Aurora Floyd the heroine is black-eyed and reckless; there her fascination of the reader stops, as she never says anything eloquent. It's good to find a reckless heroine in Vic lit, though. She does get to do something, and then some more foolish things to fix the first one. One might well ask, Can You Forgive Her?, and Braddon's answer is Yes, and in more than one possible way.
Aurora has two virtuous suitors, one proud and intellectual, one unthinking but greathearted. Not only does she marry the right one, but the other - they were schoolboy friends - helps pull Aurora out of her preposterous difficulty. My favorite thing was the undemonstrative friendship between their very different characters.
The only grit to my modern sensibility was that their friendship and kinship didn't make the courts suspicious, when they discover evidence to exonerate Aurora. All her witnesses are relations, and two-thirds of them are landed gentry, and it would have been a perfect frame-up of the villain... Oh, well; might by a stretch have written that novel; M.E. Braddon didn't. (You or I could, since the public domain really is public. At the moment, anyway.)
URI: http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/braddon/menu.html