Mary Elizabeth Braddon was an English popular novelist of the Victorian era. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, which has also been dramatised and filmed several times.

The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, centering taboo material shocking to its readers as a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties.