been meeting this young man on her River walks. Although nothing untoward has happened, the headmistress also hates Ida so any little thing she will take to get rid of her and be able to keep a large part of the 50 lb that Mr pallister paid for his daughter suits her just fine. So when this young man finds out that she gets fired he offers to marry her. Well Ida had to think that's a good idea because he's Rich right? so they get married in this little church and lo and behold she finds out he's the poor brian. She hates his guts so she leaves him and she starts home for her father's miserable little Hovel in dieppe, France.
Well her rich friend Bessie finds out she got fired and she gets her aunt to hire her as a companion. So Ida spendw a wonderful year living with Aunt Betsy and getting paid 10 lb a quarter for being her companion.
another year comes around and on Bessie's birthday the poor Brian shows up and claims his wife. The whole family is indignant that Ida has left him and they tell her that it's her duty to be the wife of the poor brian. So off she goes to lead her miserable life with this pendejo. He turns out to be a raving alcoholic. So her life is doubly miserable.
But as in all of these old English romances, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I read this on the heels of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (LOVED that) as it mentioned a few times. There was a famous murder investigation of that period that surely Mrs. Braddon called upon while writing this novel. Well-written and plotted, the only reason I give it four stars not five, is the lack of mystery... it's shocking enough if we all imagine Victorian women behaving well. There are some interesting commentaries on YouTube that one should see as well regarding Lady Audley's behavior/symptoms falling within the boundaries of what was then called "purple madness" and is similar to post-partem depression. But Lady Audley's secret is fairly obvious in the early part of the book. The question is not did she do these things but was she mad or a psychopath? How far can we go to meet her with empathy? Do we rally with a cry of feminism that not all women want to be married and have children or do we see her as a manipulative, heartless opportunist? Watching it play out is like watching a train wreck, horrible but fascinating. And yet, other books pull me away. At present, I've set it aside unfinished for now.

Loved this...great fun. 4.5-stars, rounded down.

As I read Lady Audley's Secret, I kept thinking of Poe, Conan Doyle and Anne Bronte. A nice combination, if I must say so myself. Braddon has created an interesting story line and a creepy environment in which to plunk down her motley set of characters. I loved the conflicting ideas that are present within Lady Audley herself and especially enjoyed the myriad ways she is viewed by the other characters in the story. Her secret did surprise me, and I confess I thought it would not.

Braddon does a wonderful job of creating atmosphere and her descriptive passages are delightful and vivid. She plants red herrings and takes the mind into many dead-end suppositions. She made me laugh a little, but at the same time cringe. In the end, I loved both her story and the way it was delivered. While many things progressed in the novel exactly as I assumed they would, there were a few moments of complete surprise and that is always nice in this genre. I will not hesitate to read more of Braddon's work when I can fit it into my schedule.

Think of the worst of the villains, like Simon Legree or Bill Sikes, and multiply their evil, add in cunning and calculation, and you will have a pretty good portrait of Jabez North. Even his name sort of makes you want to shrink backward, does it not? Written in 1860, The Trail of the Serpent is credited with being the first British detective fiction ever published. She predates Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone by eight years. She is known to have influenced both Collins and Conan Doyle, and this alone makes Elizabeth Braddon worth reading, but she was one of the most popular writers of her time for a reason, this book is just pure fun.

She is not only clever and able to weave intricate plots, but she has a marvelous sense of humor, very sly and subtle. In describing a lunatic at the asylum, she writes ”this gentleman also sighed for an introduction to poor Dick, for Maria Martin had come to him in a vision all the way from the Red Barn, to tell him that the prisoner was his first cousin, through the marriage of his uncle with the third daughter of Henry the Eighth’s seventh wife, and he considered it only natural and proper that such near relations should become intimately acquainted with each other. Such bits of humor are sprinkled throughout the novel and often turn a serious event into a bit of a chuckle.

There is everything present in this novel to make a good detective novel work. There is an innocent man framed for a crime; a heartless villain who will stop at nothing and has no regard for anyone other than himself, including his own flesh-and-blood; an undervalued detective, whose handicap of being dumb is turned to his advantage; and a set of believable coincidences that make all the characters come together within a world that spans the continent. This is not a who-dunnit. We know who our villain is from the first chapter. The fun here is in seeing how he manages both his crimes and his victims and how our detective pulls together the evidence to bring him to justice.

My only complaint (and it is a very small one) would be that Braddon felt it necessary to tie up all the characters in a final chapter that seemed very anticlimactic to me. If she had left this out, I would have felt a greater sense of satisfaction. Others might disagree, however, and want to know what happens to everyone after the end has come.

I picked this book to fill a slot on my Quest for Women Authors challenge. I needed an entry for
1860 and this filled the bill. I had read Lady Audley’s Secret, so I knew Braddon was an author I might enjoy, to my surprise, I liked this much more than Lady Audley, which is her most famous work. I suspect she will become much more widely read now that Modern Library has undertaken to republish some of her novels. If you like Victorian literature or detective fiction, this novel is one you won’t want to miss.

This is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's second most famous novel after Lady Audley's Secret. Like that one it also concerns a respectable woman with, at least by the standards of the mid 19th century, a disreputable secret in her past. This slightly lacked the sparkle of the other novel, but still contained moments of drama and tension and some interesting characters. There is a murder central to the mystery of Aurora's past, though the identity of the culprit is hardly a surprise and I was slightly hoping for a last minute twist. As an author of Victorian sensationalist novels, Braddon is for me almost up there with Wilkie Collins, though she is undeservedly far less well known.

An old man who had given up all hope for love falls in love and marries a governess who seems to have no history. A young man comes back from Australia, having made his fortune, just to learn that his wife had died just a little time ago. If you cannot see where this story is going, you just had not read enough books (or watched enough movies). Surprisingly enough, that turns out NOT to be the big secret of the novel - and that's part of the charm of the novel.

And just when you think that the novel will be all about unmasking the young Lady Audley (or her successful attempt in hiding her secrets), a man disappears, presumed killed - and she seems to be in the center of that mystery as well. As the book progress she manages to get herself into more and more situations which at least hint of her having even worse secrets. The big problem of course is that if anyone accuses of anything, it is her husband who will suffer - so the nephew who decides to try to get to the bottom of the murder, needs to connect every single dot in his story before he can even try to articulate his suspicions.

And off he goes - pulling and digging and trying to convince himself that he is really right - except that he is restrained by both the Victorian era norms and the mundane - no Sherlock Holmesesian ability to ignore everything else in this novel. Meanwhile our villain is living the life she always wanted - cherished, getting anything she wants and pretending to be the perfect wife.

Braddon's style can appear almost sluggish to a modern reader - but the action never stops. Every incident leads to something new, building the case against the pretty Lucy (who may appear innocent but we can see her true colors early on in some of the actions which noone else in the house sees). And somewhere among all that, even a love story manages to develop.

The introduction in the Penguin edition by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Russell Crofts is very useful in getting some of the ideas and the importance of certain facts which you just may know nothing about (and there are also some notes). It also does things properly by warning the reader before the spoilers start so one can choose if they want to read it at the start or come back later (immediately after that warning, the big secret is revealed and pretty much the whole action and all surprises are laid out so if one decide to continue reading the introduction despite the warning, they cannot blame anyone but themselves).

I really enjoyed this novel - there were times when I wish Braddon had allowed some of her characters to talk to each other and it got a bit tiresome in some parts to have everyone crying out all the time instead of just talking but those are just quibbles. It may not have the control of the language that Dickens and some of the other Victorians have but it is nevertheless fun to read.

The title of this novel is probably one of the biggest understatements in fiction: the demure, unassuming little Lady Audley has secrets the way other people have hot dinners. Only a few pages into the novel, the reader has already been given enough hints to understand that she's guilty of just about every crime on the Victorian statute books, with the possible exceptions of piracy on the high seas and the sale of ecclesiastical offices. And those only because she hasn't got around to them yet.

Miss Braddon takes us through the unmasking of this ringleted supervillain with huge amounts of energy and with her tongue firmly in her cheek. No character is ever allowed to get very far with a moralistic soliloquy or with reflecting darkly on the evils of the world without being interrupted by some thoroughly mundane consideration, like the landlady coming in with the shaving-water or the cabbie asking for his fare. Even when the hero (finally) goes down on his knees to his girl, the reader is distracted from the young man's eloquent proposal by the creaking of joints... Braddon obviously really enjoyed what she did, as well as making money out of it.

The writing is anything but "literary": like most of us, Braddon clearly believes that clichés were put into the world to save us time and effort, and she uses them liberally. No-one says anything remotely clever or original, and the descriptions of people and places are routine and instantly forgettable. But, despite that, it's always clear, efficient and eminently readable. Everything works to advance the story in the direction she intends it to go, and we stick with her, eager to find out how it's all going to end. And there are all those dry little comments dropped in along the way to undermine any pretence at moral seriousness. Whatever we may think about the Victorians, Miss Braddon makes it clear that at least one of them wasn't having any of that nonsense...

I love Richard Armitage's narration, but the book was dreadfully boring. Think I even fell asleep somewhere towards the end.

This is a really lovely little story. A bit predictable in parts, but very sweet.

Victorian tale about family and regrets. A friend decides to bring some children to his old friend's home to bring Christmas more meaning.

Lady Audley's secret was serialized between 1861-2, and then published in novel form. The novel has all the characteristics of a who-dunnit, although I think to most readers the culprit of the story will be evident from early on, as in fact the title reveals. The power of the story is to keep readers excited and interested. In the first place, of course, there is the focal point of interest, to find out what exactly Lucy Graham is hiding, and this turns out to be quite a lot. The concealment is in fact very clever, much too clever for an apparently little lamb she is supposed to be.

I first read this novel in a new "Pocket Penguin Classic" edition without an introduction, and later read the introduction by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Russell Croft to the Penguin Classics edition, and must say that introduction was pretty useless, especially its slant on supposed women roles and homosexual undercurrent. That all seems far-fetched to me.

The opening paragraphs are kind of striking, with an odd description of the age-old manor, where everything seems a bit broken and out of joint. The novel might well be a warning to the elderly rich, not to be dazed and dazzled by a 'blondie' into a late-age marriage. The metaphor of being blind is persistent, blinded by love, befuddled by appearance, and at a deeper level, deceit.

One possible theme seems to be the idea of making a new beginning, which bleakly seems to suggest that such new beginnings should be sought overseas, not at home, as Audley Manor may perhaps be a metaphor for England.

Lady Audley's secret is a very entertaining read, that I would surely recommend.

Far too predictable.

When I started this book I had no idea that it was written in 1862! I was just amazed at the use of language and how flowery and detailed it was. This was a great read with lots of plot twists and high drama. I loved that the author threw in some of the most popular writers of the day into the verbiage, especially Wilkie Collins whose work I love. Highly recommended indeed;)

A sweet Victorian tale, very well narrated by Richard Armitage. A story that can be appreciated any time of year. One that comes all tied up with a bow. Lovely, predictable, but a great escape.

This is a beautiful and heart-warming Christmas story about an old man's redemption through the innocence of a small child whom he befriends, leading to a family reunion. It's very humorous as well as sad in places. It also shows prolific Victorian author Mary Braddon's versatility as a writer. I have read her most famous work, the sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret and several of her ghostly horror short stories in various collections over the years, and really enjoyed all of these. She penned over 80 novels, short story collections and other stuff, and should be much better known.