Hitherto, wickedness had been ugly. She endued it with grace and beauty. She invented a mystery of crime surrounded by everyday circumstances, yet avoiding the "detective novel" mechanism. A new story, 'Aurora Floyd,' repeated the immense success of 'Lady Audley.' Novel after novel followed, full of momentous incidents, of surprises leading to new surprises. All the time Miss Braddon was observing much, correcting much in her methods and ideas. She studied manners closely; drew ingenious inferences; suggested dramatic and startling conclusions. She has, too, introduced into modern fiction the beguiling female fiend, who, like the Italian duchess of the Middle Ages, betrays with a smile, and with one arm about her lover beckons to the hired bravo to do his bloody work. Her plots, though sometimes forced, are ingenious and exciting. The movement of her stories is swift, and the scenes and personages contribute to the appointed end. As the author has grown in literary stature, a finer and often admirable effort is made to analyze or to develop character, as an element subservient to the exigencies of the stirring catastrophe.
Her style and treatment have matured with practice and with years, and her later novels display artistic form and finish. Her 'Mohawks' is in many respects a superb study of fashionable life, with several historical portraits introduced, of London in the time of Pope, St. John, Walpole, and Chesterfield--a tableau of great movement and accuracy of composition. In thirty-five years she has written more than sixty stories, the best of them being perhaps this fine semi-historical melodrama. Several of her earlier fictions have been successfully dramatized. An exquisite little tale for Christmas-tide, 'The Christmas Hirelings,' is an evidence of her lightness of touch and refinement of conception in a trifle. In 1874 Miss Braddon married John Maxwell, a well-known London publisher.
THE ADVENT OF THE 'HIRELINGS'
From 'The Christmas Hirelings': copyrighted by Harper and Brothers
Everything had been made ready for the little strangers. There were fires blazing in two large bedrooms overhead--rooms with a door of communication. In one there were still the two little white beds in which Lilian and Sibyl had slept when they were children; poor Lilian, whose bed was in the English cemetery at Florence, under a white marble monument erected by her sorrowing husband, and whose sorrowing husband had taken to himself a second wife five years ago. Every one knew where Lilian was lying, but no one at Penlyon Castle knew where Sibyl's head had found rest. All that people knew about the disobedient daughter was that her husband had died within three or four years of her marriage, worn to death in some foreign mission. Of his luckless widow no one at Penlyon had heard anything, but it was surmised that her father made her an allowance. He could hardly let his only daughter starve, people said, however badly she might have treated him. Lady Lurgrave's early death had been a crushing blow to his love and to his pride. She had died childless.
Sir John had heard the carriage stop, and the opening of the hall door; and although he pretended to go on reading his paper by the lamp placed close at his elbow, the pretense was a poor one, and anybody might have seen that he was listening with all his might.
The footman had opened the hall door as the wheels drew near; it was wide open when the carriage stopped. The red light from the hall fire streamed out upon the evening gray, and three little silvery voices were heard exclaiming:--
"Oh, what a pretty house!"