Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Jewish World, 1880-1915

Ruth Morris’s new book focuses on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels from 1880 to her death in 1915 and how the portrayal of Jewish characters and Jewish culture shifts throughout this timeframe. By tracing the fortunes of Anglo-Jewry through Braddon’s fiction into the twentieth century, it draws contextually on significant world events such as the Boer War, the beginning of the Zionist movement and the events leading up to the First World War. Each of these events is seen through a Jewish lens in the sense of how they affected Jews in Britain. Morris also discusses them through non-Jewish eyes because Braddon was not Jewish herself and was writing for a predominantly non-Jewish audience. Through a careful reading of the novels, these seemingly incidental references provide a rich narrative of how the Anglo-Jewish community was viewed during a particularly dynamic time in its history.