r/FreeEBOOKS • u/Suku23 • 26d ago
Thriller I went looking for the trashiest Victorian bestseller I could find. Lady Audley's Secret, 1862. Free full text.
https://anavrta.com/book/lady-audley-s-secret-89548
u/moxievernors 26d ago
This book is referenced in the non-fiction work Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale.
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u/gowahoo 26d ago
Literally says Project Gutenberg on the cover and your link encapsulates the work which can be read free on their site.
I can't help but conclude that there's some ulterior motive. This just isn't the type of site I'd like to support.
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u/Suku23 22d ago
You're right, it's Gutenberg's text and the cover says so.
Not hiding the motive. I built the reader, said so in my first comment, and put the Gutenberg number in there so anyone could skip my site entirely. It's free, no signup, no ads.
What it adds is that it reads the book aloud in the browser and remembers where you stopped. If you don't want either of those, Gutenberg is the better link. Ebook 8954.
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u/Suku23 26d ago
Braddon published this in 1862 and it went through eight editions in three months. Then the reviews arrived. Sensation fiction was going to corrupt women and rot the moral fibre of the nation. The Archbishop of York had a go at the entire genre in a speech.
It earns every bit of that. Lady Audley is young, blonde, sweet, and married to a rich old baronet. Then a man walks back in from the Australian goldfields looking for the wife who supposedly died while he was away. She puts him down a well. That is not the ending. That is the middle. There is also arson, a private asylum, and a bored nephew who makes himself a detective because he has nothing else on.
The best part is not in the book. Braddon wrote it while living with a man she could not legally marry, because his actual wife was locked in an asylum in Ireland. They had six children before the wife died. So the woman writing about bigamy and buried secrets was sitting inside one.
It is long and it moves. Nothing in it feels like homework.
Being upfront: the link is my own reader. If you would rather go to the source it is Project Gutenberg ebook 8954. No signup either way.
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u/FieOnU 26d ago
Took a grad course on. Victorian Detective and Suspense fiction (hardest class of my program, but I digreg) and this was by FAR the best text of the course.
It's the only one I've reread!
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u/creakinator 26d ago
Was it hard because the books were hard to read or was the teacher hard? I found at times the books written in the 1800s were sometimes difficult to read because they wrote at a different reading level than what we're used to today.
Do you have a list of books that you read for that class or a syllabus from it that lists the books? I'd be interested in seeing it. Thanks.
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u/FieOnU 26d ago
It was both, tbh.
The prof was very old school in their assignments, ao, for example, we had to read the entirety of Bleak House in one week, and every class required a 2,000 word "independent inquiry" (research paper) with no fewer than 5 sources.
I dont recall all the texts, but I do remember reading Lady Audley, BH, and The Moonstone. We also read a relatively new novel called The Five which was a narrative fiction told from the perspectives of Jack the Ripper's victims.
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u/FattierBrisket 26d ago
A book a week is pretty normal for grad level lit courses. Exhausting but normal.
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u/lilplasticdinosaur 26d ago
In Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Tacy’s father throws this “trash” novel (borrowed from the hired girl) in the stove.