Lady Audley's Secret

Victorian mysteries are really something else and this book does not disappoint. Mysterious disappearances, secrets borne by everyone all around, deceit and death, you've got it all here.

Everyone wasn't too surprised when Sir Michael Audley of Audley Court proposes marriage to a lady not even half his age and who worked as a governess at the local surgeon's family, primarily because said lady was charming and lovely beyond words. The new Lady Audley is the belle of the county and never fails to be the star attraction of any party, gathering, or event that she attends. Sir Michael's good-hearted, if insouciant, nephew Robert Audley pays his visit to his new aunt with a friend, George Talboys, who he's newly reconnected with, and who has just fresh come off the boat from Australia. But then George Talboys suddenly and mysteriously disappears, and all signs seem to point to something terrible having happened to him. At the center of that horrible enigma seems to be the charming Lady Audley.

The titular secret that Lady Audley carries is not very hard to figure out - you probably would have guessed it within the first 5-10 chapters. But there's something very masterful in the way Braddon builds up that mystery, shows you probably just about 90% of it and keeps you hanging for that last 10% all the way up to the end. At some point around the the first arc of the book, I had wondered, “Why would I bother reading this if I already know what the secret is?” But oh, it was worth it. I binged this book in about 24 hours (including my sleep time) because it was just so gripping and kept me at the edge of my seat - even though I had a feeling I knew what the secret was.

Lady Audley's characterisation was stellar. She's exquisitely Machiavellian and only gets more and more intense with every chapter, as Robert Audley doggedly takes step after step towards the end of the mystery. There was an entire chapter that I had to skim because her machinations got so unbearably uncomfortable to read (This was the part where she shed some crocodile tears and tried to convince Sir Michael that Robert Audley was insane just so she can discredit him before he could tell on her to her husbandSpeaking of Robert Audley, I'm not entirely convinced that he doesn't have some latent homoerotic tendencies over here. When his friend George Talboys disappears, Audley is observed by the other characters in the book to have altered considerably, becoming moodier and unhappy - and this was before he even realised he had a mystery to solve. Audley harbours some really intense feelings and affection for Talboys which I'm not convinced is entirely platonic in nature. In fact, in the end he falls for Clara Talboys because she so much resembles her brother. It's almost like everytime he looks at her, he's reminded of George and therefore convinces himself that he's crazily in love with her. Anyway, he was also characterised beautifully, with a convincing transition between the insouciant, lazing gentleman to one that rushes about the entire country seized by some frantic energy trying to find out and avenge his lost friend.Spoiler review for the ending:I thought everything wrapped up a bit too perfectly tied up with a bow, with everyone ending up happy and Lady Audley ending up dead (but apparently having been kindly treated in an upstate asylum). I was really just kinda waiting for someone to accidentally stumble across George Talboys's body in the lime-walk, or for Audley to have arranged for someone to haul that decomposed corpse out of the well, which would have driven this book into Victorian gothic territory. But nope, I was pretty caught off guard by the fact that George Talboys actually managed to save himself! Not only that, but Audley didn't even have to travel to Australia in search of him, as he had planned - he basically just went home one day (very conveniently after the entire mystery is cleared up) and Talboys is there waiting for him, because he had actually gone to New York instead and came back after he decided he was too lonely there.In fact, I would've even liked it even more if Braddon pulled a fast one on us, and we had Dr Mosgrave right at the end tell us that it was actually Robert Audley who was mad all along (which I thought was actually going to happen during that chapter), and who had dreamed up and hallucinated all these things. Or that it had been him who had actually murdered George Talboys. I know it sounds out of this world (or more in line with Agatha Christie) but it's not unheard of in Victorian mysteries, like with Wilkie Collins. Heck, even Jane Eyre had some crazy plot twists.I was a little disappointed by Lady Audley's real secret, which is that her mother was apparently "mad", never mind the disturbing Victorian notions of mental health. It just feels like an all too convenient and cliched plot twist, and I would have preferred something a bit more out of the way and weirder than that. I thought that maybe Lady Audley had in fact murdered her mother.Despite that the ending was a bit overly neat, though, it didn't require a huge amount of suspension of disbelief so I was generally satisfied.Overall, this was a very enjoyable and gripping book that I thoroughly enjoyed and which embodies all the beauty of Victorian writing that I rarely see being emulated successfully in more modern and contemporary books.