Aurora Floyd (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780199555161)

With Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of sensation novelists'. Aurora Floyd (1862-3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety.

Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood.

P. D. Edward's introduction evaluates the novel's leading place among bigamy-novels' and Braddon's treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine.

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Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, P. D. Edwards
ISBN-10: 0199555168
ISBN-13: 9780199555161
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 04/15/2009
Pages: 512
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 7.14h x 5.78w x 1.03d

About the Author

P. D. Edwards is Darnell Professor of English at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also the editor of several Trollope titles in World's Classics.