Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Maxwell, Mary Elizabeth
MAXWELL, MARY ELIZABETH (1887–1915), better known as Miss Mary ELIzABETH BRADDON, novelist, the youngest daughter of Henry Braddon, solicitor and author of several works on sporting subjects, a member of an old Cornish family, of Skisdon Lodge, St. Kew, Cornwall, by his wife, Fanny, daughter of J. White, of county Cavan, was born in London 4 October 1837. Sir Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon [q.v.], premier of Tasmania, was her brother, and John Thadeus Delane [q.v.], for thirty-six years editor of The Times, her cousin on the mother's side. Mary Braddon received a good private education and when very young showed an eagerness to write. About 1856, when she was living near Beverley in Yorkshire, a local printer offered her ten pounds for a serial story that should combine ‘the humour of Dickens with the dramatic quality of G. W. M. Reynolds’. The girl of nineteen produced a lurid story, Three Times Dead, or The Secret of the Heath, which was prepared for publication in penny numbers illustrated with violent woodcuts. But the printer went bankrupt and, although the whole story was set up in type, it is doubtful whether publication was ever completed. Later on the story was re-written, entitled The Trail of the Serpent, and in 1861 re-issued.
In 1861 Mary Braddon published Garibaldi, and Other Poems, and a short novel, The Lady Lisle. A book of stories appeared in 1862, and in the same year, in response to an eleventh hour request from John Maxwell, a publisher who was preparing to launch a periodical named Robin Goodfellow, she wrote Lady Audley's Secret. Robin Goodfellow, after struggling through twelve numbers, died. Lady Audley was at the last moment transferred to The Sixpenny Magazine, where it attracted the attention of Lionel Brough [q.v.], then acting as literary adviser to the speculative publishing firm of Tinsley Brothers. Late in 1862 it appeared as a three-volume novel and had a success both immediate and irresistible. From 1862 to the present day Lady Audley's Secret has not ceased to sell. In various forms nearly a million copies must have gone into circulation; it has been translated into every civilized tongue, several times piratically dramatized, and twice filmed.
It is a misfortune to any author's reputation that an early book should have a popularity so overwhelming as to obscure later and better work. Lady Audley's Secret, for all its daring imagination and although it is a remarkable production for a young woman of no experience, cannot be reckoned a good novel. Yet Miss Braddon is known primarily as the author of this book, and her reputation has paid the penalty. Her work has been dismissed as without proportion, thought, or character-analysis, by critics who based their judgement solely on this one preposterously successful melodrama.
Ultimate reputation apart, however, Miss Braddon was well served by Lady Audley's Secret. The book which made her publisher's fortune (out of the proceeds William Tinsley built himself a villa at Barnes and called it Audley Lodge) also made her own, and she became before long a wealthy woman. Her continued success was due partly to devoted industry, but mainly to her tireless inventiveness. Novel after novel appeared, and in addition to all those which she acknowledged, she published several anonymously, which to this day remain without their author's name. She wrote many plays; contributed to Punch and to The World; produced a serial in French for the Paris Figaro; wrote the greater part of numerous Christmas annuals (notably The Mistletoe Bough); and edited several magazines, of which the best known and most successful were Temple Bar and Belgravia. Prolific vitality was not a rare quality among Victorian novelists, but Miss Braddon's indefatigable zest is unrivalled. Mrs. Charles Gore, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Oliphant, Wilkie Collins, even Trollope himself, grew weary at their desks; but Miss Braddon maintained her freshness to the end, so that The Green Curtain, published in 1911, is rather the book of a practised writer in the prime of life than, perhaps, the eightieth novel of an old lady of seventy-four.
In 1874 Miss Braddon married John Maxwell, who became a busy publisher and the founder of numerous periodicals. She lived a great deal at Annesley Bank, near Lyndhurst, but her permanent home was always at Richmond, Surrey, in a dignified Georgian house surrounded by a lovely garden, where, on 4 February 1915, she died.
Miss Braddon was foolishly and savagely attacked during the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last century as the most dangerous of the ‘sensation novelists’, whose work was liable to corrupt the minds of young people by its violence and by its power to make wickedness alluring. One critic accused her of making probity purposely ridiculous and of recommending murder and bigamy to female enterprise; another declared that her books could only stand on a shelf beside the Newgate Calendar. Such absurdity ignores all but one aspect of her work and deals with that unfairly. The technique of crime, and not its ethic, interested her, so that wrongdoing became ingenious rather than alluring. On the other hand she was too faithful a daughter of her age ever to think of tampering with virtue's ultimate victory and reward. Rather was she liable to strain probability in her desire to prove the sad consequences of ill-doing, so that her plots, by the standards of a more candid, and maybe a more cynical, generation, lack the force that they were meant to have, so turbulent is the villainy but so easily undone the villain.
But it is an injustice to regard Miss Braddon as a mere sensationalist. She was a clever, cultivated woman with wide sympathies and interests. Not only was her response to natural beauty always quick and keen (even in her earliest books she showed great power of description alike of landscape and weather-moods), but to the end she was intensely aware of the world and eager to be part of it. This hunger for actuality gives her best work a quality beyond that of mere sensationalism, and to her joyous acceptance of life in every form must be attributed her popularity, not only among the masses but also among her fellow-writers. That her books should have delighted readers so exigent and so diverse as Bulwer, Reade, Thackeray, Sala, Labouchere, and Robert Louis Stevenson proves them to be instinct with some quality beyond that of mere dramatic ingenuity.
Her principal books are: Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), Henry Dunbar (1864), The Doctor's Wife (1864), Birds of Prey (1867), Charlotte's Inheritance (1868), Robert Ainsleigh (1872), Strangers and Pilgrims (1873), Dead Men's Shoes (1876), Joshua Haggard's Daughter (1876), Vixen (1879), Asphodel (1881), Mount Royal (1882), Phantom Fortune (1883), Ishmael (1884), All Along the River (1893), Sons of Fire (1895), London Pride (1896), Rough Justice (1898), The Rose of Life (1905), and The Green Curtain (1911).
Miss Braddon was the mother of two novelists, William Babington Maxwell and Gerald Maxwell; her third son, Edward Maxwell, was a barrister. She also had two daughters. Her portrait by William Powell Frith, R.A., is in Mr. W. B. Maxwell's possession.
[The World, 25 April 1905; Bookman, July 1912; New York Evening Post, 10 February 1915; Harriett Jay, Robert Buchanan, 1903; Henry James, Notes and Reviews, 1921; private information.]