Hello! Today, I hit the mark of having read eight books out of my seventy-five book goal for the year, which doesn't sound all that impressive, but, since it put me over being ten percent towards my goal, I was fairly excited. For the time being, though, that information isn't very relevant.
A few minutes ago, I finished reading Lady Audley's Secret, an 1862 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Like most of what I read is, it was an impulse download for my Kindle from which I had very little idea of what to expect. In this case, however, I was not disappointed at all. Despite the fact that Lady Audley's Secret seems at times to be way too long, with passages of household descriptions that seem to drag on for pages and pages and enough unnecessary plot twists to fuel a daytime soap opera for months, it's one of the most entertaining books I've read for ages. I'm not sure that anyone would have put it quite this way in the 1860s, but basically, the novel is about a rich slacker who becomes obsessed with his best friend's disappearance and tries to prove that his uncle's spoiled and much younger new wife, the titular Lady Audley, had something to do with it. This very well could have made for a boring book, but I think that what makes Lady Audley's Secret so fun is that it seems to be insane trash. It's full of blackmail, murder, bizarre lies that take hundreds of pages to unravel, secret keeping maids and their drunk husband-cousins (which I realize was acceptable at the time, no matter how weird it seems now), and a lot of snobbery about French novels. It does take a while to get through, but it almost never gets boring. When it does start to drag, however, it's never long before some strange and nearly inexplicable plot twist comes along to break up the monotony.
Because Lady Audley's Secret is from 1862, it is in the public domain and can be easily found as a free ebook. I read the edition available from Amazon.com, since it was convenient to download, but it is also available at Project Gutenberg, where it can be found alongside piles of other novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
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