Rough Justice (1898), by M. E. Braddon (novel) Mary Elizabeth Braddon

This early work by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was originally published in 1898 and we are now republishing it with a brand new biography of the author. ‘Rough Justice’ is one of Braddon’s novels in the sensation literature genre. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is her first novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times. Braddon also founded Belgravia Magazine (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science. She also edited Temple Bar Magazine. Braddon’s legacy is tied to the Sensation Fiction of the 1860s.Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), was first published serially in Robin Goodfellow and The Sixpenny Magazine. One of the earliest sensationalist novels, it sold nearly one million copies during Braddon’s lifetime. Its plot involves bigamy, the protagonist’s desertion of her child, her murder of her first husband, and her thoughts of poisoning her second husband. The novel shocked and outraged her contemporary, Margaret Oliphant, who said Braddon had invented “the fair-haired demon of modern fiction.” Throughout her long literary career, during which she wrote more than 80 novels and edited several magazines, Braddon was often excoriated for her penchant for sensationalizing violence, crime, and sexual indiscretion. Nevertheless, Braddon had many well-known devotees, among them William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Braddon died in 1915.