Window shopping : Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd as guidebooks for the mid-victorian middle-class consumer.

Abstract

In her first two major novels, Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Victorian sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon demystifies the taste of the Victorian upper class for her primarily female middle-class readers. In so doing, she provides access to the upper-class lifestyle in such a way that her readers could emulate that taste in their own lives. Braddon examines fashion, interior decorating, leisure activities, reading material, the mystique of land ownership, and the value of appearing to be of established wealth rather than one of the nouveau riche. These two novels serve as guidebooks for the emerging middle-class, status-conscious Victorian consumer seeking to appropriate the upper-class ideal for her own.