Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics)
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
'it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court' When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley's Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon's portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What is suprising about this story is that although we know whodunit,the author skillfully holds our interest.I enjoyed the narrators voice and also the change in who we think the protaganist is in the early part.
Best book I have read in a long time and I'm suprised it's not more widely recognised as the great story it is.
Best book I have read in a long time and I'm suprised it's not more widely recognised as the great story it is.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
