At the end of the cattle-lined avenue that led to Audley Court, according to the narrator of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, stood “an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand – and which jumped straight from one hour to the next – and was therefore always in extremes” (43). Standing as it did at the entrance to a house that had been continuously constructed from medieval times to the present, the clock serves as a physical symbol of the visitor’s entrance into an alternate, if indeterminate, temporal zone. Both the tower and the clock are marked indiscriminately as “old,” setting the stage for the imprecise temporality of the novel. In effect, the references to the one-handed clock that permeate the novel call constant attention to the disjunction between the modern and medieval structures within the Victorian world.

Lady Audley’s Secret is an early example of the “sensation novel,” a genre that flourished in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Defined by their attempts to produce a corporeal response of shock and horror in their readers, these novels grew out of the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century. Competing discourses of gender traditionally play a central role in critics’ interpretations of the sensation novel. As Elaine Showalter has observed, sensation novels derive a portion of their horror from the destabilization of gender expectations within the framework of the novel. Showalter argues that Lady Audley’s Secret “presents us with a carefully controlled female fantasy” that is “not only a virtual manifesto of female sensationalism, but also a witty inversion of Victorian sentimental and domestic conventions.”