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 acted on stage under a false name to keep her mother, then wrote eighty novels; this one made her fortune and defined the sensation novel — bigamy, arson and a body down a well, in the drawing rooms readers actually lived in. Fifty-five plates of portraiture, including a self portrait by Hugh Jerman, echo the novel's obsession with hidden faces and borrowed identities.