The fact that Lady Audley uses her distinctly feminine appearance to fool the community surrounding Audley Court is one of many elements of deception in Lady Audley’s Secret. Braddon uses such rampant deception to emphasize the foolishness of trusting in appearances alone. In highlighting how drastically most characters misjudge Lady Audley, the novel suggests the specific danger of underestimating one’s capacity for treachery based on beauty.
The most obvious deception in the novel is the fact that Lady Audley is actually Helen Talboys—the supposedly dead wife of George Talboys. When George initially leaves Helen for Australia, a desperate Helen assumes a new identity in the hopes of creating a new life. Upon learning that George will be returning home, she finds a near-death young woman who resembles her, Matilda Plowson, and presents this woman as herself; upon Matilda’s death, Helen is able to shed her old identity and become the unattached Lucy Graham. This initial deception leads to many others, from the minor (tricking Sir Michael into leaving Audley Court when George, who would recognize Lady Audley, visits), to the extreme (attempting to kill George and then covering up the alleged murder). These ruses work specifically because those around Lady Audley readily accept her stories at face value. They are quick to believe that Helen’s body double is Helen herself, fail to raise questions about Lucy Graham’s background until the end of the book (at which point there is more than enough evidence to prove that she is not who she says she is), and, above all, conflate Lady Audley’s childlike beauty with goodness, morality, and innocence.
Indeed, nearly every character in the novel remarks on Lady Audley’s beauty, and her rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and bouncy golden curls are said to give her a childlike appearance. The narrative also describes her mannerisms as echoing those of a little girl. When Lady Audley refuses to host Robert and George Talboys at Audley Court, for example, her stepdaughter, Alicia Audley, accuses her stepmother of being immature and spoiled. Ironically, Alicia’s assumption that Lady Audley is immature blinds her to a more sinister truth: Lady Audley doesn’t want George to visit because he is her first husband, and him seeing her would expose her bigamy. In this, Alicia is not alone. Multiple characters assume Lady Audley’s appearance must reflect an innocent and pleasant nature. Even the well-respected, well-educated Sir Michael defends his wife against his nephew Robert’s accusations of murder, because he cannot believe that such a physically lovely person could commit such a morally ugly act. Only when Robert—who at first is infatuated with his young aunt—investigates beyond superficial pretenses does he discover the truth. Upon acquiring a trunk that belonged to Lady Audley when she was a governess, he removes the label bearing the name “Lucy Graham” to find another reading “Helen Talboys”—literally peeling back the surface to reveal Lady Audley’s trickery.
Through Lady Audley’s seemingly innocent appearance, Braddon shows that one cannot trust what they see at first glance. Beauty, in fact, proves the perfect vessel to disguise ugly secrets, and only those who question the evidence of their eyes will find the truth.
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Appearances and Deception Quotes in Lady Audley’s Secret
To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy…to the left there was a broad graveled walk…and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter.
“You know that nobody asks you to marry Sir Michael unless you wish. Of course it would be a magnificent match; he has a splendid income, and is one of the most generous of men. Your position would be very high, and you would be enabled to do a great deal of good; but, as I said before, you must be entirely guided by your own feelings.”
Lucy was better loved and more admired than the baronet’s daughter [Alicia]. That very childness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley’s fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness.
We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose very shadow promised—peace…No crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-morning yearning, and associate with—peace.
“Do you know, Phoebe, I have heard some people say you and I are alike?”
“I have heard them say so too, my lady…but they must be very stupid to say it, for your ladyship is a beauty, and I’m a poor plain creature.”
“Not at all, Phoebe…you are like me…it is only colour that you want. My hair is pale yellow shot with gold, yours is drab…Why, with a bottle of hair dye, such as we see advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I any day, Phoebe.”
No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion and a stranger, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait.
“Lady Audley,” answered the young man gravely. “I have never practiced as a barrister…I have shrunk from those responsibilities and duties, as I have from all the fatigues of this troublesome life: but we are sometimes forced in the very position we have most avoided, and I have found myself lately compelled to think of these things. Lady Audley, did you ever study the theory of circumstantial evidence?”
“I hate women…They’re bold, brazen, abominable creatures, invented for the annoyance and destruction of their superiors. Look at this business of poor George’s! It’s all woman’s work from one end to the other. He marries a woman, and his father casts him off, penniless and professionless. He hears of the woman’s death and he breaks his heart…He goes to a woman’s house and he is never seen alive again.”
Lucy Audley looked up from her occupation amongst the fragile china cups, and watched Robert rather anxiously, as he walked softly to his uncle’s room, and back again to the boudoir. She looked very pretty and innocent, seated behind the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering silver. Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance.
“I am weary of my life here, and wish, if I can, to find a new one. I go out into the world, dissevered from every link which binds me to the hateful past, to seek another home and another fortune. Forgive me if I have been fretful, capricious, changeable. You should forgive me, for you know why I have been so. You know the secret which is the key to my life.”
“A conspiracy concocted by an artful woman, who had speculated upon the chances of her husband’s death, and had secured a splendid position at the risk of committing a crime…but a foolish woman, who looked at life as a game of chance, in which the best player was likely to hold the winning cards, forgetting that there is a Providence about the pitiful speculators, and that wicked secrets are never permitted to remain long hidden.”
“Mr. Audley may be as you say, merely eccentric; but he has talked to me this evening in a manner that has filled me with absolute terror, and I believe that he is going mad. I shall speak very seriously to Sir Michael this very night…I shall only put him on his guard, my dear Alicia.”
“But he’ll never believe you,” said Miss Audley, “He will laugh at such an idea.”
“No, Alicia; he will believe anything that I tell him.”
Perhaps in that retrospective reverie she recalled the early time in which she had first looked in the glass and discovered that she was beautiful: that fatal early time in which she had first begun to look upon her loveliness as a right divine…Did she remember the day in which that fairy dower of beauty had first taught her to be selfish and cruel?
“I killed him because I AM MAD! because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and insanity; because when George Talboys goaded me, as you have goaded me; and reproached me, and threatened me; my mind, never properly balanced, utterly lost its balance; and I was mad!”
“Because there is no evidence of madness in anything that she has done. She ran away from her home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left it in the hope of finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed the crime of bigamy, because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no madness there. When she found herself in a desperate position, she did not grow desperate. She employed intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy which required coolness and deliberation in its execution. There is no madness in that.”
I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace. If my experience of life has not been very long, it has at least been manifold; and I can safely subscribe to that which a mighty king and a great philosopher declared, when he said that neither the experience of his youth nor of his age had ever shown him ‘righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.’
