Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London to solicitor and writer Henry Braddon and his Irish wife, Fanny White. Her parents’ marriage broke down due to Henry’s infidelity and financial irresponsibility when Mary was only five years old. In 1857, Mary began acting in order to support herself and her mother. Three years later, she published her first novel and met publisher John Maxwell. She began an affair with the already-married Maxwell, whose wife lived in an asylum, and gave birth to their first child together in 1862. The same year, she experienced her first commercial success with Lady Audley’s Secret. Throughout her life, Braddon produced novels at a prolific rate and founded her own literary magazine, Belgravia, dedicated to sensation fiction. She and Maxwell eventually married upon the death of his first wife in 1874. They had six children together. Braddon died in Richmond in 1915.