Reading too much into things..?

The ending of Lady Audley's Secret gives us a lot to consider. We can speculate, as we did on Tuesday in Madison that Lady Audley isn't actually dead and is in fact pretending in order to get out of a messy situation and work her way into a better one.

For that to be true though, I feel like it would depend on her kind of 'mad'. Is she simply upset about being abandoned, does she have postpartum depression, or is she actually a lunatic? If she is simply angry, I don't see her disappearing again, more likely her story has actually ended. If she s slightly unstable and upset about her circumstances, maybe she really did waste away—maybe she really was just tired, being a loon can really take a lot of a person. And can probably be linked to physical health factors that can lead or contribute to death. But if she is a full blown lunatic, a sociopath, then she very likely could have faked her death. She could very well be lurking around the corner of the story, waiting for everyone to be so distracted that we/they don't see her slip out and into a new story, full of new characters to terrorize. Or to live a new life, less complicated.

However, all of this speculation seems like just good fun, or silly on our part, like we are unhappy with the ending and thus we need to make up something more exciting. I personally like the ending of Lady Audley's Secret, even if it is a bit of a cop out...

"I hope that no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace" (Braddon 446).

Maybe, as suggested in Madison, peace is being used as a trick term and doesn't actually mean peace and is really alluding to something else. But maybe Braddon just wanted a happy ending and did the most convenient thing; killed off Lady Audley. It would not be the first nor would it be the last time a writer has done so. I guess it seems to me that after all the trauma, the characters deserve a happy ending, or maybe Braddon is just a sucker for happy endings too. Either way, I am in favor of taking the ending of Lady Audley's Secret at face value and accepting that she is probably not actually still alive and that everything has worked out in favor of happiness.