Exploring the theme of marginality in Mary Elizabeth Braddon novels from The Trail of the Serpent to The Infidel, Anne-Marie Beller makes astute connections between the position of the female popular novelist and the outcast subject in Braddon's fiction. Braddon's position in the literary marketplace, shaped by the double constraints of gender and genre and the demands of Victorian authorship, influenced the forms of resistance to the dominant ideology at play in her novels.