The Poetry - Volume II: Under The Sycamores & Other Poems

By Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840. When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together. The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum. Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced.

Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career. Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’. It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine. This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised. But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline. In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Jan 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781787803688

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) was an English novelist and actress during the Victorian era. Although raised by a single mother, Braddon was educated at private institutions where she honed her creative skills. As a young woman, she worked as a theater actress to support herself and her family. When interest faded, she shifted to writing and produced her most notable work Lady Audley's Secret. It was one of more than 80 novels Braddon wrote of the course of an expansive career.

Book preview

The Poetry of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Volume II – Under The Sycamores & Other Poems

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in London on 4th October 1835.

Braddon suffered early family trauma at age five, when her mother, Fanny, separated from her father, Henry, in 1840.  When she was aged ten her brother Edward left England for India and later Australia.

However, after being befriended by Clara and Adelaide Biddle she was much taken by acting. For three years she took minor acting roles, which supported both her and her mother, However, her interest in acting began to wane as she began to write. It was to be her true vocation.

In 1860, Mary met John Maxwell, a publisher of periodicals. By the next year they were living together.  The situation and the view from polite society was complicated by the fact that Maxwell was already married with five children, and his wife was under care in an Irish asylum.  Until 1874 Mary was to act as stepmother to his children as well as to the six offspring their own relationship produced. 

Braddon, with a large and growing family, still found time to produce a long and prolific writing career.  Her most famous book was a sensational novel published in 1862, ‘Lady Audley's Secret’.  It won her both recognition and best-seller status.

Her works in the supernatural genre were equally prolific and brought new menace to the form. Her pact with the devil story ‘Gerald, or the World, the Flesh and the Devil’ (1891), and the ghost stories ‘The Cold Embrace’, ‘The Face in the Glass’ and ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ are regarded as classics.

In 1866 she founded the Belgravia magazine.  This presented readers with serialised sensation novels, poems, travel narratives and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history and science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers an excellent source of literature at an affordable cost. She was also the editor of The Temple Bar magazine.

Maxwell’s wife died in 1874 and the couple who had been together for so long were at last able to wed.

Mary Elizabeth Brandon died on 4th February 1915 in Richmond and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

After her death her short story masterpieces would be regularly anthologised.  But for the rest of her canon her reputation then went into decline.  In the past decade her reputation and talent is once more being given the attention it so rightly deserves.

Index of Contents

UNDER THE SYCAMORES

THE SECRETARY

Fugitive Pieces

The Last Hours of the Girondists

Joanna of Naples

Louise de la Vallière

Queen Guinevere

Si and No

By the Sea-Shore 

At Last

Tired of Life

Waiting

Under Ground

Vale

Going Down 

Gabriel 

Farewell 

Waking 

A Shadow 

Life is a Child 

To a Coquette

The Lost Pleiad

After the Armistice

Among the Hyacinths 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon – A Concise Bibliography

UNDER THE SYCAMORES

God guard that spot beneath the sycamores

Where blood was med once by a woman's hand!

Man shuns the dark made of those sycamores:

There night is blackest—there the winter's wind

Shrieks shrillest—or in loud prophetic voice,

With fitful wailings through the short'ning days,

Seems as it knew the story of the place

And tried to tell it in harm syllables,

To scare all sentient things from sheltering there.

The smiling summer there can only frown,

For the thick trees shut out the funny skies,

And the damp ground will not be shone upon,

Will only nourish rank and poisonous weeds,

And will proclaim with black and hideous looks

Here once was murder done.

The records tell

How a chiefs daughter, one Menamenee,

Was left an orphan in her early years,

And was proclaimed the Princess of her tribe,

Male issue failing to her father's line.

Thus the tribe said, "She shall select a mate,

Dauntless and handsome as her glorious self;

Shall choose from all our people him that is

Swiftest of foot, boldest of heart and mien,

Wisest and greatest. They shall have a son

Whom they shall rear to be our children's chief,

And to recall the virtues of her fire—

The brave Dark Eagle." Young Menamenee

Is straight and slender, graceful, light and free,

As shadows thrown by flowers on funny grass

That flicker as they fall, her deep black eyes

Have the Dark Eagle's radiance in their glance,

And can command as his were wont to do.

Her hand can wing the arrow to its home

In the bird's heart that flies above the trees;

She has all his imperious grace; a queen

In every gesture, word, and thought, and deed—

What a strange fight to see such pride brought low,

Such regal beauty prostrate in the duff,

And such a warm and noble heart abased

For man with reckless foot to trample on.

She met a stranger in the forest path,

Who turned aside to note her Indian grace;

She met a stranger—and his deep blue eyes,

Through the dark night, were with her in her dreams,

And shone on her, till changing into stars,

She woke, and gazing upward to the sky

Still saw their light in depths of azure blue.

Again she met him in the forest: glade,

And this time in distress; thrown from his horse.

In danger; so they bore him to her home,

And laid him on a couch of soft dried herbs,

Brown moss, and withered flowers. There he lay

For weeks, she watching by him through the long

Still days and nights, of fever and unrest,—

Delirious wanderings of the burning brain,

Through black despair to glimmering hope, until

A change came o'er him, and he grew to know

His tender nurse. To listen to her voice

That soothed him to his rest with Indian airs

Sung in a plaintive minor. Well he knew

The touch of the light hand that smoothed his hair,

Or laid cool simples on his burning brow,

And had a power to soothe, apart from them,

By very virtue of its tenderness.

All suffering past, he lay as in a rest;

So deep, it might be death—and all so sweet

And heavenly peaceful, it could not be life.

And she—alas! She sang a mournful song,

That