Although Lady Audley's Secret is a well written, very readable mid-Victorian novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, it has some serious characterisation flaws. The three main male characters are all too good to be true. In particular, 'our hero', Robert Audley is depicted as such a paradigm of virtue that the discerning reader will not fail to end up thoroughly disliking him as a smug, self-righteous numskull of a barrister good for nothing but smoking cigars in his chambers. After the reader is told that he has never taken on a case for anyone, he is then portrayed as the paragon of virtue who succeeds in exposing the machinations of an unfortunate woman who has already suffered hell throughout her short life. Our hero then makes a bosom pal of this lady's first husband, after which the reader is expected to empathise with this latter gentleman on account of his sufferings caused by his own ill judgements.
The moral of the tale seems to be that decent men are made to suffer by scheming, mentally unbalanced women who deserve to be thoroughly punished for causing the male establishment so much distress. Even my lady's personal maid, Phoebe, is portrayed as some morally inferior creature in need of masculine moral guidance. Unfortunately she weds a boring drunk who, notwithstanding he gets nearly burnt to death, is still able to indulge in a long death bed dissertation for the benefit of our smug hero. It's all Lady Audley's fault. She's committed the unforgivable sin of upsetting a set of smug, self-righteous, cigar smoking, Victorian gentlemen. Small wonder that Mary Elizabeth Braddon never became as renowned a writer as George Elliot, Mrs Gaskell and the Bronte sisters, all of whom, in one way or another, created more believable characters and did not elevate their male characters into positions suggesting that they were in some way or other morally superior to weak and helpless females.
Although some readers will doubtless very much enjoy reading this novel, I have to speak as I find. The tale amounts to little more than two vulnerable, decent women, Lady Audley and her maid Phoebe, being misunderstood and mistreated in a variety of ways by a bunch of male, chauvinist pigs. How a female author could manage so successfully to put her own sex down in this way is beyond me. However, taking into consideration that this is a well written, well constructed work failing mainly through poor male character construction and portrayal, I'm happy to give it three stars.
