“This business of poor George's:” Queer Loss and the Marriage Plot in Lady Audley’s Secret

“Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit.”

-Robert Browning, “The Real and True and Sure” (1842)

When Mary Elizabeth Braddon published her Lady Audley’s Secret in May 1862, criticisms abounded of its scandal. Margaret Oliphant, for one, was astounded by its “fleshy and unlovely record” of bigamy, madness, and criminality (qtd. in Çelik 72). Her early reaction forecast the later reception history of the novel. Despite—or perhaps because of—the controversy that erupted from the novel’s vulgarity, Lady Audley’s Secret has become a paradigm text in what Maia McLeavey has famously coined the “Bigamy Plot.” The misdeeds of the novel’s central woman—Lady Audley, Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham—have eclipsed all other conversations to be had about the novel’s strange conventionality. Despite being the object of so much conservative and feminist criticism alike, the novel ends in a lawful, idyllic marriage between Robert Audley and Clara Talboys. Its ghastly and thrilling interior, as many seem to forget, resolves in the domestic sphere. Lady Audley’s Secret concludes with the marriage plot, no doubt. But, more particularly, the novel’s reception highlights that the marriage plot demands more than a conjugal union. A straight and homogenous narrative arc is as much of an expectation for the genre as its straight relationships. What complicates the marriage at the end of Lady Audley’s Secret and what has led so many to neglect its domestic ends is the novel’s extended, suspenseful, and emotional central loss — a loss which is not George Talboys’s sudden realization that Helen has died or Lucy’s atypical grief after attempting to murder her husband. No, the central loss of Lady Audley’s Secret rejects the notion that grief in fiction must either be tied to widowed or orphaned characters. The central loss is between two grown, unmarried, and unrelated men. Much of the novel’s first, second, and third volumes narrate Robert’s passionate and desperate longing for George. 

Braddon exposed a dynamic which drives forward the marriage plot: the queer drives characters must shed to conform to Victorian narratives of the good, domestic life. Though this trope exists in most marriage plots produced during Victoria’s reign, the centrality of queer loss in Lady Audley’s Secret is what makes the novel so subversive to contemporary and historical readers alike. Insofar as it is a “Bigamy Plot,” itself a term predicated on centering straight union as much as the “marriage plot,” the striking bigamy and illegality of Lady Audley’s Secret only drive George and Robert closer together. The novel’s most frightening episode, George’s sudden and unexplained disappearance, is what brings forth Robert’s longing. This essay re-centers this grief to argue that Lady Audley’s Secret ultimately conforms to the marriage plot, after a long series of deviations from it. Implicit in the marriage plot is the assumption that the novel ultimately affirms a heterosexual, domestic agenda, which I affirm. However, by resituating the novel as a marriage plot, it is revealed that the utopian ideal of domestic bliss is contingent on a cycle of self-denial, grief, and loss. While critics of the marriage plot have long argued that it ignores these myriad complications of domestic life, I argue that adopting a more capacious range of the marriage plot, including Lady Audley’s Secret, foregrounds these losses. To treat Braddon’s sensation novel as a bigamy plot and a marriage plot, then, emphasizes the tremendous grief that facilitates the novel’s promises of domestic bliss. 

The restorative potential of foregrounding queer loss in the marriage plot was introduced first by Kaelin Alexander in his Turning the Grave: Ambivalence, Queer Loss and the Victorian Novel (2014). Importantly, he theorizes that the marriage plot only ever succeeds “alongside the production of a corollary set of ‘queer losses’” (Alexander 7). These losses, Alexander explains, affect characters whose grief, in some way or another, falls outside of the expectations of the marriage plot (Alexander 16). “Queer losers,” to Alexander, can be widows/widowers, orphans,  and the otherwise heartbroken; however, these losers do not necessarily have to be sexually queer (Alexander 16). They must merely demonstrate that emotions which live in the absence of the joy that the marriage plot demands. The crux of what makes a queer loss is that it highlights just how contingent the marriage plot and its propriety—insistent chastity, courtship, and heterosexual desire—is upon the sentimental and raw loss of queer forms of kinship (Alexander 8). Robert Audley and George Talboys are, then, “queer losers” because both of their narrative lives are marked by grief, heartbreak, and loss for which marriage is not a clear salve.

While Robert’s grief is the topic of far more critical conversations, George is an even more explicit mourner, especially by Victorian standards. His year-long bereavement of his wife Helen Talboys is both prolonged and shortened by Braddon; it is revealed that she has “died” when George was on a maritime (mis)adventure to Australia. However, his search for Mrs. Talboys is deflated and shrunk in narrative time, with the desperate ordeal being portrayed in two brief chapters. After George asks the woman-of-the-house about the circumstances of his beloved’s death, she is able to quickly and astonishingly both produce a lock of her hair and to guide him to her headstone (Braddon 81). Following an immediate visit to her parents’ house, Braddon cuts to the end of the first year of George’s widowhood:

The first year of George Talboy’s widowhood had passed away; the deep band of crepe about his hat grew brown and rusty, and as the last burning day of another August faded out, he sat smoking cigars in the quiet chambers in Fig Tree Court, much as he had done the year before, when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seemed saturated with his one great sorrow.

But the big ex-dragoon had survived his affliction by a twelve-month, and hard as it may be to have to tell it, he did not look much worse for it (Braddon 87; emphasis mine).

This first heartbreak (of a seemingly endless series of heartbreaks) is surprisingly downplayed. George is described as wearing a simple hat with a “deep band of brown and rusty crepe.” This description of George is particularly perplexing because he, despite his world being melodramatically “saturated with one great sorrow,” does “not look much worse for it.” The novel cuts to this moment from a scene of devastation, of George beseeching Helen’s father, who is similarly described as “having a crape round [his] shabby hat,” to remember him (Braddon 82). Though Helen had died for her father at a similar interval as for George in the following chapter, he is described far more somberly, with “faded hair” and a “somber look” (Braddon 82). George’s reaction, as highlighted by the crepes on both of their hats, is described triumphantly and kindly. His hat itself is not shabby, but the crepe is. The internal structure is untouched, but the covering is tattered. The fact that he continues to wear a crepe, much less a tattered one, as an upper-class man, at the “twelve-month” is itself outside of the norms of Victorian mourning, as widowers were expected to grieve for a mere three-to-six months. However, their wives were expected to grieve for up to two years (Bedikan 39).  The extension of this period of what Alexander terms “compulsory mourning” met with Robert’s perception of George’s heroic “survival,” initially complicates how the novel consciously structures itself around these standards of marital loss. 

George’s loss is, then, queered by its material conformity and temporal dissonance to the expectations of a widower. The extension and condensation of the novel’s germinal heterosexual loss initially complicates its conformity to what Alexander terms “compulsory mourning” itself: 

a series of norms prescribing who was to mourn for whom, in what fashion, and for how long… Compulsory mourning valorized the married, monogamous, heterosexual couple form as the supreme social bond and, in so doing, acted as an affective extension for the development of Victorian ideals of domesticity. (Alexander 8).

If the “series of norms” which George’s grief breaks and flaunts is responsible for the “[valorization of] the married, monogamous, and heterosexual couple,” then that very grief’s queerness subverts the novel’s initial logics of marriage, particularly to its High Victorian audience—all of whom, as Alexander highlights, were acutely aware of these logics. The protraction of mourning for a man raised the same anxieties as its contraction for a woman. As widows were expected to partake in an amplified performance of their domesticity and docility, widowers were compelled to re-enter the workforce, provide for their families, and remarry. George’s subversion of these expectations of heterosexual mourning, then, begins to complicate the gendered assumptions that underpin Victorian mourning practice. He does not re-embark to sea immediately following his wife’s death. He does not remarry. He stays with his unmarried bachelor friend for the remainder of his mourning period. Men who did not mourn “properly” were often ostracized and dandified, as highlighted by James Eli Adams in his Dandies and Desert Saints (1995), with long and intense grief “overthrowing masculine expectations” and shattering “respect of their masculine self-discipline” (Adams 46, 50).  

It is George’s queer mourning that allows room for the depth of his relationship with Robert in subsequent chapters. While the two had indeed met each other as boys at Eton, Braddon hints that their bond was casual or somewhat distant; though excited by reuniting with him, Robert seems unaware of many of George’s Australian plans, asking him to “tell us all about” a strikingly unspecific “it” (Braddon 74). His use of the plural “us” rather than the singular me denotes a lack of intimacy, as if he expects Robert to tell him no more than he might be comfortable telling the acquaintances/strangers around them. However, this small talk is interrupted when George receives the horrible news that his wife has died in the paper (Braddon 76). While Robert’s presence is un(der)stated in the scenes when George is actively investigating Helen’s death, he regains his narrative presence as George begins to actively wallow. Following the first “brief violence [of his grief],” his mourning assumed a “quiet form” that “left him as submissive as a child to the will of his friend; ready to go anywhere or do anything; never enjoying himself, or originating any enjoyment, but joining in the pleasures of others with a hopeless, uncomplaining, unobtrusive resignation peculiar to his simple nature” (Braddon 88; emphasis mine). It is the loss of George’s wife that leaves him bound to “the will of his friend” and that makes his character subject to Robert’s “pleasures.” It is hard to miss the irony of George’s deep dependence on Robert when he is introduced as an adventurous sailor “pouring to his friend’s ear all those wild hopes and dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine nature” (Braddon 75). His grief feminizes him to the unmarried Robert. The loss of George’s wife is so important because it robs him of those very hopes; it makes him “submissive” only to the temperament and “enjoyment” of Robert, who is masculinized by his later heroism. The emptiness left by Helen’s “death,” thus, clears the narrative and emotional space for his emerging homosocial bond with Robert to fill. It leaves him with a sense of protectiveness and responsibility for a man who is socially his equal. In so doing, Helen’s straight death and George’s queer grief enhance his status as a dependent man—and by putting him under Robert’s care, the mourning period raises his friend’s independence and selfhood. Robert is forced to raise pleasures for his now abject friend to partake in, precisely because he cares for him.

The queer attachment Robert develops for George is rendered extraordinarily clear by his passionate yet measured response to his surprise departure. Though Robert enters the narrative as a mere “barrister,” without any emotional or interiorizing description, he is finally revealed to care deeply about George: 

If anyone had ventured to tell Mr. Robert Audley that he could possibly feel a strong attachment to any creature breathing, that cynical gentleman would have elevated his eyebrows in extreme contempt at the preposterous notion. Yet here he was, flurried and anxious, bewildering his brain by all manner of conjectures about his missing friend, and, false to every attribute of his nature, walking fast (Braddon 117).

The narrative’s self-reflexive acknowledgment that Robert is presented as a “cynical gentleman” emphasizes the profundity of George’s impact on him. He had disrupted our initial impression of Robert as a “lazy, care-for-nothing fellow” by leading him to begin “walking fast” (Braddon 71). Despite being described earlier as “easygoing,” he is now “anxious and bewildered.” The long string of tense adjectives and verbs—“bewildering,” “elevated,” “fast”—all build a sense that this Robert Audley is more than a mere idle barrister. His early characterization’s opposition to his fierce protectiveness of George reveals that caring for his friend changed some part of Robert Audley: it led him to take on a more assertive, active personality. If the prolongation and idleness of George’s grief feminized him, the rapidity and order of Robert’s masculinizes him. The propulsion of the dandy out of idleness, as Adams points out, is a common trope in the novel and denotes a certain growth in “ideal manhood” (Adams 53). Moreover, this “displacement of an aristocratic (or dandiacal) idleness by a distinctively bourgeois heroism” is often tied to a romantic loss (Adams 55). The shift in Robert Audley characters, then, denotes that George’s absence in the narrative is a queer loss, one that leaves him searching both his friend and any other form of fulfillment.

To that end, on his quest, Robert meets George’s near-identical sister Clara, and we see another subversion of his masculine, self-disciplined character. Despite decidedly “much rather not” wanting to fall in love with or wed a woman, upon meeting Clara his first remarks is that she is “very handsome,” he goes on, “She had brown eyes, like George’s, a pale complexion… regular features, and a mobility of expression which bore record in every change in feeling” (Braddon 230, 219; emphasis mine). The only particular feature that Robert observes in her appearance, her eyes, tied to her “handsomeness,” is her resemblance to her brother. Intriguingly, earlier in the novel, George’s eyes are directly described as “handsome brown eyes, with a feminine smile in them” (Braddon 54; emphasis mine). The parallelism between the description of their features throughout the novel emphasizes the fact that all of Clara’s other qualities, such as her pale skin, exist without qualifiers. They are unspecific and unremarkable at this moment of attraction. While he does expand on her “mobility of expression,” her ability to portray her emotions is also later tied to George. Robert remarks that her “beauty is elevated to sublimity” only once she calls out, “Lead me to the murderer of my brother, and let me be the hand to avenge his untimely death!” (Braddon 222). The “mobility of her expression” contributes to her beauty precisely because it reflects her love for George. It contorts and shifts and reveals her wrought emotions surrounding a loss that is profoundly sympathetic to Robert. He, too, feels that violent passion to avenge George.

However, the parallelism of Robert’s grief and Clara’s does not advance their bond itself, nor does it advance their bond to George. Rather, it reveals that the nature of Robert’s attraction to Clara itself is queer. In her “Educating Boys to be Queer” (2002), Jennifer S. Kushiner reads this attraction to Clara’s love of George as being advanced “by her already having been chosen as another man's beloved, even her own brother” (Kushiner 68). Indeed, the Victorian novel often places widows and other women grievers as fetish objects. Take the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), Dorothea Brooke, whose beauty is only elevated by her mourning dress. As Mrs. Caldwalder famously remarks, “She looks handsomer than ever in her mourning” (Eliot 505). While Dorothea is a widow and Clara a grieving sister, they both are immediately described by their looks and those looks, in both cases, are amplified by their mourning for a man. Alexander theorizes that the fetishization of widows, like Dorothea, is not due to an attraction to their loss itself, but to the notion that they are an intermediary to male homosocial/sexual bonds (Alexander 24). However, I argue that this framework can still apply to Clara Talboys, who herself experienced a marriage-like dependency on her brother, telling Robert, “My mother died when I was very young. My father has always been to me what you saw him to-day. All the love that my heart can hold has been centered upon him” (Braddon 222). As observed by Aycan Göyęk in their “Social Position of Victorian Women” (2021), “An unmarried woman was traditionally dependent on her father and brother” (Göyęk 146). Clara Talboys’s relationship to her “dead” brother, thus, attaches to her many of the same connotations of widowhood as faced by Dorothea Brooke—namely, of desirability and eventual marriageability. She has been more than “chosen as [George’s] beloved,” she has been covered by him.  If we can read Clara as being similar to a Dorothea, the framework of widowhood and coverture, then that opens up the possibility that Robert is attracted to her grief itself. While she is not described in the drab widow’s weeds worn by Dorothea, her cloaking of grief is an affectual one. That is to say, what attracts Robert to her in these nascent moments of their relationship is the degree of her passion for George. Taking up Alexander’s notion that the attraction to a widow is to her lost husband (or, in this case, brother), to desire Clara, the quasi-widow, for Robert, is to also desire her past.

And Robert’s grief for his friend is never truly resolved by his love for his sister. Even after meeting Clara and beginning the process of a quasi-courtship, he continues to experience hot lashes of grief for George; he continues to question where he is, and when he learns that Lucy was behind his killing/disappearance, he continues to express his lack of desire for women: 

I do not say that Robert Audley was a coward, but I will admit that shiver of horror, something akin to fear, chilled him to the heart, as he remembered the horrible things that had been done by women, since that day upon which Eve was created to be Adam’s companion and help-meet in the garden of Eden. What if this woman’s hellish power of dissimulation should be stronger than the truth, and crush him? She had not spared George Talboys when he had stood in her way, and menaced her with a certain peril; would she spare him who threatened her with far greater danger? Are women merciful, or loving, or kind in proportion to their grace? (Braddon 289)

Robert Audley’s “horror” is a consequence of his knowledge not of “the horrible things that had been done” merely by Lady Audley, but by all women since the day when “Eve was created to be Adam’s companion.”  Though the immediacy of Robert’s fear is blunted by Braddon’s use of the third-person-omniscient narrator, it becomes more tangible through the use of free-indirect discourse at the end of the passage. And the questions Robert begs through the narrator, as they so often do in Braddon’s fiction, go from the particular—questioning the extent of Lady Audley’s known “hellish power dissimulation” and later whether the mercy of all “women” is “in proportion to their grace.” Not only do the rapidity and irrationality of these questions portray Robert’s fear at the notion of a duel with the “dangerous” woman, but they also signify how central George has become to his worldview. Though Robert goes on misogynistic tirades earlier in the novel—immediately following his first meeting with Clara—they are not mediated by her presence in the narrative. If anything, as time goes on and George continues to be missing, his disdain for women seems to fester. Lady Audley can only sour his view of women precisely because she has hurt a man he loves. This turn away from women, particularly one as beautiful and “graceful” as Lady Audley appears in the novel’s first volumes, itself represents how the loss of George queers the figure of Robert Audley. As he becomes more virile, more protective, and more masculine, he finds himself increasingly repelled by women as a category and can only see their good or their evil through their relationship to George. 

Robert’s eventual proposal to Clara also confirms that he sees marrying George’s sister as mere proxy for his queer loss. He importantly proposes to her only after he learns that Lady Audley’s attempt to murder “poor George” was unsuccessful. And he does not just propose a marriage. As he goes down on one knee, Robert Audley asks: “Clara, Clara… Shall I go to Australia to look for your brother?” When Clara remains silent, he ups the ante, “Shall we both go dearest? Shall we go as man and wife? Shall we go together, my dear love, and bring our brother back between us?” (Braddon 441; emphasis mine). Robert’s proposal—to go to Australia to find Clara’s brother—is certainly a conflicted one. It comes only after Clara, quite understandably, remains hesitant/silent at her courtier’s suggestion to leave her English life behind to search for George. Even when he begins the second line of questioning, the marriage proposal is couched between two other requests to “bring our brother back between us.” There are three more questions about George in this proposal to his sister than there are about her. This strange, loveless formulation leads Clara to remain silent. Richard Nemesvari highlights that rather than Braddon showing Clara’s consent to this strange act, “there is a break in the text, followed by an interview between Robert and Mr. Talboys which concludes with this statement by George's father: 'You are going to look for my son . . . Bring me back my boy, and I will freely forgive you for having robbed me of my daughter'” (Braddon 442 qtd. in Nemesvari 526). Clara, indeed, is made immaterial in this proposal. She is a means to the end of “looking for [her] brother.” The success of his proposal, even if merely approved by Clara’s father, would have been a legible form of closure for the Victorians, for whom marriage was, more often than not, a utopian ends of the novel. However, unlike most Victorian men, Robert Audley’s relationship to marriage is profoundly ambivalent. Braddon’s cut to the elder Mr. Talboys approval of the union emphasizes how little joy and conviviality bring to the novel’s central man.

The dispassion of this scene is contrasted by the only moment in the novel when Robert truly is overcome by joy. In the novel’s final chapter, George returns and Robert Audley “[utters] a great cry of delight and surprise, and [opens] his arms to his lost friend” (Braddon 443). While Richard Nemesvari points to the novel’s conclusion—the two men reunited and Robert getting to live his life in the idealized domestic sphere—as a comedic, “best of both worlds” scenario, it can also be read as profoundly tragic (Nemesvari 526). Robert’s quest for George does not receive a satisfying conclusion: he, who explicitly never desired a marriage, sees an ending in a heterosexual union with a woman who can only be described lovingly through her similarities to George. To be stuck in a marriage that he entered as a means to reconnect with his old friends demonstrates just how Robert Audley is a “queer loser” by Alexander’s definition. He is a man for whom “the marriage plot’s promise of domestic bliss” is a stand-in for some deeper longing. As this essay has explained, he is introduced as a remarkably idle character with no clear drives: he never “wished to have a brief” nor to return the affections of any woman (Braddon 71-72). But his friendship with Robert gives him something to long for and treasure; it gives the novel its marriage plot. Though he is introduced as a bachelor who never wants to marry, his queer loss of George teaches him to see the good in another person; he searches not only for George, but for an embodiment of all he loves in his dearest friend. Learning to love queerly, then, allows Robert Audley to finally conform to the myriad expectations of a man of his social class; it lands him, ironically, in a marriage. 

The novel’s conclusion in the domestic sphere, thus, is contingent on a series of such queer losses. Not only does he see George in Clara, but his proposal to her is a result of his absence in the first place. And the fact that Robert knew and cared that George was missing was a result of his returning to England and receiving the news of his wife’s “death.” The fact that Robert Audley has a plot at all, therefore, is quite astounding. His propulsion from a lame bachelor to a married man is so obscured by the drama that draws Oliphant (and so many others to engage) with Braddon’s sensation fiction at all that it is easy to lose sight of the novel’s conformity to these larger Victorian forms and conservative norms. Focusing on Lady Audley’s Secret marriage plot and how its central marriage is “a fetish object around which life narratives and cultural values are oriented,” then allows us to question how the characters who constitute its triangular marriage plot—George, Robert, and Clara—struggle to conform to this Victorian, domestic notion of the “good life” and the “happy ending” (Alexander 16). And it indeed “makes palpable” the costs of the Victorian and modern fiction that a blissful marriage is the ideal resolution to an otherwise grievous life (Alexander 16). Focusing on the novel’s queer losers provides us an opportunity to see a progressivism that extends beyond its sympathies for divorced women. Though Lady Audley demonstrates the horrors of an unsuccessful marriage, Braddon’s abject subjects vivify the muted sacrifices that make married life possible.