Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon by Jennifer Carnell

THE LITERARY LIVES OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON:
A STUDY OF HER LIFE AND WORK

JENNIFER CARNELL

This is the first new literary critical biography of Mary Elizabeth Braddon for over twenty years, and its predecessor, Robert Lee Wolff's Sensational Victorian, has never been reprinted and is not easy to obtain. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon concentrates on sources not available to Wolff, and in doing so examines the entire eight years of her career as an actress in the 1850s (Wolff believed it to have been only three years in duration), her earliest writing in the 1850s, her rise to fame as an equal of Wilkie Collins at the height of the controversy over sensation fiction in the 1860s, her relationship with the publisher John Maxwell, the many influences on her work, and the respect she eventually earned in the literary world. Each chapter is a blend of biography and literary criticism.

The book also includes two large appendices, the first mapping Braddon's entire career as an actress, listing the companies she acted with in London and the provinces, the plays she acted in, and the roles she played. The second appendix provides a new bibliography of her work, listing the first editions and serialisations of her ninety novels, short stories, plays, poems and essays; importantly, this includes details of the following previously unrecorded works: 1 opera, 19 short stories, 4 songs, 46 essays, 1 play, and 27 poems. The book reproduces the entire text of 15 of her earliest poems, the first of Braddon's work to be published, never before recorded or republished, which were written for provincial newspapers while she was an actress.

This book is an important resource, providing critical analysis for the undergraduate, and research information for the graduate and professor.

Contents: Introduction; The Early Years; Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Career as an Actress; Mary Braddon and the Rise of Sensation Fiction; Melodrama, Penny-part Fiction and French Realism: Mary Braddon's Negotiation of Other Cultural Forms; Detectives and the Detection of Secrets and Crime; The Years of Success and Security; Calendar of Braddon's Theatrical Career 1852-1860; A New Annotated Bibliography of Braddon's Writing. The index of the text sections of the book (not including the appendix sections) can be viewed: here

Hardback with text of 448pp. and 6 illustrations.

An extract of a review of The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the journal Victorian Periodicals Review by Professor Benjamin F. Fisher can be read on the site Victorian Database Online Critic's Choice:

http://www.victoriandatabase.com/choice.cfm#Critic2

Jennifer Carnell received her Ph.D for her research on M.E. Braddon in 1999. She has edited editions of two novels for the Sensation Press, The Black Band and The Octoroon, is a contributor to the book Beyond Sensation (State University of New York Press), and is the author of a novel (Harper Collins).

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