[THA]≡ Descargar Gratis Lady Audley Secret Oxford World Classics Mary Elizabeth Braddon David Skilton 9780192835208 Books

Lady Audley Secret Oxford World Classics Mary Elizabeth Braddon David Skilton 9780192835208 Books

Download As PDF : Lady Audley Secret Oxford World Classics Mary Elizabeth Braddon David Skilton 9780192835208 Books

Lady Audley Secret Oxford World Classics Mary Elizabeth Braddon David Skilton 9780192835208 Books

I read three Tasha Alexander novels with a wonderful character, Lady Emily Ashton. The third book in the series was "Fatal Waltz". Throughout the book, Lady Ashton kept giving "Lady Audley's Secret" to her friends and family to read because she thought it was so splendid. I had never heard of the book and decided if Lady Emily Ashton loved it, it must be good! :) Thank You, Tasha Alexander, the author of those three books.

I just finished Lady Audley's Secret and must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While parts of the book were somewhat wordy, the characters, plot and ending were fabulous. Lady Lucy Audley was easy to dislike.... A perfectly wretched and evil woman. Barrister Robert was easy to like even though he was lazy and took his life and position for granted. Baronet Michael was easy to see as blind/naive/lovestruck/foolish, but who wouldn't want a husband who adored you so much? He was such a mensch. George was.....interesting? Sometimes a bit high strung (the passage from Australia...can you say HYPER??) and somewhat depressing to be around (poor Robert!) And the plot held me until the end.....which I loved. The book's ending made me sigh and smile. I like that. It ended just as I wanted it to...which almost never happens for me.

"Lady Audley's Secret" was an unexpected delight and I'm happy I read it. I would recommend "Lady Audley's Secret" if you enjoy Historical/Victorian mysteries. While you're at it, try Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily Ashton series! They too are very enjoyable.


Tags : Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) [Mary Elizabeth Braddon, David Skilton] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This Victorian bestseller, along with Braddon's other famous novel, <em>Aurora Floyd, </em> established her as the main rival of the master of the sensational novel,Mary Elizabeth Braddon, David Skilton,Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics),Oxford University Press,0192835203,19th century fiction,Classics,FICTION Classics,Fiction,Literature - Classics Criticism,Literature: Classics

Lady Audley Secret Oxford World Classics Mary Elizabeth Braddon David Skilton 9780192835208 Books Reviews

This story was first published in 1862, that fact alone intrigued me. I love to read these old books from another lifetime. The phrasing, the prose, the way of life in another century, all of it comes vividly to life among the pages. The characters were so well portrayed, the mystery was intricate and not fully concluded until the end of the story. I absolutely loved it.
I love to discover an old treasure, such as this, among the literary successes of past generations. The theme of selfish wickedness and deception being overcome by truth, patience, and love for others is timeless. This is a suspenseful story with an intriguing twist and satisfying conclusion. It reminds me of Dickens, but less verbose. I highly recommend this book.
This is a Victorian novel is all senses of the term -- written a couple of decades into the start of the Victorian era, set in Victorian society, and written for a Victorian audience. It was initially serialized, and each chapter is meant to get the reader to buy the next issue of the magazine. That plus the conventions of the period mean that it's terribly wordy. Perhaps the author was paid by the word, as Dickens was. But it's worth slogging through because it's a very early example of a murder/detective mystery, and you get a pretty clear picture of the social attitudes of the era. It's also unusual in that it's written by a woman, Margaret Braddon. She manages to write it as though she was a man, or at least as though she agreed with the contemporary view of women as having limited capacity. If nothing else, it's a lesson in how far social attitudes have changes and how far good mystery writing has come.
Lady Audley's Secret belongs to a genre known as the "sensation" novel. Today, of course, we would be more likely to call it a "thriller," or a "mystery," but that original term is important not only because it belongs to 1860s Victorian literature, but also because it maintains a connection back to the eighteenth century and the novel of sensibility that made made this kind of work possible in the first place. "Sensation" and "sensibility" refer to a novel's ability to provoke emotions in the reader, and certainly Lady Audley's Secret promises to draw us in as readers from the opening pages. Given these influences, Braddon plays self-consciously with the expectations of the nineteenth-century reader for much of the book, drawing especially from the conventions of the Gothic novel in ways that cleverly (and in a more indirect, subtle way than in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey) make fun of this fictional formula. Since most readers today are not familiar with the literature of that era, many of those references will be overlooked or misunderstood. Happily, the plot does not rely on them for advancement.

The story itself follows the laconic barrister Robert Audley, whose friend George Talboys has just returned from colonial Australia as a rich man, having found success on the goldfields there. Upon his return, George discovers that the wife he had left behind in England has just died, news that sends him into a deep and lasting depression. When George disappears suddenly, leaving only a note that he has decided to return to Australia, Robert becomes increasingly suspicious that George has in fact been murdered. Robert finds his investigations hampered by his rich uncle's new wife, Lady Audley, a beautiful young woman who seems to have something to hide.

Braddon's narrative is smooth and well-written, and she does a good job of drawing readers into the book's core mystery. But as with any such narrative, the ultimate success of the work depends on the pay-off, and this is where the novel is inevitably going to fall short for the modern reader. The canny reader will quickly work out the most obvious of Lady Audley's secrets, but she does have more than one, and when our detective-protagonist in Robert discovers this deeper truth the novel seems to shrink unimpressively from the spirit of subversion that marked its opening pages. So strong are the moral conventions of the Victorian that Braddon does not dare to challenge them directly. It's not hard to see why - just look at the lashing Thomas Hardy received some thirty years later for the directness of Jude the Obscure - but ultimately it does leave today's reader feeling a bit let down. Braddon's ending does manage to impart some hidden barbs at being forced into this ending, but they are subtle and easy to overlook, and certainly my graduate students did not feel that they rescued the text from disappointment.

Despite this inherent sense of disappointment, I would still highly recommend this book to those who are willing to look past their contemporary expectations and understand this work within its context. It is a very easy and engaging read for a classic work of literature, and while Braddon will not go down as one of the great Victorian writers, this particular work nonetheless does deserve its place as a landmark piece of genre fiction.
I read three Tasha Alexander novels with a wonderful character, Lady Emily Ashton. The third book in the series was "Fatal Waltz". Throughout the book, Lady Ashton kept giving "Lady Audley's Secret" to her friends and family to read because she thought it was so splendid. I had never heard of the book and decided if Lady Emily Ashton loved it, it must be good! ) Thank You, Tasha Alexander, the author of those three books.

I just finished Lady Audley's Secret and must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While parts of the book were somewhat wordy, the characters, plot and ending were fabulous. Lady Lucy Audley was easy to dislike.... A perfectly wretched and evil woman. Barrister Robert was easy to like even though he was lazy and took his life and position for granted. Baronet Michael was easy to see as blind/naive/lovestruck/foolish, but who wouldn't want a husband who adored you so much? He was such a mensch. George was.....interesting? Sometimes a bit high strung (the passage from Australia...can you say HYPER??) and somewhat depressing to be around (poor Robert!) And the plot held me until the end.....which I loved. The book's ending made me sigh and smile. I like that. It ended just as I wanted it to...which almost never happens for me.

"Lady Audley's Secret" was an unexpected delight and I'm happy I read it. I would recommend "Lady Audley's Secret" if you enjoy Historical/Victorian mysteries. While you're at it, try Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily Ashton series! They too are very enjoyable.