Chapter 3 - Lady Audley’s Portrait: Textuality, Gender, and Power

Summary

The most consequential scene of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret features neither an act of writing nor a disquisition on “the identity of things” but rather an unfinished portrait being studied by two men, Robert Audley and George Talboys, who have squeezed through a secret passage and into Lucy Audley’s private rooms to linger over a striking image of the novel’s femme fatale. They emerge into “the elegant disorder” of her dressing-room to find a profusion of sights and smells that bespeak her feminine charms: handsome dresses heaped on the floor, the “rich odours of perfumes,” and the glittering items of her toilette, all of which George hovers over just long enough to glimpse “his bearded face and tall gaunt figure” in the cheval-glass and realize “how out of place he seem[s] among all these womanly luxuries.”.