Lady Audley's Secret

A governess with no past marries a rich baronet, and her new nephew begins to wonder what became of the friend who disappeared the week she arrived. Braddon put the danger not in a foreign villain or a ruined castle but in a charming Englishwoman with a locket, and Victorian readers bought it faster than they bought Dickens. Paintings of country estates, candlelit corridors and the lime-tree avenue; Gilded Library ornament of locket, phial and well.