M. E. Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon British novelist (1837 – 1915)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (October 4, 1837 – February 4, 1915) was a British Victorian era popular novelist.

Life

Born in London in England, Braddon was privately educated and worked as an actress for three years in order to be able to support herself and her mother Fanny, who had separated from her father Henry in 1840, when Mary was just three. When Mary was ten years old, her brother Edward Braddon left for British Raj India and later Australia, where he would become Premier of Tasmania.

In 1860, Braddon met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. However, Maxwell was married with five children and his wife was insane. Mary acted as the stepmother of the children till 1874, when Maxwell's wife died, and they could get married. She had six children by him.

Braddon was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is her first novel, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times.

Braddon also founded "Belgravia Magazine" (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers a source of literature at an affordable cost.

Braddon's legacy is tied to the Sensation Fiction of the 1860s.

She died on February 4, 1915 in Richmond upon Thames, England and is interred there in Richmond Cemetery.

Partial bibliography

Novels

• The Octoroon (1861)
• The Black Band (1861)
• Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
• John Marchmont's Legacy (1862-3)
• Aurora Floyd (1863)
• Eleanor's Victory (1863)
• Henry Dunbar: the Story of an Outcast (1864)
• Circe (1867)
• Dead-Sea Fruit (1868)
• Fenton's Quest (1871)
• To the Bitter End (1872)
• Publicans and Sinners (1873)
• Lost For Love (1874)
• Hostages to Fortune (1875)
• An Open Verdict (1878)
• The Cloven Foot (1879)
• Vixen (1879)
• Asphodel (1881)
• Phantom Fortune (1883)
• Ishmael. A Novel (1884)
• Cut by the County (1887)
• The Fatal Three (1888)
• One Life, One Love (1890)
• The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1891)
• The Venetians (1892)
• The Christmas Hirelings (1894)
• Sons of Fire (1895)
• London Pride (1896)
• Rough Justice (1898)
• His Darling Sin (1899)
• The Infidel (1900)
• Dead Love Has Chains (1907)
• During Her Majesty's Pleasure (1908)

Theatre

• Griselda (1873)