Mary Elizabeth Braddon - One Thing Needful

London, John and Robert Maxwell, 1886. First edition. Leather. A first edition of this extremely scarce Victorian novel. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (4 October 1835 – 4 February 1915) was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret. During the four years following Lady Audley's Secret Braddon defied her critics by publishing eight novels, often writing several novels for serialization at once; as she remarked to Bulwer-Lytton, "I have never written a line that has not been written against time" (Wolff, Sensational Victorian, 134). Although accused of beginning "the reign of bigamy as an interesting and fashionable crime" and inventing "the fair haired demon of modern fiction" (Oliphant, "Novels", 263), after Aurora Floyd she turned to more decorous drawing-room fiction. Eleanor's Victory (1863), The Doctor's Wife (1864), and The Lady's Mile (1866) were gentler "society" novels. In 1866 Maxwell founded the Belgravia Magazine, a fiction journal which would be edited by Braddon for ten years and carried serials of many of her novels. Later that year her third child died, but she continued to write through a period of depression, publishing her twentieth novel by 1868. (DNB) Complete in three volumes. Rebacked in cloth with the original boards and backstrip. Externally sound, though with some wear to the original leather. Three hinges strained, with one hinge tender and held by the cords only. Internally, binding tender. Pages are bright, though with some scattered spotting to the endpapers. Good Only . Ill.: None. Good Only .

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