Phantom Fortune
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The plot of the book contrasts with the life of two ladies Hazelden, named Maria and Lesbia. Lady Mary Hazelden is much more meek and stereotypically feminine than other heroes of sensational novels such as Alicia Audley, Marian Halcomb and Magdalen Vanstone. She falls in love with a poor man named Mr. Hammond and is trying to learn how to work to compensate for her lower social status after she marries him. Her grandmother seems not to mind if she gets married because she has freckles and tanned skin, because the Victorian ideal of beauty probably resembles a vampire.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London in 1837 into the unhappy family of a Cornish solicitor who left when she was five. Her brother Edward left for Tasmania five years later, eventually becoming its prime minister in 1894. Mary helped support herself and her mother by working as an actress and writing fiction. Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was her fourth published novel and first success. It was widely reviled by critics as 'sensation fiction' but made her rich. Seventy more novels followed, many in a similarly racy vein, and remarkable for their inventiveness and readability. She died in 1915.
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