Phantom Fortune
A Novel

Whether you like or despise Mary Elizabeth Braddon's work, her great success lay in the telling of a story. Her work may be derivative (Wilkie Collins leaps to mind) melodramatic, character driven, cliché-ridden, but however weak the plot, however many coincidences are introduced as an alternative t......more

Braddon is my current fixation based on how varied and outright weird her novels are, and what they say about the anxieties of late Victorian gentry. An amazing set up that like most of Braddon's novels, grows weaker toward the end. Some nice characterization in the proud, ambitious, and self defeat......more

This book tells the love stories of two sisters and their grandmother, and how all three stories are intertwined. Two aspects I love about Braddon’s writing: we get to follow her characters through several different phases of their lives, and she lets us guess many of the story’s secrets early on, b......more

I thought this was a well-written story with multiple overlapping plots, keeping my attention to the end. The shocking decadence of "the season" in London (is that what they got up to???) and double standards of the upper classes seem to be a deliberate theme through the book. It is a bit let down b......more

Not her best but pretty fun......more