M. E. Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was an English novelist who supported her mother by acting in provincial theaters under a stage name before Lady Audley's Secret (1862) made her, overnight, one of the most popular writers in Britain and a founder of the sensation novel, with its bigamists, poisoners and secrets in respectable houses. She lived for years with her publisher John Maxwell, whose wife was in an asylum, raising his children and bearing six more, and married him when he was free. She wrote more than eighty novels, including Aurora Floyd, edited the magazine Belgravia and was admired by Thackeray, Stevenson and Henry James.