Reading #8 - Braddon, Eliot, Doyle

What I found most interesting about the excerpts we read for Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret was not the suspense or elements of sensation fiction, but rather that the story is a commentary on the destruction of Victorian society. Lucy Audley is supposed to be a model woman, beautiful, innocent, eager to please the men in her life, and absolutely incapable of murder. The story has the same sort of draw that trashy reality television shows or Dateline specials on women who kill have: the idea that women who act in ways outside of the prescribed notions of femininity are completely fascinating. Lucy is the epitome of what a woman should not be. She abandons her marriage and her child, enters into a bigamous relationship, and attempts murder on her first husband's life. One can understand why this story may have been so shocking to readers in the Victorian era.

Unfortunately, although I am usually very interested in stories about people who possess extrasensory abilities, I did not find Eliot's The Lifted Veil a very captivating read. It has the potential to be a good story, but I think Eliot should have stuck with her realistic fiction instead of venturing into the world of the super- and preternatural.

But thankfully Eliot was positioned between two intriguing stories. The last, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League," a short Sherlock Holmes story, was of course the center of my presentation for this past week. Holmes enters into a business arrangement with Mr. Wilson, who is paying him to find out why Wilson was terminated from his work as a very important member of the Red-Headed League. In taking on this ridiculous case, Holmes discovers a con artist hard at work deceiving redheads with stolen money. The culprit is captured and Holmes is hero once again. I'm a big fan of Holmes and Doyle, but I don't pretend to know everything about the opium-addicted detective. I definitely want to look a little more closely at the 56 stories and 4 books that involve Holmes' life to see if there are other obvious elements of sensation and detective fiction (besides the ones that are already clear).