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Completed	22 December 2006
Title	Lady Audley's Secret
Author	Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Published	1862
Quote	"Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels, he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that he had knocked himself up with overwork."
Review	This was an interesting book. Some people say it's a story about greed, about a woman (Lady Audley) who claws her way to the top. I say it's about a woman who's just trying to make a better life. Hey, desperate people do desperate things. Her unsuccessful, poor first husband, George Talboys, takes off and she doesn't hear from him for, literally, years. So she considers him dead. Fair enough. She takes off and eventually finds her way into a position as governess. There she meets a local widower, who is wealthy and she becomes his bride. All is fine and dandy until Robert Audley, the nephew of her second husband, starts poking his nose about her past. This is when the trouble starts. Sure, Lady Audley does some bad things, like pushing the guy into the "old well beyond the lime-walk" and leaving him for dead. Or, setting fire to the tavern in hopes of killing Robert Audley who is sleeping there. Sure, that's all bad. Not exactly stellar moments of decision. But very quickly she is branded a "madwoman" and Robert Audley (the interfering nephew) makes her confess her entire past to her husband (Robert's uncle). After the confession, all the uncle/husband says is, to Robert, "Will you take it upon yourself the duty of providing for the safety and comfort of this lady, whom I have thought my wife?" Then the uncle/husband gets up and walks out of the room. It's all very sad and cold. Robert Audley gets Lady Audley confined to a "Belgian madhouse" which she says is a "living grave" which, of course, it is. Lady Audley doesn't last long. She took her jewels and furs with her, and in the "madhouse" she has a very nice room, but still, she's confined and dies soonafter. They said that a "black-edged letter came" which explained her "dying after a long illness, which Monsieur Val described as a maladie de langueur (anemia, but also, more generally, listlessness.)" This book is definitely worth a read. Apparently, it caused quite the sensation when it was first published in 1862.

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