The Octoroon (1861-1862) is a lurid tale of race, slavery and crime. It was the second anonymous novel written by Braddon for a rare lower class magazine, and was published to coincide with the first British performance of Dion Boucicault's drama of miscegenation in the Southern states of America. Educated in Britain, Cora only learns the truth about her mother's slave origins, and her own legal position as an Octoroon, when she returns to her father's plantation in Louisiana. Reviving issues raised by Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Braddon also utilised contemporary theatre and her own experience as an actress to create a novel which has much in common with melodramas of the period.