Whitlock Reissues Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Small press Whitlock Publishing has reprinted Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Wyllard's Weird (1885) in which a girl's fall from a train may be something more than suicide.

The brainchild of Alfred University professor Allen Grove, Whitlock Publishing specializes in affordable editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. It's hard to resist a publisher whose staff, its Web site admits, "works for pocket lint."

Braddon (1835-1915), best known for Lady Audley's Secret (1862), produced more than 80 books during her lifetime. At her death, she left an estate worth about $340,000, computed in 2007 dollars at ca. $6.4 million. Because much of her work has been difficult to obtain or has been out of print (Valancourt Books has recently reissued Braddon's Thou Art the Man [1894], and Whitlock plans an edition of Braddon's A Strange World [1875]), Grove's efforts should be applauded.