Aurora Floyd

Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel.”
The novel depicts a heroine trapped in an abusive and adulterous marriage, and effectively dramatizes the extra-legal pressures which kept many such unhappy marriages out of the courts: fear of personal scandal, and of betraying one’s family through the publicity and expense of the process. Aurora’s bigamous marriage dramatizes the need for expeditions divorce without the enormous social cost, but the overt sexuality of the heroine shocked contemporary critics. “What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshy and unlovely record,” wrote Margaret Oliphant.
Braddon’s text is studded with references to contemporary events (the Crimean War, the Divorce Act of 1857) and the text has been carefully annotated for modern readers in this edition, which also includes a range of documents designed to help set the text in context.

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With Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon had established herself, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mrs Henry Wood, as one of the ruling triumvirate of `sensation novelists'. Aurora Floyd (1862-3), following hot on its heels, achieved almost equal popularity and notoriety. Like Lady Audley, Aurora is a beautiful young woman bigamously married and threatened with exposure by a blackmailer. But in Aurora Floyd, and in many of the novels written in imitation of it, bigamy is little more than a euphemism, a device to enable the heroine, and vicariously the reader, to enjoy the forbidden sweets of adultery without adulterous intentions. Passionate, sometimes violent, Aurora does succeed in enjoying them, her desires scarcely chastened by her disastrous first marriage. She represents a challenge to the mid-Victorian sexual code, and particularly to the feminine ideal of simpering, angelic young ladyhood. P. D. Edward's introduction evaluates the novel's leading place among `bigamy-novels' and Braddon's treatment of the power struggle between the sexes, as well as considering the similarities between the author and her heroine. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

P. D. Edwards is Darnell Professor of English at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also the editor of several Trollope titles in World's Classics.