This early work by Mary Elizabeth Braddon was originally published in
1880 and we are now republishing it with a brand new biography of the
author. 'The Story of Barbara' is one of Braddon's novels in the
sensation literature genre. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in Soho,
London, England in 1835. She was educated privately in England and
France, and at the age of just nineteen was offered a commission by a
local printer to produce a serial novel combining the humour of Dickens
with the plot and construction of G. P. R. Reynolds What emerged was
Three Times dead, or The Secret of the Heath, which was published five
years later under the title The Trail of the Serpent (1861). For the
rest of her life, Braddon was an extremely prolific writer, producing
more than eighty novels, while also finding time to write and act in a
number of stage plays.