Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Broschiertes Buch

Thou Art the Man

Beschreibung

Ten years ago, a shocking murder cut short a blossoming romance between beautiful young heiress Sibyl Higginson and her cousin Brandon Mountford. When Mountford, an epileptic subject to seizures and memory loss, awakened near a bloody corpse, he was forced to escape to avoid execution for the crime. The years passed, nothing was heard of Mountford, and it was supposed he had either died or fled the country. A decade later, Sibyl, now Lady Penrith, is travelling along a desolate moor when a crazed man stops her carriage and hands her a scrawled note. Believing the note to be from Mountford, Sibyl sets out to investigate, and with the help of her niece Coralie Urquhart she will uncover the long-hidden truth behind the murder and the horrible fate of Brandon Mountford! Thou Art the Man (1894) is a thrilling and fast-paced novel of murder and mystery. It is also, as Laurence Talairach-Vielmas discusses in her introduction to this edition, a fascinating look at the ways Braddon adapted late-Victorian theories of heredity, disease, and criminology into her fiction. This edition reprints the unabridged text of the 1895 "yellowback" edition, complete with a facsimile of its cover, and includes a new introduction and explanatory notes.

Autor

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (4 October 1835 - 4 February 1915) was an English popular novelist of the Victorian era. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, which has also been dramatised and filmed several times. Born in London, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was privately educated. Her mother Fanny separated from her father Henry in 1840, when Mary was five. When Mary was ten years old, her brother Edward Braddon left for India and later Australia, where he became Premier of Tasmania. Mary worked as an actress for three years, when she was befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle. They were only playing minor roles, but Braddon was able to support herself and her mother. Adelaide noted that Braddon's interest in acting waned as she took up writing novels. In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell (1824-1895), a publisher of periodicals, and moved in with him in 1861. However, Maxwell was already married with five children, and a wife living in an mental asylum in Ireland. Mary acted as stepmother to his children until 1874, when Maxwell's wife died and they were able to get married. She had six children by him. Her eldest daughter, Fanny Margaret Maxwell (1863-1955), married the naturalist Edmund Selous on 13 January 1886. In the 1920s they lived in Wyke Castle, where Fanny founded a local branch of the Woman's Institute in 1923, of which she became the first president. The second eldest son was the novelist William Babington Maxwell (1866-1939). Mary Elizabeth Braddon died on 4 February 1915 in Richmond (then in Surrey) and is interred in Richmond Cemetery. Her home had been Lichfield House in the centre of the town, which was replaced by a block of flats in 1936, Lichfield Court, now listed. She has a plaque in Richmond parish church, which calls her simply "Miss Braddon". A number of nearby streets are named after characters in her novels - her husband was a property developer in the area.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Valancourt Books
• Revised edition
• Seitenzahl: 372
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Februar 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 496g
• ISBN-13: 9781934555378
• ISBN-10: 1934555371
• Artikelnr.: 23489261