Lady Audley's Secret

Lucy, the new Lady Audley, is everything a Victorian wife should be: golden-haired, childlike, adored by her wealthy older husband. Then her nephew-in-law's friend George Talboys (freshly returned from Australia with a fortune and hopes of rejoining the wife he left behind) vanishes from Audley Court's grounds without a trace. Robert Audley, an amiable barrister who has never worked a day in his life, finds himself doing the one thing no one expects of him: methodically investigating, and following every thread to his uncle's beautiful new bride.

This was one of the great bestsellers of the 1860s, a 'sensation novel' that scandalized critics precisely because its menace lives inside a respectable English home. Braddon builds her suspense through accumulating dread rather than shocks, a portrait with something wrong in its expression, a well in a neglected garden, a lady's maid who knows too much. A perfect period thriller for listening: propulsive, atmospheric, and anchored by one of fiction's great ambiguous villainesses.

At roughly 143,000 words, Lady Audley's Secret runs about 16 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

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