Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Factory Girl (1863)

(Hardback)

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Description

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura's tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora's beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

Author Bio

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) was a British novelist best known for Lady Audley's Secret. Bridget M. Marshall is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature, also published by the University of Wales Press.