Tuesday, February 12, 2013  Lady Audley's Secret, like some
demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like
members had a fancy for standing on their heads  I do not have
an argument but rather a suspicion.  Lady Audley’s Secret was
serialized (in several magazines, oddly), and although the plot
is slick enough that I am sure Braddon planned it out ahead of
time I am convinced that she ran into a problem with length. 
Since the plot frame had already been built, so to speak, she
had to pad the book with digressions and strangely detailed
descriptive passages that become more frequent in the last third
or so.  Near the beginning, the narrator’s intrusions look like
this:  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 that terrible chain of
evidence afterward to be slowly forged in the only criminal case
in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. Robert Audley
would have lifted his eyebrows