<1>In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, the heroine embroiders an identity for herself as a titled woman of leisure. Throughout the novel we observe her doing Berlin wool work and watercolor painting, reading “yellow-paper-covered novels” (104), playing the piano, gardening and flower arranging, and poring over her dresses and jewels. These leisure activities are the markers of refined aristocratic femininity and innocent idleness. This paper argues that Lady Audley’s pastimes, far from being mere leisure, are the tools of her secrecy. Through these activities Lady Audley disguises her lower-class origins, the spectre of inherited madness, and her crimes of bigamy, child abandonment, and attempted murder. Robert Audley alludes to this in his description of the novel’s mystery as “all woman’s work from one end to another” (Braddon 207). By cultivating a semblance of idleness, Lady Audley rewrites her story, embroidering the truth of her identity and her past.
<2> Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret is a mysterious tale of the disintegration of the Victorian ideals of gender, class, marriage, and the family. It was one of the first and bestselling novels in the new genre of sensation fiction (Loesberg 115). In 1863, H. L. Mansel identified Braddon’s novel as archetypal in this new “class of literature [that] has grown up around us” (482). Sensation fiction developed from the conventions of the gothic and Newgate novels, and in direct contrast and competition to Victorian realism. In his article for the Quarterly Review, Mansel identified a group of novels in this “wildly popular and artistically dubious upstart genre” (Phegley 113). The first to theorize the genre, Mansel argued that these texts share an interest in appealing to readers’ bodily sensations and baser sexual instincts, rather than their intellects (482). Margaret Oliphant, in another contemporary commentary, described sensation novels as evoking “sensuous raptures … [an] intense appreciation of flesh and blood … [and] eagerness of physical sensation” in its readership (259). This effect was created by the structure of the sensation novel, as well as its subject matter. Its plots revolve around a central mystery, often involving murder, blackmail, theft, mistaken and false identities, illegitimacy, bigamy, adultery and arson. As Jonathan Loesberg argues, the sensation novel is structured by the discovery of clues which lead to the resolution of these mysteries (126). In Braddon’s own words, readers collected clues and circumstantial evidence in order “to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle” (161) and solve the mystery. The genre was wildly popular with readers, and roundly decried by critics; Mansel famously described these novels as “fancy portraits of repulsive virtue and attractive voice” (499). As a new genre in the literary marketplace, sensation fiction also created new, increasingly democratic, forms of reading and leisure.
<3>During the mid-nineteenth century, new technologies in papermaking, printing and transportation increased the speed and efficiency of the production and dissemination of literature. Simultaneously, the introduction of mass-education increased the size of the reading public. Sensation fiction developed as a response to these conditions. Sensation novels met their first readerships via serial instalments in magazines or newspapers. These were inexpensive and ephemeral, and could be easily exchanged between readers. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was partially serialized in Robin Goodfellow magazine between July and September 1861, then serialized in full in the Sixpenny Magazine from January to December 1862, and again in the London Journal between March and August 1863 (Sutherland 80-81). It was printed as a three-volume novel by William Tinsley in 1862. The speed with which sensation fiction was written and published earned the genre a reputation as crassly commercial. Mansel observes that: “The public want novels, and novels must be made—so many yards of printed stuff, sensation-pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season. And if the demands of the novel reading public were to increase to the amount of a thousand per season, no difficulty would be found in producing a thousand works of average merit” (483). Sensation novels were popular with male and female readers from across all social classes, much to the concern of contemporary critics. Prior to this period, leisure was the preserve of the upper classes and could be relied upon as a marker of refined gentility, as Thorstein Veblen establishes in Conspicuous Consumption (1899). Yet, the consumption of sensation fiction blurred the lines of gender and class. The exchange of sensational reading material between classes is played out in Lady Audley’s Secret through the relationship of Lady Audley and her maid Phoebe Marks. The narrator observes that “Phoebe knew enough of the French language to be able to dip into the yellow-paper-covered novels which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade, and to discourse with her mistress upon the questionable subjects of these romances” (Braddon 104). In this statement, Braddon self-consciously alludes to contemporary criticisms of sensation fiction. Critics were concerned that, firstly, women and servants would be corrupted by the “questionable” subject matter of these texts and, secondly, that conversations about these subjects could be conducted across classes. In 1865, W. Fraser Rae observed that the genre make the “literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room” (204). Questions of gender, class, and leisure not only inform the reception of novels such as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, they also shape their plots. The negotiation of domestic space is one way in which this is made evident. In the Victorian period, domestic spaces were segregated by gender and class, and by the dichotomy of work and leisure, as in Rae’s pointed allusion to the kitchen and drawing-room.
<4>Sensation fiction was controversial for its tendency to set its crimes in the sanctified domestic sphere (Brantlinger 5-6). This is a marked departure from the dilapidated castles and city slums that are the settings of gothic and Newgate novels. Braddon describes this in Lady Audley’s Secret, stating, “no crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic calm” of the Victorian home (54). In this novel, the heroine’s crimes take place within spaces in the home specifically designated for female leisure: the drawing-room, the boudoir/dressing-room, and the flower garden. Victorian etiquette and ideologies of the home naturally engender a form of secrecy in which men are barred from “my lady’s apartments” (Braddon 68). Lady Audley takes advantage of these sensibilities, and her apartments become places of secrecy and criminality, as well as leisure. In fact, the viewing of Lady Audley’s unfinished portrait which catalyzes the plot of the novel and ultimately leads to the discovery of her guilt is only made possible because Robert Audley and George Talboys gain illicit entry into her boudoir. Throughout the novel, Lady Audley consistency manipulates the social mechanisms which would construct her as an ideal and angelic heroine in order to practice her deception. She is represented as a paragon of ideal Victorian femininity: “wax-dollish” (Braddon 33) in her youthful beauty, perfectly accomplished (Braddon 5), gentile, amiable (Braddon 220) and charmingly innocent; “everybody, high and low, united in declaring that Lucy Graham [Lady Audley] was the sweetest girl that ever lived,” Braddon enthuses (6).
<5>In the novel’s opening chapters, Lucy Audley (née Graham) is introduced as the new wife of Sir Michael Audley of Audley Court, having previously been employed as a governess. The narrator states that: “the truth was that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Michael, made one of the apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex” (5). Yet it is Lady Audley’s “secret,” rather than this “truth,” that drives the plot of the novel; “no one knew anything of her,” the narrator states (Braddon 5). Over the course of the novel, her past is revealed. Lucy Audley is found to be the alias of Helen Talboys (née Maldon): a fraudster, bigamist, mother and would-be murderer. This deception is achieved through her performance of upper-class leisure and innocent idleness. Lucy Graham acquired the position of governess to the Dawson family because “her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous” (Braddon 5); “she taught the girls to play sonatas by Beethoven, and to paint from nature after Creswick,” the narrator states (Braddon 5). As wife to Sir Michael, she cultivates these genteel pastimes, thus reinforcing her position as an aristocratic woman of leisure. Throughout the novel, she paints, does fancy needlework, reads novels, plays the piano, and arranges flowers. Through these activities, Lady Audley creates a semblance of idleness to disguise her deception and guilt. Both metaphorically and literally, her leisure is a tool of her secrecy. At crucial moments in the plot, Lady Audley is depicted at leisure; as her crimes are discovered and secrets revealed, she sits in her drawing-room, the picture of innocence. Her idleness has the dual function of disguising her agency and providing her with an alibi. Furthermore, Lady Audley employs the techniques of her chosen pastimes to refashion her identity and commit fraud. Her needlework allows her to alter her clothes and her appearance, and her skills in watercolor painting are applied to forging documents. Her novel reading represents her dishonesty; Lady Audley creates a history for herself that is as fictional and sensational as the “yellow-paper-covered novels” she reads (Braddon 104). Lady Audley’s leisure is synonymous with her secrecy; literally and metaphorically, she embellishes and rewrites the truth.
<6>This paper explores painting, needlework, and novel reading as leisure activities and rhetorical strategies in Lady Audley’s Secret. During the mid-Victorian period, these were popular leisure activities for middle and upper-class women. All three pastimes were considered industrious enough to occupy idle women and allow them to improve themselves, while also exhibiting a family’s disposable wealth. Art and needlework allowed women to create beautiful ephemera and trinkets as a way of establishing and displaying their social position; as Krista Lysack states, “in the age of consumerism, identity . . . was generated through one’s proximity to commodities” (59). It is understandable then, that Braddon’s heroine cultivates these activities in creating an identity for herself as the wife of aristocrat Sir Michael Audley. As cultural practices, needlework and reading, specifically, are similar in significant ways. In the nineteenth century, both were categorized as feminine, domestic pastimes. Via these forms, women were educated and acculturated into their roles as ideal wives and mothers. Yet they also found forms to tell their own stories as a means of feminist resistance. Novel reading and needlework alike require skills of interpretation, problem solving, and a detailed knowledge of systems of meaning, be they linguistic or visual. In Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism, Christine Bayles Kortsch argues that that Victorian women were educated in the dual languages of cloth and print (4). As Kathryn Ledbetter demonstrates, girls learned to read and write by embroidering samplers (5). Victorian women also interpreted cloth, learning to read threads, textiles, stitches and seams for meaning and purpose (Kortsch 9). Such knowledges were coded as “women’s work” (Kortsch 9). While this can be viewed in a derogative light, the gendering of needlework meant that it could function as “an alternative to mainstream, patriarchal discourse” (Kortsch 5). In From Man to Man (1926), Olive Schreiner asks: “Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?” (Schreiner 323). In literature, authors used imagery of clothing and textiles to open up conversations about femininity that transgressed the ideal image of the Angel in the House. Kortsch states that: “in her work bag, the ideal woman reader carried not only shears and a needle, but something more invisible, less tangible—a sophisticated knowledge of the social significance of clothing” and textiles (55). Metaphorically, embroidery and reading are also linked: threads connect them.
<7>As I argue in Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature: Double Threads, the word “thread” has multiple meaning which operate in Victorian literature (Seys 4-5). A thread is a long spun fibre which constitutes the warp or weft of a woven cloth, or is a length of fibre used for sewing or embroidery (Oxford English Dictionary). This literal purpose lends “thread” its metaphoric meaning “as that which connects the successive points in a narrative” (Seys, Fashion 4-5). These two meanings are delicately intertwined. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the silks and wools of the heroine’s needlework are the symbolic threads that hold her narrative together. Her embroidery symbolizes the elaborate fiction of her identity and her past that she creates. In order to discover her true identity, the “tangled skein” of her embroidered truth must be unraveled (Braddon 161). Throughout the novel, Lady Audley’s secrecy is described in a gendered language of needlework and “women’s work.” Braddon draws on Victorian women readers’ dual literacy in “the language of cloth and the language of print” (Kortsch 4). It is not without irony, then, that she employs a man—Robert Audley—to do this “women’s work” within the novel’s plot. At various stages in the investigation, he finds himself ill-equipped for and frustrated by the task: “why should I try to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle, and gather together the stray fragments which, when collected, may make such a hideous whole?” he asks (Braddon 161). Yet in this image, Robert provides the answer to his frustration. He must gather together the loose threads of Lady Audley’s needlework and unravel her embroidered truth in order to reveal the “hideous whole” of her past. He does so, weaving together the threads of “circumstantial evidence [into]… that wonderful fabric” and ultimately committing Lady Audley to a Belgian asylum under another alias (Braddon 119). The “evidence” that condemns the heroine includes: “a scrap of paper, a shred of some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped incautiously from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment of a letter” (Braddon 120). In his collection of these clues, Robert demonstrates his ability to interpret both textiles and literary texts textile and literary forms. In solving the mystery of Lady Audley’s identity, Robert becomes conversant in the “women’s work” of embroidery and reading. As well as providing the means of Lady Audley’s secrecy and Robert’s detection, art, embroidery and reading provide the methodological framework for this paper. I will pick up the threads of Lady Audley’s leisure, tracing them through the complex narrative structure of Braddon’s sensation plot. By closely reading Lady Audley’s performance of leisure at crucial moments in the novel, I will examine how she embroiders and recolors the truth while giving readers the clues to unravel her dissimulation. In doing so, I will bring to light aspects of the novel’s imagery, logic and structure that have yet to make an appearance in the critical scholarship. I argue that Lady Audley’s pastimes are never mere leisure, but a form of “women’s work” through which she resists patriarchal control.
<8>When we meet Lucy Graham seated in the Dawson family’s school-room in Chapter I of Lady Audley’s Secret, she has already perpetrated her most significant crimes. She has faked her own death, left her marital home, and abandoned her infant son; another woman now lies in the grave marked “Helen, the Beloved Wife of George Talboys” (Braddon 42). Under the alias of Lucy Graham, she answered an advertisement for a governess that “Mr Dawson, surgeon, had inserted in the Times” (Braddon 5). “Her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous”, the narrator observes, “that it seemed strange that she should have answered an advertisement offering such very moderate terms of remuneration as those named by Mr. Dawson; but Miss Graham seemed perfectly well satisfied with her situation” (Braddon 5). As governess to the Dawson family, Lucy’s leisure is not here own. She instructs her pupils in the female accomplishments of music, art and needlework, rather than pursuing these activities herself. In the opening scenes, she is employed in “putting the finishing touches on some water-color sketches done by her pupils” (Braddon 7-8). Practically and symbolically, this task befits her position, within the Dawson household and within the novel. In finishing her pupil’s watercolors, she fulfils her role of finishing their education and improving their prospects as marriageable young women. In performing this duty, Lucy also reinforces her own identity as a young unmarried governess and demonstrates her desirability as a potential wife. The success of this is strategy demonstrated when Lucy is interrupted from her painting by Mrs. Dawson remarking: “Do you know, my dear Miss Graham … I think you ought to consider yourself a remarkably lucky girl?” (Braddon 8). “What do you mean, my dear Mrs. Dawson?,” Lucy replies, “dipping her camel’s-hair brush into the wet aquamarine upon the palette, and poising it carefully before putting in the delicate streak of purple which was to brighten the horizon in her pupil’s sketch” (Braddon 8). Mrs. Dawson answers “that it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court” (Braddon 8). In shock, “Lucy Graham dropped the brush upon the picture” (Braddon 8). This conversation, and the narration of it, is punctuated by descriptions of Lucy’s artistic practice. In her shocked reaction and hesitation in answering, she creates the impression that she is surprised, yet readers know that Lucy is well aware of Sir Michael’s intentions. “Her grace, her beauty, and her kindliness” (Braddon 6), had long enthralled the baronet, we are told, and he believed “she was his destiny!” (Braddon 6). Lucy’s responses to Mrs. Dawson are as considered and artful as her additions to her pupil’s paintings. In both arts, she creates an impression of gentile and innocent femininity. At the same time, her addition of “delicate streak of purple … to brighten the horizon” (Braddon 8) represents the transformative impact a marriage to Sir Michael Audley would have on the heroine’s future and betrays her happiness at this prospect. Her addition of purple and aquamarine foreshadows the way in which she recolors perceptions of her; this vivid imagery is to recur throughout the novel. Yet, Lucy continues to be reticent in her courtship with Sir Michael. The narrator notes that “Lucy never again showed any emotion whatever when the baronet’s admiration for her was canvassed” (Braddon 9). In this scene, art and leisure are established as metaphors for the heroine’s careful cultivation of her new identity. While Lucy is reluctant to show any emotion, Sir Michael’s affection for her is, quite, literally canvassed when he commissions a portrait of his new wife.
<9>After her marriage to Sir Michael, the nature and purpose of Lady Audley’s leisure changes. Instead of practicing art herself, Lady Audley becomes the object in another’s painting as she sits for her portrait. Lynette Felber presents a detailed analysis of the significance of this portrait in “The Literary Portrait as Centrefold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Building on this work, I will consider how the portrait functions within the novel’s use of leisure as a mode of identity formation. In rendering her image on canvas, Sir Michael secures Lucy’s new identity and social position as Lady Audley. However, in the portrait’s style, there are clues to her dishonesty and her criminality. In the portrait, painted in the pre-Raphaelite style, Lady Audley appears to have “something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend” (Braddon 71). Like the heroine’s additions to her pupil’s watercolors earlier in the novel, this painting is vividly colored. Braddon states that the portrait “was so like and yet so unlike” its sitter (71): the artist had “brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in [Lady Audley’s face] before” (Braddon 71). “We have never seen my lady to look as she does in that picture,” Alicia Audley states, “but I think she could look so” (Braddon 71-72). It is not merely the details and style of the portrait, but also the very existence of an image of the heroine that leads to a discovery of her true crimes.
<10>One afternoon, Robert Audley and George Talboys prove unable to occupy themselves in their own leisure and decide to satiate their curiosity about Sir Michael’s new wife by breaking into her boudoir to view her portrait. In doing so, they transgress the division of male and female leisure spaces; as Elizabeth Langland states, “Lady Audley’s private spaces are curiously vulnerable to penetration” (9). Robert is fascinated by the portrait’s beauty and mysteriousness; George, however, is strangely troubled by the experience. Soon after this episode, he disappears. While Robert is occupied in looking for his friend, “my dear lady seemed … restless from very joyousness of spirit, and unable to stay long in one place, or occupy herself with one thing” (Braddon 77). The narrator mistakes this restlessness as joyful, when it is, in fact, the manifestation of Lady Audley’s anxiety to assert her image as an innocent and idle woman, having just attempted to murder George by pushing him down the well. She achieves this by her near manic indulgence of all of her favored leisure activities:
Lady Audley flitted from room to room in the bright September sunshine—now sitting down to the piano to trill out a ballad, or the first page of an Italian bravura, or running with rapid fingers through a brilliant waltz—now hovering about a stand of hot-house flowers, doing amateur gardening with a pair of fairy-like, silver-mounted embroidery scissors—now strolling into her dressing-room to talk to Phoebe Marks, and have her curls rearranged for the third or fourth time. (Braddon 79)
By practicing these feminine arts and fussing with her appearance, Lady Audley takes care to appear “gentle, innocent … [and] unusually charming” (Rae 186). Much of this work takes place in her private chambers. Whether or not they are aware of it, Robert and George also gain access to other clues to Lady Audley’s true identity by entering her boudoir.
<11>Within the layout of the Victorian home, the boudoir is a place of female leisure; it also provides a space for displaying the objects and commodities which constitute a woman’s identity. This is particularly true of Lady Audley, who is anxious to assert her new social position. Anna Royal notes that: “Lucy frames herself amongst her possessions to subsequently reinforce her status at Audley Court” (Royal). The act of framing herself amongst the opulence and excess of her boudoir is literalized by the “the looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an artistic upholsterer, [which] multiplied my lady’s image, and in that image reflected the most beautiful object[s] in the enchanted chamber” (Braddon 294). Lady Audley’s boudoir abounds with the tools and products of her leisure:
My lady’s piano was open, covered with scattered sheets of music and exquisitely-bound collections of scenas and fantasias which no master need have disdained to study. My lady’s easel stood near the window, bearing witness to my lady’s artistic talent, in the shape of a water-colored sketch of the Court and gardens. My lady’s fairy-like embroideries of lace and muslin, rainbow-hued silks, and delicately-tinted wools littered the luxurious apartment. (Braddon 294)
Braddon describes this as “every evidence of womanly refinement” (294). More importantly, perhaps, it provides every evidence of her attempts to cultivate feminine femininity and disguise her true identity. Lady Audley collects and surrounds herself with beautiful and valuable objects. These are a substitute for her lack of cultural currency and matrilineal inheritance. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich states that “textiles, homemade or store-bought, were a form of wealth and the core of female inheritance” (133). Braddon’s Lady Audley has no such legacy. In her own words: “the only inheritance I had to expect from my mother was—insanity!” and “a secret to keep” (Braddon 350). In response to this, Lady Audley stitches her own collection of textiles as a substitute for a matrilineal inheritance and disguise for her criminality and suspected madness. The moments in which she does so are very significant to the plot.
<12> Robert Audley is not entirely convinced by Lady Audley’s performance of idle innocence following his friend’s disappearance. He begins to scrutinize her closely. This requires his participation in women’s leisure activities, rather than pursuing his usual masculine activities of hunting and fishing. The narrator notes that: “he showed no inclination for any of these outdoor amusements, and he spent his time entirely in lounging in the drawing-room, and making himself agreeable, after his own lazy fashion, to my lady and Alicia” (Braddon 114). Alicia Audley mocks Robert for this emasculating idleness, stating: “you are good for nothing but to hold a skein of silk or read Tennyson to Lady Audley” (Braddon 114). By holding the skein, though, Robert is able to untangle the web of the heroine’s lies and to see the truth that she is embroidering. Their shared leisure allows Robert to watch and question Lady Audley. On one notable occasion, “my lady re-entered the drawing-room, fresh and radiant in her elegant morning costume … [and] planted a little easel upon a table by the window, seated herself before it, and began to mix the colours upon her palette”; “all this time Mr. Robert Audley’s eyes were fixed intently on her pretty face” (Braddon 116). The sketch she is working on is “nearly finished, and she had only to put in some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable pencils” (117). This represents her belief that her dissimilation is near complete and she has been able to get away with the murder of her first husband. However, this is challenged when, in response to her saying “do you know that you sometimes puzzle me—”, Robert says: “not more than you puzzle me, dear aunt” (118). Immediately,
my lady put away her colors and sketch book, and seating herself in the deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work—a piece of embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond of exercising their ingenuity upon—the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey. (Braddon 117)
By retiring to the “embrasure of this window, my lady was separated from Robert Audley by the whole length of the room, and the young man could only catch an occasional glimpse of her fair face” (Braddon 117). In this act, Lady Audley shifts from putting the delicate finishing touches on her self-image, to actively embroidering the truth. As she stitches, she denies any knowledge of George Talboys and his fate. This intricate work is done away from the scrutiny of the male gaze.
<13>Berlin wool-work was a type of needlework that reached a craze of popularity in Britain between the 1840s and 1870s (Kortsch 36). It involved working mass-produced patterns in brightly colored tapestry wools onto a meshed canvas, popularly known as Penelope canvas. Using “cross-stitch, it required careful shading that resulted in a three-dimensional effect” (Kortsch 153). It was a fashionable form of embroidery for embellishing upholstery, accessories and clothing (Kortsch 153). Lady Audley’s Berlin wool-work is not only a fashionable choice, it is also a symbolically significant one. In referring to “the Penelopes” in her description of Lady Audley’s embroidery, Braddon associates her heroine’s work with that of “Penelope … wife of Ulysses, who, in her husband’s long absence, unraveled her weaving each night in order to put off importunate suitors for another day” (Broughton 4). Broughton argues that, in the context of Lady Audley’s Secret, Penelope “surely represents fidelity to the home, to a decorative ideal [of femininity] and to the pointless, endless activity for its own sake” (Broughton 4). In this way, Lady Audley also embroiders a facade of fidelity in marriage. This is, perhaps, her most serious dissimulation, as she a bigamist who attempted to murder her first husband. However, I believe that is has another function. By embroidering these pre-printed patterns with vivid color, Braddon’s heroine demonstrates her attempt to fulfil the preordained role of Lady Audley – wife of the peerage, and ideal and innocent heroine. There pre-colored canvases represent the typical and prescriptive narratives of femininity that Lady Audley is working to fill in in order to disguise her true history.
<14>During the mid-Victorian period, the distinction between plain sewing and fancy work was one of class (Ledbetter 1-2). Fancy work such as Berlin wool work, crochet, knitting, and netting, was a marker of middle and upper-class femininity, “an activity for those who had leisure and some pocket money” (Ledbetter 1; 4). Whereas plain sewing, the basic straight stitches and darning employed in constructing and maintaining clothing object, was practiced by lower-class women and servants (Ledbetter 1). While Lady Audley practices Berlin-wool work, her maid Phoebe Marks does the utilitarian plain sewing. The latter is represented as tedious, menial and dully practical. When Lady Audley returns from the garden having pushed George Talboys down the well, she asks Phoebe what she has been doing. Phoebe replies: “I have been altering the blue dress. It is rather dark on this side of the house, so I took it up to my own room, and worked at the window” (Braddon 79). In the last clause is a coded rebuke; Phoebe’s job is a difficult one and Lady Audley’s elaborate apartments are ill-suited to practical work. It also raises point of tension between these women. Although their needlework would suggest a difference of status between Lady Audley and Phoebe, both are actually members of the working and serving classes. While Lucy embroiders her Penelope canvas and shores up her identity as an upper class wife, Phoebe must do the practical work necessary to uphold her mistress’s dissimilation. Both Lady Audley’s leisure and her fashionable dress are crucial to maintaining her position as a wife of Baronet Sir Michael.
<15>As these scenes illustrate, as Robert Audley works to unravel the mystery of the heroine’s past, Lady Audley applies her proficiency in the “women’s work” of art and embroidery to maintaining her dissimulation. Yet, after Robert leaves Audley Court to pursue his investigation in London and elsewhere, this becomes increasingly difficult for the heroine. The objects and facts that Robert collects, and that ultimately condemn her, are outside her reach and her control. He collects the pieces of “circumstantial evidence” that hold her real identity: a plate in a book, a label pasted on a hatbox, a memory of a long forgotten acquaintance. This demonstrates his literacy in the material practices of identity formation commonly known as “women’s work.” In her desperation, Lady Audley attempts to have Robert committed as insane. Then, she burns down the Castle Inn in an attempt to kill him; however, both are unsuccessful. After these final attempt, she retires to her chambers and occupies herself in the task of admiring her most prized possessions: her silken dresses, diamond jewelry, “drinking-cups of gold and ivory,” “fragile tea-cups of turquoise china,” and “cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors” (Braddon 293). These are a substitute for the very ordinary objects which have been her undoing. This is Lady Audley’s only true act of leisure in the novel; it can have no effect as “Lucy Audley” is now known to be an alias for bigamist and murderer, Helen Talboys. Her “women’s work” and leisure is done, and her fate is sealed.
<16>Women’s leisure performs important rhetorical work in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Throughout the novel, the heroine uses her pastimes to perform innocent, idle and aristocratic femininity as a disguise for true identity and a distraction from her crimes. As Robert Audley reveals the truth, Lady Audley sits in her drawing room, doing Berlin wool work or watercolor painting, or in her boudoir, poring over her dresses and jewels. As well as providing an occupation and alibi for the heroine, these leisure activities are provide significance metaphors for her secrecy and the clues for discovering it. Through the practice and metaphor of her painting and needlework, Lady Audley creates a new identity for herself, one more refined, more artful and more colorful than her working-class roots. The novel does not end here, however, with the discovery and reassertion of Lady Audley’s true identity. It closes with her taking a final alias: Madame Taylor. This identity is not a product of the heroine’s “women’s work” of painting and needlework, however, but is imposed upon her by the patriarchal forces of the family. Robert Audley commits the heroine to a Belgian asylum under this name in order to preserve the Audley reputation. As Felber argues, Robert fabricates the identity of Madame Taylor, just as Helen Maldon/Talboys fabricates that of Lucy Graham/Audley (483). When the heroine dies of “a maladie de languer” some years later, she is buried under the name of Madame Taylor (Braddon 446). The final scene of the novel, Braddon restores the image of the perfect Victorian family. Robert and Clara Talboys are married, and are parents to little Georgey. George Talboys lives with the family and dotes on his nephew. Alicia Audley is soon to be married to Sir Harry Towers. This domestic bliss is represented through a description of the family at leisure. This is not the deliberate, artful leisure earlier performed by the heroine, but true idle relaxation. The gendered segregation of leisure spaces is also reasserted; the gentlemen “sit and smoke” in the smoking-room overlooking the Swiss boat-house, and “Clara and Alicia … eat strawberries and cream upon the lawn” (Braddon 446). Robert Audley has given away his bachelor’s habits and, with them, his collection of French novels. The last is an important symbolic gesture. Throughout Lady Audley’s Secret Braddon uses French novels a self-conscious symbol for the novel’s sensational plot and Lady Audley’s deceptive performance of leisure. In giving his novels away, Robert establishes this this part of the story is over. Braddon reinforces this by directly addressing her readers in the novel’s final paragraph; she states:
“I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace. If my experience of life has not been very long, it has at least been manifold; and I can safely subscribe to that which a mighty king and a great philosopher declared, when he said, that neither the experience of his youth nor of his age had ever shown him “the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.” (447)
So, Lady Audley’s Secret closes with a reassertion of the true definition and purpose of leisure: “the good people all happy and at peace” (447). Yet readers are left to question whether women’s idleness, happiness, and peace in leisure is ever possible in a world where men have the ultimate political and social power to prescribe their roles, positions, and even, in the case of Lady Audley, their names. Even in their leisure, Victorian women bear the pressure of exhibiting of their family’s wealth. In her needlework, painting, and collection of beautiful objects, the Victorian woman demonstrates the accomplishment, idleness, and wealth that are the preserve of the upper classes. Lady Audley takes advantage of and subverts these social customs in order to take power back for herself. This begs the question: is female leisure never idle, but always a form of “women’s work” and political resistance to the patriarchy?
I dedicate this paper to Dr Heather Kerr (1957-2019) whose scholarship, creativity and kindness remain an inspiration in all things. Heather’s interest in the materiality of literature and the complex interweaving of narrative threads run through this paper.