At the time of its publication in 1879, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's hugely popular Vixen quite literally scandalized Victorian England. An exquisite and heartbreaking love story, Violet Tempest and Roderick Vawdrey, (known to one another as Vixen and Rorie), are childhood sweethearts.
The conflict?
Rorie's family opposes their marriage and will do anything to prevent it.
MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON (1835 1915) was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, best known for Lady Audley's Secret. Together with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon dominated the market for novels of sensation during the 1860s, in featuring a beautiful heroine, amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. The genre caused moral alarm among critics: not only did it revel in murder, bigamy, illegitimacy and madness, it seemed to pathologize the very act of reading itselfsince its narrative method (which foreshadows that of modern detective fiction) turned readers into addicts, titillating them with a series of withheld secrets and startling revelations.