Thou Art the Man

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (Editor)

Ten years ago, a shocking murder cut short a blossoming romance between beautiful young heiress Sibyl Higginson and her cousin Brandon Mountford. When Mountford, an epileptic subject to seizures and memory loss, awakened near a bloody corpse, he was forced to escape to avoid execution for the crime. The years passed, nothing was heard of Mountford, and it was supposed he had either died or fled the country. A decade later, Sibyl, now Lady Penrith, is travelling along a desolate moor when a crazed man stops her carriage and hands her a scrawled note. Believing the note to be from Mountford, Sibyl sets out to investigate, and with the help of her niece Coralie Urquhart she will uncover the long-hidden truth behind the murder and the horrible fate of Brandon Mountford! Thou Art the Man (1894) is a thrilling and fast-paced novel of murder and mystery. It is also, as Laurence Talairach-Vielmas discusses in her introduction to this edition, a fascinating look at the ways Braddon adapted late-Victorian theories of heredity, disease, and criminology into her fiction. This edition reprints the unabridged text of the 1895 "yellowback" edition, complete with a facsimile of its cover, and includes a new introduction and explanatory notes.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, English Literature, Mystery, British Literature

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is her first novel, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times.

Braddon also founded Belgravia Magazine (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science. She also edited Temple Bar Magazine. Braddon's legacy is tied to the Sensation Fiction of the 1860s.

She is also the mother of novelist W.B. Maxwell.

Reviews

[Susan Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915) is known for her sensation novels – novels written for all levels of readers, those grabbing a cheap book bound in yellow covers and sold in railway stations, and those serialized in popular magazines (one of which she founded and ran). They explored the dark sides and inner workings of Victorians at all levels: prim and proper professionals, landed gentry, impoverished women, people in desperate poverty, and they explore secrets and the question: “What on earth do you do if you find yourself in an impossible situation?”

Victorian psychology held that epileptic seizures turned people into demons (remember, this was the age of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) who slipped into uncontrollable homicidal rages, that generally targeted lovely (and often hot-blooded) women who happened to stray into their way.

In fact, the mystery in Thou Art the Man revolves around the question of guilt and also the nature of epilepsy itself. Mountford has lived in a kind of existential horror as he saw his seizure disorder slowly destroy his dreams of being an attorney, and then of love, since he was determined never to marry, have children, and potentially pass along the disease. He read the medical literature of the day which detailed the progress of the disease and the prevailing belief that the seizures transformed the sufferer into a violent beast with no self control, and later, no memory of their actions.
The full review is filled with spoilers... it is here: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2017/...

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

So interesting that in this time period there was much medical belief that epilepsy led to symptoms of demonic possession. One of the main male characters, who had epilepsy, therefore chose to live a life of celibacy, so as not to possibly pass on this “curse” to children (his own mother had died in a mental hospital). Ah, but when he fell in love, it became devastating to him. We have jealousy between brothers, deception for wealth and position, kidnapping, murders, secret diaries, and a message from the grave.

I listened to this book as a free download from LibriVox.org. First published in 1894.

[Geicodave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sensation novel, a literary genre which became wildly popular during the mid-nineteenth century. Mrs. Braddon, a prolific author, was an acknowledged master of the form. This is not one of her best, but it is an entertaining and well told tale of jealousy, greed, and murder, three of the elements which frequently appear in sensation novels.

[Geicodave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining sensation novel

This is a sensation novel, a genre which became enormously popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Mrs. Brandon was an acknowledged master of the form. This is certainly not her best novel, but is a tale well told.

[Niki (nikilovestoread) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am slowly reading my way through all Mary Elizabeth Braddon's books. Unfortunately, the majority of her books are out of print and rather difficult to find. When I saw Valancourt Books had published an edition of Thou Art the Man, I quickly ordered a copy. I finally read it this month with a Victorian Sensation bookclub. Braddon can always be counted on for a fun story. In Thou Art the Man, we meet Sibyl Higginson, whose father is a self-made man while her mother came from a poor aristocratic family. After the death of her mother, her father brings home a young woman who he claims is the orphaned child of a former employee. Raised together, the girls become very close. Unfortunately, on the cusp of Sibyl's coming out, Marie is murdered and the man Sibyl loves is believed to be the murder albeit while not in his rational mind. The novel explores Victorian beliefs about epilepsy and murder as the story unfolds.