Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a popular writer during the Victorian Era whose most famous work was Lady Audley's Secret.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a popular writer during the Victorian Era whose most famous work was Lady Audley's Secret.

I was just nineteen years of age when I began my career as articled pupil with the Miss Bagshots of Albury Lodge, Fendale, Yorkshire. My father was a country curate, with a delicate wife and four children, of whom I was the eldest; and I had known from my childhood that the day must come in which I should have to get my own living in almost the only vocation open to a poor gentleman's daughter. I had been fairly educated near home, and the first opportunity that arose for placing me out in the world had been gladly seized upon by my poor father, who consented to pay the modest premium...

There were two surgeons in the little town of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire, -Mr. Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt derived from his aristocratic patients

"What about?" There are some houses whereof the outward aspect is sealed with the seal of respectability-houses which inspire confidence in the minds of the most sceptical of butchers and bakers-houses at whose area-gates the tradesman delivers his goods undoubtingly, and from whose spotless door-steps the vagabond children of the neighbourhood recoil as from a shrine too sacred for their gambols.

The wind howled across the level fields, and flying showers of sleet rattled against the old leathern coach as it drove through the thickening dusk. A bitter winter, this year of the Royal tragedy. A rainy summer, and a mild rainy autumn had been followed by the hardest frost this generation had ever known. The Thames was frozen over, and tempestuous winds had shaken the ships in the Pool, and the steep gable ends and tall chimney-stacks on London Bridge. A never-to-be-forgotten winter, which had witnessed the martyrdom of England's King, and the exile of her chief nobility, while a rabble...

In the days when the Bourbon reigned over Gaul, before the "simple, sensuous, passionate" verse of Alfred de Musset had succeeded the debonnaire Muse of Beranger in the affections of young France, -in days when the site of the Trocadero was a remote and undiscovered country, and the word "exposition" unknown in the Academic dictionary, and the Gallic Augustus destined to rebuild the city yet an exile, -a young law-student boarded, in common with other students, in a big dreary-looking house at the corner of the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle, abutting on the Place Lauzun, and within some ten minutes...

'Where is Miss Palliser?' inquired Miss Pew, in that awful voice of hers, at which the class-room trembled, as at unexpected thunder. A murmur ran along the desks, from girl to girl, and then some one, near that end of the long room which was sacred to Miss Pew and her lieutenants, said that Miss Palliser was not in the class-room. 'I think she is .

The house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby, East India bankers, was one of the richest firms in the city of London--so rich that it would be quite in vain to endeavour to describe the amount of its wealth. It was something fabulous, people said. The offices were situated in a dingy and narrow thoroughfare leading out of King William Street, and were certainly no great things to look at; but the cellars below their offices--wonderful cellars, that stretched far away underneath the church of St. Gundolph, and were only separated by party-walls from the vaults in which the dead lay buried--were...

A warm summer evening, with a sultry haze brooding over the level landscape, and a Sabbath stillness upon all things in the village of Lidford, Midlandshire. In the remoter corners of the old gothic church the shadows are beginning to gather, as the sermon draws near its close; but in the centre aisle and about the pulpit there is broad daylight still shining-in from the wide western window, across the lower half of which there are tall figures of the Evangelists in old stained glass.