After returning from Australia for the first time in three years, George Talboys joins his friend Robert Audley at a Westminster coffee house. There he picks up a ‘greasy Times newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table’, only to confront the printed evidence of his wife's death: ‘On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged 22.’ Audley tries to comfort Talboys and assures him that ‘there may be some other Helen Talboys’ or it ‘may be a misprint for Talbot’. Talboys, however, believes that his wife is dead: ‘Yes, there it was in black and white – “Helen Talboys, aged 22.”’

Talboys marvels that ‘one line in the The Times newspaper could have so horrible an effect upon him’, and he sits ‘rigid, white, and helpless, staring stupidly at the shocked face of his friend’. It later turns out that Helen is not dead but faked her death so as to marry the wealthy landowner Sir Michael Audley. While Talboys takes the newspaper's report as unimpeachable fact, the novel shows it to be a fraud authored by his wife. Lady Audley's Secret (1862) dramatises a contradiction inherent in news: the form and structure of the newspaper invite readers to apprehend it as a factual account of recent events, but its contents are often wrong or even fraudulent. The news of Helen's death instigates the plot of the novel as Robert Audley begins to suspect that his uncle's wife, Lady Audley, is in fact Helen Talboys. The newspaper, like the novel, might also be called ‘Lady Audley's Secret’.

Newspapers are frequently wrong in the worlds of Victorian novels, from the mistaken report of John Harmon's death in Our Mutual Friend to allegations of extra-marital affairs in Phineas Finn. They titillate, disturb and torment their readers with allegations that appear unlikely but true, and they both propel and disrupt the progression of novelistic plots. This monograph is about the ways that nineteenth-century novels envision newspapers and incorporate, problematise, and transmute news stories into fictional narrative. By fictionalising a discourse that lays claim to factuality, the novels examined in this book interrogate the operations of ‘narratives of the real’ and their effects on a community of readers.