Wild tale of Victorian villainy

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THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT

By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

REVIEWED BY CYNTHIA GRENIER

Across the top of the jacket of my new Modern Library edition of "The Trail of the Serpent"

runs an intriguing phrase: "Back in Print after Nearly a Century." Indeed, it was in 1860 that Mary Elizabeth Braddon saw the publication of her first novel in serial form, under the title "Three Times Dead."

No one, it seems, wanted to read it. But not long afterwards she met John Maxwell, a London publisher, soon to become her lover and eventually her husband. He saw the potential in the story, and under his guiding hand she diligently rewrote it as "The Trail of the Serpent." Within the first week of its re-publication it had sold 1,000 copies, provoking George Eliot to complain that it was populist trash and was outselling her own novels (which were anything but trash).

Two years later Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret" was gobbled up by readers, running to nine editions within three months of its publication. It established her as one of the most popular novelists of the period. Possessed of the prodigious energy that seemed to drive so many women writers of the day, Braddon, while writing "Lady Audley's Secret," also produced another serial, "The Black Band," under the pen name of Lady Caroline Lascelles; gave birth to her first son; and started "Aurora Floyd," which became an immediate bestseller.