Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: The Lovels of Arden. V1. 13 Nov 2009
 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (4 October 1837 – 4 February 1915) was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret.

Excerpt
The lamps of the Great Northern Terminus at King’s Cross had not long been lighted, when a cab deposited a young lady and her luggage at the departure platform. It was an October twilight, cold and gray, and the place had a cheerless and dismal aspect to that solitary young traveller, to whom English life and an English atmosphere were somewhat strange.
She had been seven years abroad, in a school near Paris; rather an expensive seminary, where the number of pupils was limited, the masters and mistresses, learned in divers modern accomplishments, numerous, and the dietary of foreign slops and messes without stint.