Lady Audley’s Secret – Cleopatra Loves Books

Hosted by Lipsy Lost & Found my Wednesday post gives you a taste of what I am reading this week. A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words

I have started my fourth read from The Classics Club chosen by the spin which chose Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon so I’m going back to the Victorian times to meet this far from insipid lady.

Blurb

‘Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair’

In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful – and very mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her? A huge success in the nineteenth century, the book’s anti-heroine – with her good looks and hidden past – embodied perfectly the concerns of the Victorian age with morality and madness. Amazon

The last book I finished also featured a far from insipid female, this time WPC Florence Lovelady who takes us back to 1969 in Sharon Bolton’s brilliantly creepy The Craftsman – my review for this book will follow soon.

Blurb

Devoted father or merciless killer?
His secrets are buried with him.

Florence Lovelady’s career was made when she convicted coffin-maker Larry Glassbrook of a series of child murders 30 years ago. Like something from our worst nightmares the victims were buried…ALIVE.

Larry confessed to the crimes; it was an open and shut case. But now he’s dead, and events from the past start to repeat themselves.

Did she get it wrong all those years ago?
Or is there something much darker at play?

Next on my list is The House Swap by Rebecca Fleet which will be published on 3 May 2018 – not sure if the female protagonist in this book is insipid but I sincerely hope she isn’t!

Blurb

‘No one lives this way unless they want to hide something.’

When Caroline and Francis receive an offer to house swap, they jump at the chance for a week away from home. After the difficulties of the past few years, they’ve worked hard to rebuild their marriage for their son’s sake; now they want to reconnect as a couple.

On arrival, they find a house that is stark and sinister in its emptiness – it’s hard to imagine what kind of person lives here. Then, gradually, Caroline begins to uncover some signs of life – signs of her life. The flowers in the bathroom or the music in the CD player might seem innocent to her husband but to her they are anything but. It seems the person they have swapped with is someone she used to know; someone she’s desperate to leave in her past.

But that person is now in her home – and they want to make sure she’ll never forget . . . Amazon

So what do you think? Have you read any of these? Would you like to?

The Classics Club has held its 17th Spin, and this was my first time of playing the book roulette.

The idea is to list 20 of the books on your Classics Club list before Friday 9 March when the wheel will turn and reveal the winning number. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by 30 April 2018.

The rules suggested we pick five books from each of the following categories:

5 books you are dreading/hesitant to read
5 books you can’t WAIT to read
5 books you are neutral about
5 books which are free choice

Now I’m one of those people who tend to follow the rules and although I didn’t have any books I was dreading I duly put my five books that I was more hesitant about in the first five on my list, and then the classic club number came up as number 3!

This means that I need to read Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon before 30 April 2018. Fortunately I already have a copy of this book so no purchasing required.

Blurb

‘Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair’

In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful – and very mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her?

A huge success in the nineteenth century, the book’s anti-heroine – with her good looks and hidden past – embodied perfectly the concerns of the Victorian age with morality and madness. Amazon

I’ve never read this book, obviously it didn’t appeal when I did the majority of my classic reading in my late teens and twenties but I do like a bit of scandal!

Lady Audley’s Secret was first published back in 1862 and it was originally added to my bookshelf as elements of Mary Elizabeth Braddon story mirrored the real-life story of the day, that of the Road Hill Murder, in the storyline. I read about this crime in the fabulous The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale.

Lady Audley’s Secret centres on the key concerns of the day, the enemy within the domestic sphere… not so very different to our current diet of domestic noir – it’s funny to think that Victorian women in the early 1860s reading this novel, which was first serialised over three months in 1861 in a magazine before it was published in three volumes. I’m guessing that the readers were in a state of high anticipation for the next of these bite-size chunks. I wonder if they sat all prim and proper in their drawing rooms, gasping over the events in the way more modern women read on their e-Readers about friends, sisters and husbands terrorising lives in a world which seems far away from over hundred years in the past.

The story promises it all; a wicked stepmother, a country-house murder, a dollop of madness and a detective.

So although I put this in my I’m hesitant to read this novel pile, based on the overly dramatic book cover and the time period it was written, as anything else – now I’ve reminded myself why I wanted to read Lady Audley’s Secret, I’m actually very keen to read it indeed.

What did you get fellow Classic Club Spinners?

Looking forward to everyone’s views on whether I should be celebrating my success or perhaps this book missed the mark where you’re concerned?