Mary Elisabeth Braddon 
Wyllard’s Weird 

A village in Cornwall is thrown into turmoil after a young girl falls from a train to her death. Was this an accident? Or murder? The mystery deepens when clues link the girl to a double homicide committed ten years earlier. Braddon’s sensational novel takes us to the estates of aristocrats, the haunts of tabloid writers, the homes of Bohemian artists, and the dark alleyways of Paris. Braddon, one of Victorian England’s best-selling novelists, is at the height of her powers in Wyllard’s Weird. The novel shakes the foundations of 19th-century social order as it questions the sanctity of marriage and exposes the vices hidden beneath masks of gentility. First published in 1885, Wyllard’s Weird has been for too long either out of print or available only in expensive facsimile editions. The novel holds an important place in literary history as it forecasts the appearance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 and Sherlock Holmes in 1887.