“Let me be the physician to strike to the root of your malady”: Negotiating Female Medical Agency in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
Anna-Maria Grill
Abstract
While mental aberration and the figure of the madwoman have received ample attention in academic investigations of Victorian literature, links between madness, the space of the asylum, and aspects of female medical agency have so far been largely neglected. This study will home in on this gap in criticism by examining the connections between the discourses, practices, and spaces associated with madness and its diagnosis in Braddon’s novel. Its enigmatic anti-heroine has in the past often been linked with academic discussions of madness, resulting in an extensive corpus of pre-existing research. This study, however, inverts the usual canonical readings of Lucy Audley, reading her not as a patient but rather as a figure who herself temporarily gains and wields medical agency. For this purpose, this study proposes that Braddon posits the novel’s main setting, Audley Court, as an extended metaphor for the Victorian asylum, which then serves as the chief locus for a power struggle for and (re)negotiation of (female) medical agency. Thus, Braddon suggests both Audley Court and her novel’s titular figure as important sites of cultural contestation, in which the contemporary concerns about, respectively, the asylum and medical women enter a highly productive dialogue.
Keywords
sensation fiction; madness; female medical agency; asylum; asylum propaganda; diagnosis; the medical woman controversy
Date of Acceptance: 1 July 2026
Date of Publication: 3 July 2026
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Grill, Anna-Maria. 2026. “‘Let me be the physician to strike to the root of your malady’: Negotiating Female Medical Agency in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 8.1 (Spring): 64-78. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/BPAE6865
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