The Doctor's Wife

With The Doctor's Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote Flaubert's Madame Bovary, exploring the heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. A woman with a secret, adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. The novel is also self-consciously literary, however, and Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre. This volume, which reproduces uncut the first three-volume edition of 1864, is the only edition of the novel available today.

Lyn Pykett is Professor and Head of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.