Mary Elizabeth Braddon : The Factory Girl (1863)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura’s tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora’s beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

A new edition of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl that includes an introduction that places the novel in its historical and literary contexts, including its connections with Gothic and sensation fiction traditions.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl first appeared in serial installments in London’s Halfpenny Journal from January to October 1863. Published anonymously, the novel is an exciting romp through the various tropes of both Gothic and sensation fiction, including poisoning, dueling, kidnapping, secret identities, cross-class love affairs, gambling addictions, and mock marriages. It is one of many nineteenth-century texts that portrayed the “factory girl” as an innocent young woman who was threatened by economic precarity, lecherous suitors, and even her own family. With numerous twists and a large cast of villains, the novel offers a critique of gender and class structures that left women in precarious positions. Sometimes called a “penny blood,” this kind of cheap novel was likely read by factory girls themselves, and this edition, complete with original illustrations, shows why Braddon became the “queen of the circulating library.”