Who wrote the sensation novel 'Lady Audley's Secret'?

Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote the sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. First published in 1862, it became Braddon’s best-known work and one of the defining novels of Victorian sensation fiction.

The story centres on Lady Audley, whose beautiful and respectable public identity conceals a dangerous past. Its plot combines secret marriage, suspected murder, disappearance, false identity, and social scandal—features that made sensation novels especially compelling to nineteenth-century readers. Robert Audley, the novel’s detective-like investigator, gradually uncovers the truth about his friend George Talboys and Lady Audley.

Braddon had worked as an actress before becoming a full-time writer, and she eventually produced more than eighty novels. Lady Audley’s Secret was initially published serially before appearing in three-volume book form. It sold through nine editions in its first year. Readers sometimes confuse Braddon with Wilkie Collins, another major sensation novelist, but Collins wrote The Woman in White and The Moonstone, not Lady Audley’s Secret.