[Gutenberg 35485] • The Doctor's Wife: A Novel

When *The Doctor's Wife* was first published in 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was well known for her scandalous bestseller, *Lady Audley's Secret*. Adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements that combine to make *The Doctor's Wife* a classic women's 'sensation' novel. Yet it is also Braddon's most self-consciously literary work and her rewriting of *Madame Bovary*. Like Emma Bovary, Braddon's heroine, Isabel Gilbert, is trapped in a marriage to a man incapable of understanding her imaginative life. But Braddon's novel differs vastly from Flaubert's in the nature and consequences of Isabel's 'affair'.