Foreshadowing and Suspense

While reading through the first thirteen chapters of Lady Audley’s Secret, I noticed in particular the use of foreshadowing to create suspense. The title of the work sets the reader up for some kind of mystery; we know from the outset that we will read about Lady Audley and that she has a secret. Indeed, the reader meets the kind, bubbly, curly blonde Lucy Graham--and her mysterious black ribbon. At the conclusion of the first chapter, Lucy has just accepted Baronet Audley’s marriage proposal (in a very strange manner) and stares out the window with a forlorn expression, murmuring how “every trace of the old life melted away -- every clue to identity buried and forgotten -- except these, except these” while holding her necklace (Braddon 17). So here is her secret! Lady Audley has a past and one cannot help but conjecture that this past will catch up with her in an unfortunate way. 

Unlike Great Expectations that frequently leaves the reader at an intense moment of action--Pip running home, Estella kissing Pip--to create suspense, Braddon uses foreshadowing and direct addresses to the reader to create suspense. After we learn that Lady Audley’s secret is connected to the necklace, the next few chapters set up the connections that the reader begins to forge: we meet George Talboys on the boat from Australia and learn of his wife and son, we meet the young Robert Audley and learn of his friendship with Talboys, we learn of the supposed death of Helen Talboys just a week before, and so on. The next important clue in connecting these events comes with direct foreshadowing in Chapter 7; the first-person narrator (yet unnamed) muses to the reader that “if any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin’s brief letter would one day come to be a link in the one only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual” (55). The connections the reader has begun to make in his or her mind are solidified: Lady Audley (whom we begin to guess is Helen Talboys) does not want Robert Audley and George Talboys to visit Audley Court, but somehow they will and a crime will occur. 

With this foreshadowing, Braddon uses missed connections to create even more suspense. When Robert and George finally make it to Essex, clueless George and mischievous Lady Audley manage to miss each other an uncommon amount of times (similar to Pip almost getting caught after bringing food to the convict in Great Expectations). The reader at this point knows something foul is bound to happen (based upon the direct foreshadowing of chapter 7) but are pulled to keep reading to find out just what and when it will happen.

Indeed, something foul does happen and Lady Audley is involved; the particulars are not yet revealed, but Robert Audley's slow collection of clues and the narrator's analysis draw us in as readers curious to be a part of the murder mystery.