(no subject)

[skygiants]

I got in the mood to read some Victorian lit recently and Emmy suggested Lady Audley's Secret "for EVIL DEMON BLONDE WOMAN who... basically just tries not to get screwed over by victorian england and fails. But the homoerotic subtext is basically text!"

As in so many things, Emmy was 100% correct.

Lady Audley's Secret is basically the Tragedy of One Woman Who Really Needed a Divorce. It begins with genial, middle-aged, extremely wealthy Lord Audley proposing to the beautiful, blonde, penniless young governess down the road:

LORD AUDLEY: I love you! Do you love me? I don't want to tie you down or make you unhappy, please only marry me if you love me!
LADY AUDLEY-TO-BE: Actually I am pretty sure I am not capable of love! My motives in marrying you would be completely mercenary! But, I mean, it sounds nice, I'm sure we'll be very happy!
LORD AUDLEY: ... uh, well, OK? Sure. Um. I...appreciate your honesty?

Meanwhile, in a TOTALLY UNRELATED EVENT on a boat back from Australia:

GEORGE TALBOYS: Man, I am so excited to get home and give all my new money to my beautiful, blonde, penniless wife!
A LADY PASSENGER: So, like, you're not nervous that something might happen on the trip? I mean, it's a long way from Australia to England, and instant communication has not yet been invented...
GEORGE TALBOYS: Haha, that is nothing, I haven't heard anything from my wife for five years!
A LADY PASSENGER: ....
GEORGE TALBOYS: Nope, after I ran off without warning and left her and our newborn baby in the middle of the night, leaving only a note saying that I had decided going to Australia to make my fortune or die trying, we haven't exchanged a single word of communication! She's going to be so excited to see me!
A LADY PASSENGER: ...
GEORGE TALBOYS: I mean, she'll probably be pretty much right where I left her, yeah?
A LADY PASSENGER: ...
GEORGE TALBOYS: She's completely penniless with only an alcoholic father for support, so it's not like she had anywhere to go...
A LADY PASSENGER: ....
GEORGE TALBOYS: You know, I have no idea why, but suddenly I'm starting to feel these mysterious feelings of completely unsourced apprehension?

At this point Lord Audley's nephew, Lazy Lawyer Robert Audley, enters into the picture and picks up an extremely depressed George at the point of learning that -- shockingly -- his wife is NOT, in fact, just where he left her. After some shenanigans at Audley Manor, George mysteriously disappears, which sends Robert into an obsessive tailspin trying to track him down.

LORD AUDLEY: Strange boy, Robert. Like a son to me, but strange. Hilariously lazy. No interest in sports or hunting or manly pursuits. No interest in marrying my pretty and wealthy daughter, who's madly in love with him. Inexplicable!
ROBERT AUDLEY: You know, it's funny, I never cared about anything before George, and now he's gone it's like I SEE HIM EVERYWHERE I GO AND MY HEART HAS BEEN RIPPED OUT OF MY CHEST.
LORD AUDLEY: Seriously, I wonder why Robert is not interested in marrying my daughter? So peculiar!
ROBERT AUDLEY: I just, I miss the way he used to angst attractively on the other side of the room. :( :( :( MY BACHELOR PAD SEEMS SO EMPTY.

(For the record, Robert's George-inspired transformation from cheerfully lazy gad-about-town to GRIM SEEKER OF JUSTICE is vastly more interesting and entertaining than anything about George himself, who as previously demonstrated is kind of a tool.)

Anyway, the rest of the book is mostly Robert trudging about putting his hitherto-unused lawyer skills to work at proving what you've all already guessed just from reading this summary, sprinkled through with a few attempted murders and a lot of conversations between Robert and Lady Audley that go pretty much like this:

ROBERT: If I were you I'd run away now before I have time to actually compile evidence that's more decisive than suspicious narrative coincidence.
LADY AUDLEY: BRING IT.
ROBERT: ...so, all-out war, then?
LADY AUDLEY: ALL-OUT WAR.
LORD AUDLEY: Hey, what are you and Robert talking about there, dear?
LADY AUDLEY: Nothing, honey! ^__^

It's a super enjoyable read in a sensationalist Victorian fashion, albeit heavily sprinkled with Victorian misogyny and a very, VERY Victorian ~*~madness in the family~*~ subplot towards the end. I would actually really love to see a modern film version of it too; Lady Audley, who uses every single weapon at her disposal as a Victorian woman in her quest for a half-decent life, would be an amazingly meaty role for a contemporary actress.

On another note, Apathetic Ambiguously Gay Lawyers Who Don't Lawyer appears to be a Victorian trend. I still have to write up my reread of Our Mutual Friend, but I refuse to believe that Mortimer Lightwood and Robert Audley don't frequently go out to dinner together and trade lazy hipster quips about how little work they do while resolutely avoiding the topic of the other men in their lives.

Comments

[qian]

This review is 100% accurate!!

Apart from the subtext the main thing I think of when I think of Lady Audley's Secret is the fact that Polly's fashionable cousin Fanny reads it in An Old-fashioned Girl. Which suggests to me that Alcott sees it as kind of trashy chicklit? Which I guess it kind of is!

[skygiants]

Ha! I remember seeing somewhere that people have seen it as sort of a trashier The Woman in White, which ... I would say they are about equally trashy myself!

(I also just saw via Wikipedia that not only did M.E. Braddon's brother run off to Australia himself, he eventually became PREMIER OF TASMANIA.)

[rymenhild]

I would read this book if I didn't think your review would be much more fun than the actual book-reading.

[metaphortunate]

My thoughts exactly!

[skygiants]

If you're in the mood for Victorian fiction, it is a lot of fun! But that's an if, I will grant.

[lizbee]

A couple of years ago I read a really interesting book called Reading Lady Audley's Secret in Melbourne. Because this was basically [insert literary zeitgeist here] of the day, and people (by which I mean mostly women) were getting together to have reading parties, and writing looooooooooong letters about the characters, and generally being a fandom. While Proper Society (by which I mean mostly men) was worrying about the impact this terrible book would have on the weakminded (by which I mean women). And then it inspired sensation fiction of its own, like The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. SO GREAT.

[nextian]

I read the Mystery of a Hansom Cab! I can't remember a single thing that happened in it, though, except that it was very, very True Crime.

[lizbee]

It was ...something. As was the recent TV adaptation, which replaced the heroine's consensual relationship with a Chinese man with forced prostitution at the hands of white men. I had some feelings about that.

[pedanther]

Thank you. Now I can stop wondering whether I wanted to see the TV adaptation.

[lizbee]

Watching Bad TV So You Don't Have To. But seriously, between that and the sidelining of Lin Chung in the Phryne Fisher adaptations -- and it takes serious work to be more racist than the original books -- I have a lot if questions about the ABC's drama department c2012.

[skygiants]

Wow, that book sounds fascinating! I would love to hunt it down. Thanks for the heads-up!

[lizbee]

Actual info! Might be hard to find, though, it was published by a small press in Melbourne.

[skygiants]

I was hoping NYPL's decent scholarly library might come through for me, but not this time. :( Ah well! I'll keep an eye out for it in used bookstores.

[meganbmoore]

There's a TV movie from 10 or so years back that's GREAT.

[skygiants]

Oooh! Is that the one with Jamie Bamber?

[meganbmoore]

Yup.

[wakeupnew]

Oh man, I read that book for a class on Victorian women in college; I loved the shit out of it! Several of my classmates liked to do dramatic reenactments of the homoerotic tension.

[skygiants]

Hahaha man, AS WELL THEY SHOULD. It's pretty dramatic! ROBERT AUDLEY CARED FOR NOTHING BEFORE.

[dimestore_romeo]

I remember loving this at undergrad and giving a passionate speech in my seminar about something along the lines of how Lady Audley wasn't mad but society had convinced her that she WAS because she wasn't acting out the ideal of the perfect woman and REALLY, wasn't she only taking logical steps to secure her own future????

[skygiants]

There's actually a ton of interesting stuff in the way Lady Audley kind of uses the Victorian trope of madness in her own defense - "well it's not my fault, I was irrational!" And then the doctor's just like, "I mean, that....isn't actually irrational behavior..."

[cahn]

I... am totally gonna read this.

[skygiants]

PLEASE DO, I will look forward to your thoughts! :D