**How I Discovered Lady Audley’s Secret: The Gone Girl of Victorian Times**

5 min readFeb 25, 2022

In 1862, Mary Elizabeth Braddon published Lady Audley’s Secret and scandalized Victorian society. It was one of the first of the “sensation novels.”

A black-and-white illustration of a scene from Lady Audley’s Secret. An older man stands at the left, gesturing to a younger man at the far right, who seems to be averting his face from the drama. Between them, a woman has collapsed to the ground and is kneeling, looking up at the older man. — A Sensational Illustration from Lady Audley’s Secret. (Source: A not so guilty pleasure…)

Sensation novels were hot in the 1860s through 1870s. Shockingly, these books reminded readers that crimes and depravity could occur in middle-class households, not just among the poor. Even more…

How I Discovered Lady Audley’s Secret: The Gone Girl of Victorian Times

Written by Anne Marble

**How I Discovered Lady Audley’s Secret: The Gone Girl of Victorian Times**