What is presented here is a brief series of “cameos” on the sensational novel Aurora Floyd, serialized in Temple Bar between 1862-63. Though Aurora Floyd was branded "an abomination" by its critics, the populace would send Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s work soaring to unprecedented heights. Like Aurora, Braddon was a fashionable, “fast” young woman in the midst of the quickening pace of Victorian England. Aspects of social spheres reached a feverish pitch, as a hodgepodge of cultures and classes began buzzing back and forth, crisscrossing each other on underground trains.

Each cameo will detail a specific “layer” or focus and how it relates both to the novel and to Braddon’s life. Braddon’s life, much like a cameo, consisted of more than “two layers of different colors,” and contained an “inner stratum” differently colored from the outer (“Cameo” OED).

The first cameo will look at Braddon’s close association with the sensation movement, and how she became its primary figurehead and, for many critics, a scapegoat. In Aurora Floyd Braddon addresses criticisms of the sensation novel head-on, using devices of allusion and characterization to comment on contemporary literary discourses.

Another cameo begins with Aurora Floyd's and Braddon’s mutual love of hunting and horseflesh. Braddon, well-read and intelligent, would have been versed in the controversies of the day surrounding both female and equine fashions, namely the corset for women and the curb-bit and bearing rein for horses. Like other controversies that are present both in her life and her work, such as divorce law and bigamy, the debate over fashion and the parallels between female and equine fashion are undercurrents in her novel Aurora Floyd.

Aurora Floyd was published in Temple Bar magazine from 1862-1863. Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers was a "shilling monthly" published by Ward and Lock and aimed at a middle-class readership. Its format, which mixed serialized novels, essays, reviews and poetry, was largely modeled after William Makepeace Thackeray's successful Cornhill magazine; Temple Bar's chief distinction, however, was its policy of including additional text rather than the popular etchings and woodcuts of other contemporary periodicals (Blake/Onslow). Perhaps as a result of this policy, Temple Bar had a significantly lower circulation than its primary rival; while Cornhill was maintaining a readership of 80,000 in 1862 (Phegley "Cornhill"), Temple Bar at its height reached only 30,000 readers (Blake/Onslow).

Still, the significance of Temple Bar to Braddon's early career is manifold. Its founder, John Maxwell, had been Braddon's chief mentor since 1860 and her domestic partner (Maxwell was infamously married to another woman during their cohabitation) since 1861. In addition, the magazine's editor during the period of Aurora Floyd's publication was George Augustus Sala, who would later in the decade become a contributor to Braddon's own magazine, Belgravia, and a very public defender of her sensational fiction. In his most famous of such defenses, 1867's "The Cant of Modern Criticism," Sala wrote that "there is a kind of pleasure, mingled with sadness, in assailing [Braddon's] detractors in a magazine she conducts, remembering as I do that it was in a magazine which I conducted--in Temple Bar--that she reached her first station in the highway of Fame" (Sala 55).

By Kristy Scherba

In "Miss Braddon: The Writer and her Work" by Clive Holland, the family background of Mary Elizabeth Braddon is highlighted, noting they lived as lawful people amidst the quiet rolling countryside of Cornwall, England. The family cultivated literary talent primarily through Mary Elizabeth, who began writing as a child and who exclaimed there was never a time she recalled not writing. Her mother possessed cultured tastes, her father worked as a sports writer, and her brother wrote and published a couple of books; but no one equaled the determined talent of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In The Writer and her Work, Braddon is praised for revising the element of mystery in sensational fiction,unlike “the sensational rubbish which now pours from the printing press almost every day”(151). Braddon is praised as a great stylist and brilliant writer. In effect, she has come full circle in her lifelong career; first as the criticized, now as the acclaimed. At seventy-four years of age, Mrs. Braddon offers some anecdotes about her writing habits and talks of her first writing position. She was offered a writing job that needed someone to match the humor of Dickens and the plot of Reynolds, an almost impossible role to fill; but eagerly set to work, placing the writing sample on the desk the next morning, and was immediately hired. From there, Lady Audley’s Secret was an instant success; unable to print and bind fast enough to keep up with demand. Aurora Floyd was equally anticipated and well received. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Aurora Floyd is to be out and away greater and more popular than Scott, Shakespeare, Homer, In the South Seas, and to that you have attained” (152). Clive Holland reports Braddon is esteemed not only in quality, but for quantity of words, filling “generous lines” in lengths exceeding many of her contemporaries. The once severe critics have only to sing praises for Braddon,as a masterful weaver of plot and story, with fifty-six books penned; she is an indomitable force in the industry with unmatched perseverance and style. Braddon talks about her plot ideas when developing a story: “When the plot of my tale has been decided, I carry it about with me, in the shape of portable mental luggage, for a long time. I always write the book with my own hand, with no preference where and no particular time for writing”(153). At seventy-four, she has no love for publicity and prefers the solitude of the country. Her hobbies are traveling, gardening, music, and reading, but her love of horse riding has ended due to age; she has always been fond of children and animals. Her favorite writer is Charles Dickens, and her advice to new authors is: “wait until some incident in real life suggests the subject of a story and when you have let it grow and shape itself in your mind, tell your story and tell it in the best language and in the simplest manner possible” (153). That, she declared, is the best advice she can give anyone.

Many 19th century novels contain some level of self-reflexivity in their narration; Aurora Floyd, however, engages this tendency to an unusually great extent. Braddon’s narrator frequently refers to the novel as a text in the process of being written, rather than merely a story being recounted. Describing Talbot’s love for Aurora, for example, she interjects, “I must write his story in the commonest words. He could not help it!” (Braddon 124) Later, after Talbot rejects Aurora, she elides his period of ennui with the admission, “I might fill chapters with the foolish sufferings of this young man; but I fear he must have become very wearisome to my afflicted readers” (165). Most revealingly, Braddon even attempts to dissuade criticisms of her novel on the basis of genre: in the first chapter, she claims, “If this were a very romantic story, it would be perhaps only proper for Eliza Floyd to pine in her gilded bower, and misapply her energies in weeping for some abandoned lover, deserted in an evil hour of ambitious madness. But as my story is a true one…” (57) This explicit rejection of “romantic” clichés, and insistence on the “truth” of the narrative, predicts later attempts in essays like Sala’s to defend sensation by aligning it with realism. As Jennifer Phegley writes in her article “‘Henceforward I Refuse to Bow the Knee to Their Narrow Rule’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia Magazine, Women Readers, and Literary Valuation,” one of Braddon’s chief critical strategies during the Belgravia period was to redefine “her own brand of fiction as more realistic than realist novels” (Phegley 152). Aurora Floyd’s satirical treatment of “very romantic stories” suggests that this strategy was already in place as early as 1862.

The “dazzling” nature of sensation fiction was acknowledged even by one of its harshest contemporary critics: Margaret Oliphant’s scathing “Novels” essay for Blackwood’s—the direct inspiration for Sala’s rebuttals in Belgravia—admitted that Aurora Floyd was a “very clever story…well knit together, thoroughly interesting, and full of life” (Oliphant 263). Such concessions, however, were tempered with a sense that a “thoroughly interesting” novel was not necessarily a fulfilling or edifying one. By placing her dazzling, sensational heroine at the center of a murder investigation, Braddon at first seems to concede this point to her critics; but Aurora is not guilty, and her ultimate absolution from guilt of James Conyers’ death solidifies her place not as an irresistibly “beautiful fiend,” like Braddon’s earlier protagonist Lady Audley, but as a new kind of literary ideal. Braddon may not have “officially” engaged the critical discourse on sensation fiction until she became editor of Belgravia in 1866; however, these debates were clearly at the forefront of her mind even as her literary identity was being solidified.

In Aurora Floyd, the corset is not specifically mentioned in the way Aurora’s “now universal turban, or pork-pie” (Braddon 184) hat and her “diamond bracelet, worth a couple hundred pounds” (79) are, likely because of its status as an undergarment---an overt mention would have given Braddon’s detractors reason to call her writing pornographic. Despite this, it is likely that Aurora was corseted while she went about her daily activities, including riding. As late as the 1890s, corset companies were advertising their wares in pictures of “competent women exuberantly participating in…outdoor pursuits such as horse riding” (Summers 177). For a fashion-conscious young woman such as Aurora, a corset “beautifully decorated with ‘flossing’ or ‘fanning’ of shell-pink thread” (Summers 156) against a black background would have been a desirable object. Furthermore, during the time Braddon was writing, corsets were considered important in denoting social class (Summers 7), an undercurrent in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd. A tightly laced corset was “undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject’s vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work” (Petcovici 209).

Similar to the corset, the curb-bit and the bearing rein, “two popular harnessing devices which held the horse’s head tightly erect, compelling the animal into contrived and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone” (Dorré 157) were used extensively by the bourgeoisie. Like the human corset, which was known to cause death, miscarriage, uterine prolapse, punctured lungs, the rupturing of internal organs, and open sores from broken stays, many horsemen and veterinarians reported that “excessive tight-reining of a horse damaged its windpipe and significantly shortened its life, in addition to purportedly causing severe discomfort” (Dorré 162). The dangerous fashions of the day place women and horses as mirrors of one another, especially in the language used to describe horses and women. Braddon describes Aurora as “pleasant a sight as the smooth greensward of the Knavesmire, or the best horse-flesh in the county of York” (202). Earlier, in her encounter with Steeve Hargraves, Aurora‘s “cheeks [are] white with rage, her eyes flashing fury” (193). In 1842 a similar description appears in Penny Magazine: “Her large fiery eye gleamed from the edge of an open forehead, and her exquisite little head was finished with a pouting lip” (“Horses in the East” 448), but this catalogue of features belongs to a “hot-blooded” (448) Arabian filly and not a human woman.

Within the controversies surrounding fashion, the topic of women riding horses was hotly debated. For every article that claimed “it is not becoming in a gentle and modest Englishwoman to be seen careering across country” (“Six”) there is an article declaring that “the English lady in her saddle is a picture of dignity and grace” (“Lady”). This debate, unlike the debates over fashion, explicitly appears in Aurora Floyd through the voice of John Mellish, who tells Aurora, “I think the good old sport of English gentlemen was meant to be shared by their wives” (262) and the opposing side in Talbot Bulstrode who viewed her love of horses with horror at the thought of what such tastes could do to “the heir of all the Raleigh Bulstrodes” (79). While this is the only debate that explicitly occurs in Aurora Floyd, the debates of female and equine fashion, and the alignment of women and horses is eloquently hinted at by Braddon in descriptions of Aurora and notably in the fact that a beautiful, primped, polished, and trained filly bears Aurora’s name.

By Kristy Scherba

In "Aurora Floyd," the London Review, 1863, Aurora Floyd is the giant among bigamy novels, feeding the public a better executed plot than Lady Audley's Secret. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Aurora Floyd is contrived with greater finesse through winding chapters of well woven intrigue. The critic feels Braddon’s talent is wasted, however, on bigamy and a disregard for decency, “piling on the agony,” and implores Braddon to lift her talent to a higher level of meaning in response to her readership. Aurora is viewed as a manly character who hates Conyers, the groom she runs away with, abuses Mellish, the man she marries, and within the year readily forgets the one who loves her, Talbot. The only connection she has with the groom is horses and dogs; she is a “masculine woman with heart but not lovable, and borders on repulsive” (149). Her marriage to Mellish is one of bigamous consolation; she consoles her guilt and repressed anger by bullying him; he loves his beautiful tigress and takes her fiery hostility like a deserving child. Braddon’s work produces sensations of romance with tawdry images that have a negative influence on young female readers and is detrimental to society: “[w]e cannot sympathize with those who select scenes of domestic misery and crime” (149). Although not accused of “willfully corrupting society,” the critic argues what purpose is to be gained by popularizing domestic suffering beginning with the “clandestine marriage of a young lady with her groom...making the heroine marry a rich Yorkshireman while she is still the groom’s wife...[then] the groom being subsequently opportunely shot"(149) while living happily ever after. Instead of filling the public with misdirected passion like the French novelists to whom Braddon subscribes, the critic suggests she trade cheap thrills with shock value for charming references to meaningful and elevated subjects, adding, “no ill nature intended” (149).

The critics' dislike of Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, was a societal pruning of her literary art. In the end, however, excellence in style and commitment to sensational writing won the critics over worldwide. The image of Braddon, jumping through hoops of mockery like a circus performer for profit, was replaced with flowery praise like delicate rose buds in her hands. The fragrance still lingers in those critical words falling like banished rose petals to the floor, swept up flawlessly with her tiny hands, hands capable of handling horses and carrying a whip. Braddon hints of pruning the critics in Aurora Floyd: "It is fortunate for mankind that speaking daggers is often quite as great a satisfaction to us as using them, and we can threaten very cruel things without meaning to carry them out. Like the little children who say, 'Won't I just tell your mother!' and the terrible editors who write, 'Won't I give you a castigation'" (Braddon 349).

In Jeni Curtis' "Pruning the Docile Body in Aurora Floyd," two opposite extremes are manifest as cousins whose social grooming reveal natural and unnatural tendencies of passionate and dispassionate natures:"the bright exotic is trimmed and pruned by the gardener's merciless hand, while Aurora shot whither she would, and there was none to lop the wandering branches of that luxuriant nature" (Braddon 61). As women of Victorian times, Aurora is all that is forbidden; she is running with the servants and horses, hunting, and frolicking in the woods without a chaperone. She is riding with her groom, learning unspeakable things of nature; her black hair uncoils like serpents, signifying sexual urges. "You don't use that animal well, Aurora. A six hours' ride is neither good for her or for you. Your groom should have known better than to allow it" (Braddon 64).

In contrast, Aurora rejects an artificial life of adornment and embraces an unnatural preoccupation with horses, running free like a wild mustang from a world devoid of sensuality and passion; she is disinterested in feminine things. "The diamond bracelet...lay in its nest of satin and velvet...[s]he took the morocco-case in her hand, looked for a few moments at the jewel, and then shut the lid of the little casket with a sharp metallic snap" (Braddon 81). The female watchers act as social police, exposing a blemish in Aurora’s past and dissuade Talbot from marrying her; preserving his dispassionate nature apart from that "rare" and "exotic" delight, he trades fiery passion for domesticity. "[S]o we dismiss Talbot Bulstrode for a while, moderately happy, and yet not quite satisfied," (Braddon 227) Talbot's ideal mate..."was some gentle and feminine creature...some timid soul with downcast eyes...some shrinking being; as pale and prim as the medieval saints..spotless as her own white robes, excelling in all womanly graces and accomplishments, but only exhibiting them in the narrow circle of a home" (Braddon 86). Dispassionate Lucy becomes the perfect wife for Talbot, secure in their domestic platitude of sexual indifference, while radiant and beautiful Aurora rides..."across the moorland on her thorough-bred mare, driving all the parish mad with admiration of her" (Braddon 102).

The year 1855 marked the removal of newspaper stamp taxes. Popular short stories and novels, like Aurora Floyd, became available through six shilling and two-shilling yellowback editions. These periodicals were available in railway waiting rooms, allowing wider access to contemporary literature. This availability opened doors, blurring a purity division between high and low literature (Nemesvari and Surridge 13). George Eliot would, in 1866, pervert this shift toward wider access by labeling Braddon’s work as sensationalized, low “trash” (12). Critics like Eliot attempted to colonize the new, ambiguous space Braddon’s genre occupied by not only dragging her “private life [into] the glare of public scrutiny” (10), but by fallaciously labeling her work as immoral and “unrealistically sordid,” though it drew heavily from true, daily news reports (15).

 Aurora Floyd’s own critics within the novel place her private life under scrutiny and police the spaces she occupies. Mellish Park in particular, Aurora Floyd’s haven, continually gets perverted, disrupted, and reconstructed. When Aurora sneaks out of the home for a meeting with blackmailing James Conyers, deceitful Mrs. Powell tells a servant Aurora is already back in the house, and orders him to “shut all the windows, and close the house for the night” (Braddon 271). Aurora is locked out of the house. The narrator tells us, “This being done, all communication between the house and the garden was securely shut off” (271). Mrs. Powell’s revulsion for Aurora is characterized as a hate which “such slow, sluggish, narrow-minded creatures always hate the frank and generous” (188). The shutting off of communication at Mellish Park smacks of the practices of Braddon’s critics.

Of course, Mrs. Powell is only one of many watchdogs who threaten Aurora’s space within the novel. She is the second oppressor to be exiled by John Mellish, who first offers her the warning, “I require no information respecting my wife’s movements from you, or from any one. Whatever Mrs. Mellish does, she does with my full consent” (335). He also declares to Powell, “I generally prefer the high road” (336) as opposed to low, deceitful communication practices. In volume III, Mellish finally discharges Powell, saying “I preferred telling you the plain truth,” (420) and does not hesitate to pay her stipend dues.

Mellish Park, like a train station, is an important networking space for Aurora. It offers her a sense of shared property ownership and interests with her husband, at a time when conventional marriages were not balanced. John and Aurora’s love is “mutual and reciprocal” (Schroeder and Schroeder 96). Natalie and Ronald Schroeder argue, then, that Braddon endorses unconventional marriages, without repudiating the traditional. Instead, Braddon is suggesting “that conflicting models of marriage do not necessarily exclude one another but can coexist” (104). Braddon saw her work as coexisting alongside conventional Victorian models. She stated in a letter to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in 1863, “I want to serve two masters. I want to be artistic and to please you. I want to be sensational, and to please Mudie’s subscribers” (qtd. in Phegley Educating 110). Rather than choose the conventionally masculine Talbot Bulstrode, Aurora does assert preference for John Mellish, to the point of re-marrying him. This exemplifies Braddon’s endorsement of both a digression from and a return to the “central line”, creating a marriage between two seemingly contradictory states.

John Mellish is the husband who is able to “converse easily with employees, servants, and other commoners on a personal level” (Schroeder and Schroeder 91) and be fully aware of a patriarchal structure which governs Victorian life. The narrator says, “John Mellish was entirely without personal pride; but there was another pride which was wholly inseparable from his education and position, and this was the pride of caste. He was strictly conservative” (Braddon 412) and that "John Mellish submitted himself to the indisputable force of those ceremonial laws which we have made our masters” (414). John Mellish, like the railway, interacts with castes and undulating narratives both high and low. Like Braddon and Aurora, he attempts to negotiate a space in between where plain truth can be experienced, a new central point or “high road” inclusive of diverging loop-lines.