Biography

As a victim of scandal and gossip, Braddon chose to write a sensational novel, "Lady Audley's Secret," which was utterly notorious, and which sold into eight editions within three months.

A radical all her life, she was the daughter of Henry Braddon and Fanny White Braddon; her father was financially irresponsible and unfaithful. Her sister was 11 years older than her and her brother six years older. She received home schooling for the most part, and at age 19 acted on stage under the name Mary Seyton.

She met Irish publisher John Maxwell in 1860 and fell hopelessly in love; hopeless, because he was married and his wife was in a mental asylum in Dublin. Mary must have enjoyed motherhood, for she had six children with John alongside the five he had had with his wife. The scandal was as large as the household: Mary managed a family of 11 children (10 survived) including herself, John, and her mother. Son William Babington Maxwell--an author who was also wrote under the name W.B. Maxwell--describes a loving home in his 1937 book "Time Gathered." Mary and John were freed to marry when his wife died in 1874.

She wrote novels of psychological mystery and thrillers and is remembered as one of the first to develop the mystery into a literary form, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens in gifting her characters with realistic psychological development.

Among her fans were Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Henry James, Charles Reade, and Charles Dickens.