Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/404

 . Novel after novel appeared, and in addition to all those which she acknowledged, she published several anonymously, which to this day remain without their author's name. She wrote many plays; contributed to Punch and to The World; produced a serial in French for the Paris Figaro; wrote the greater part of numerous Christmas annuals (notably The Mistletoe Bough); and edited several magazines, of which the best known and most successful were Temple Bar and Belgravia. Prolific vitality was not a rare quality among Victorian novelists, but Miss Braddon's indefatigable zest is unrivalled. Mrs. Charles Gore, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Oliphant, Wilkie Collins, even Trollope himself, grew weary at their desks; but Miss Braddon maintained her freshness to the end, so that The Green Curtain, published in 1911, is rather the book of a practised writer in the prime of life than, perhaps, the eightieth novel of an old lady of seventy-four.

In 1874 Miss Braddon married John Maxwell, who became a busy publisher and the founder of numerous periodicals. She lived a great deal at Annesley Bank, near Lyndhurst, but her permanent home was always at Richmond, Surrey, in a dignified Georgian house surrounded by a lovely garden, where, on 4 February 1915, she died.

Miss Braddon was foolishly and savagely attacked during the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last century as the most dangerous of the ‘sensation novelists’, whose work was liable to corrupt the minds of young people by its violence and by its power to make wickedness alluring. One critic accused her of making probity purposely ridiculous and of recommending murder and bigamy to female enterprise; another declared that her books could only stand on a shelf beside the Newgate Calendar. Such absurdity ignores all but one aspect of her work and deals with that unfairly. The technique of crime, and not its ethic, interested her, so that wrongdoing became ingenious rather than alluring. On the other hand she was too faithful a daughter of her age ever to think of tampering with virtue's ultimate victory and reward. Rather was she liable to strain probability in her desire to prove the sad consequences of ill-doing, so that her plots, by the standards of a more candid, and maybe a more cynical, generation, lack the force that they were meant to have, so turbulent is the villainy but so easily undone the villain.

But it is an injustice to regard Miss Braddon as a mere sensationalist. She was a clever, cultivated woman with wide sympathies and interests. Not only was her response to natural beauty always quick and keen (even in her earliest books she showed great power of description alike of landscape and weather-moods), but to the end she was intensely aware of the world and eager to be part of it. This hunger for actuality gives her best work a quality beyond that of mere sensationalism, and to her joyous acceptance of life in every form must be attributed her popularity, not only among the masses but also among her fellow-writers. That her books should have delighted readers so exigent and so diverse as Bulwer, Reade, Thackeray, Sala, Labouchere, and Robert Louis Stevenson proves them to be instinct with some quality beyond that of mere dramatic ingenuity.

Her principal books are: Lady Audley's Secret (1862), Aurora Floyd (1863), John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), Henry Dunbar (1864), The Doctor's Wife (1864), Birds of Prey (1867), Charlotte's Inheritance (1868), Robert Ainsleigh (1872), Strangers and Pilgrims (1873), Dead Men's Shoes (1876), Joshua Haggard's Daughter (1876), Vixen (1879), Asphodel (1881), Mount Royal (1882), Phantom Fortune (1883), Ishmael (1884), All Along the River (1893), Sons of Fire (1895), London Pride (1896), Rough Justice (1898), The Rose of Life (1905), and The Green Curtain (1911).

Miss Braddon was the mother of two novelists, William Babington Maxwell and Gerald Maxwell; her third son, Edward Maxwell, was a barrister. She also had two daughters. Her portrait by William Powell Frith, R.A., is in Mr. W. B. Maxwell's possession.

 MERRY, WILLIAM WALTER (1835–1918), classical scholar, born at Evesham 6 September 1835, was the only son of Walter Merry, of that town, by his wife, Elizabeth Mary Byrch. He entered Cheltenham College as a day boy in 1846 and was elected to an open scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1852. He obtained a first class in classical moderations (1854) and a second class in literae humaniores (1856). In 1858 he gained the Chancellor's Latin essay prize and in the following year he was elected a fellow of Lincoln College, where he filled the office of classical lecturer until his election to the rectorship twenty-five years later. Merry 378