1 - Displacing the Gothic in Lady Audley's Secret

Summary

In reviewing Lady Audley's Secret for The Times, an anonymous reader found a precedent to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's most famous novel, which dated back to the seventeenth century. The reviewer hinted at the differences between a quintessential Gothic tale of abuses and violence which took place in the past and the narration of Lady Audley's story, belonging to ‘modern times’:

The name of the novel which everybody is just now reading may excite the curiosity of historical students. They may imagine that it refers to that most horrible story which appears in the record of our state trials – the story of Mervyn Touchet, Lord Audley, who was beheaded in the reign of Charles I for in flicting on his wife, Lady Audley, indescribable cruelties. The secret of the imaginary Lady Audley, however, is very different, and the novel in which she figures belongs entirely to modern times.

The story was that of Lord Audley, born in 1552 and executed on 14 May 1631 on Tower Hill because of the daily violence his wife (the Countess of Castlehaven, who died between 1622 and 1624) had to endure, namely rape and sodomy. As far as ‘modern times’ were concerned, the sad existence of this seventeenth-century Lady Audley would similarly find one of its Victorian counterparts in John Conolly's female patients suffering from puerperal insanity, and in particular in one case regarding a ‘sensitive woman, whose mother had been insane, [who] became deranged and melancholic almost as soon as her little child came into the world’.