Rippling Intimacies: The Queer Waters of Lady Audley’s Secret

Abstract This article relies on ecocriticism to explore Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s most popular novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, to understand the queer ecological potential even within a Victorian novel that relies on key conventional tropes. It analyzes moments when the three main characters, Lady Helen Audley, Robert Audley, and George Talboys, engage in queer ecological intimacies before the advent of sexological studies. Looking first at how Lady Audley interacts with the garden spaces surrounding her estate, the article offers a new theoretical framework, domestic queer ecology, to explore the asphyxiation the domestic space pushes onto the titular protagonist, and how the garden space offers her an escape. It then moves on to critically assess sites of water as spaces that promote queer intimacy between the two male protagonists. Ultimately, Braddon’s novel suggests a misogynistic ecological queerness that favors eco-queer men over eco-queer women.