Lady Audley's Secret" (1862) subtly undermined the Victorian myth that female self-assertion was a form of insanity. At the same time it established the prolific Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a leading "sensation" novelist, a rival to the master of the genre, Wilkie Collins. Flouting the Victorian convention of the "blue-eyed wax-doll" heroine, Braddon presented a sexually attractive woman with great depth and complexity of character: a woman, as one contemporary critic put it, "high-strung... full of passion, purpose, and movement - very liable to error". This novel can now be seen as an anticipation of Ibsen's great dramas, and as an unabashed bid for freedom from the constraints of Victorian