The first paragraph of Lady Audley’s Secret says a lot about Mary Braddon’s writing style. The first sentence starts off with, “It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures”(7). By her use of diction, it is obvious that the book is extremely descriptive containing long and illustrative sentences. In the first paragraph of the story, Braddon sets the scene in an area with a lot of land and farm life. It describes the area as pretty desolate saying that “unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all”(7). Just by reading the first paragraph, I can assume that the story is written about a wealthy family in the mid 1800s who lives in a large estate on the country side in England. The random mention of the Court makes me believe that this is foreshadowing a significant event that will later happen in the story. Despite the openness of the farmland, there seems to be a bit of privacy surrounding the people that randomly come and go to this area. Lady Audley’s “secret” is unknown to the reader so far, but based off of the mention of “court” in the first paragraph, one could assume that her secret might cause destruction in her life.