At a ball held for her 19th birthday, she meets 32 year old Captain Talbot Bulstrode, the eldest son of a Cornish baron.

He later finds that, before fainting, Aurora was reading a newspaper which contained an article about an English jockey named Conyers who had died in a horse-racing accident in Germany.

Talbot eventually learns that soon after arriving at the Parisian finishing school, Aurora ran away and when he questions her about the 15 months of her life before she returned to Felden Woods in late August 1857, she refuses to account for her actions and will only tell him that her father knows what happened and that it broke his heart.

When a new trainer is needed at Mellish Park, John receives a recommendation from a friend and Aurora becomes hysterical when she hears that the man's name is James Conyers.

[1] This was only a few months after the publication of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's other famous novel, Lady Audley's Secret, which was published in October 1862.

Within the novel, Aurora Floyd is frequently described as donning a pork pie hat and having an affection for the stables, both traits which would have brought Catherine Walters to the mind of the Victorian reading public.

[3] Aurora Floyd is considered one of the pioneers of the sensation novel genre, containing as it does a sense of realism within its domestication of criminality.

The rise of this genre concerned many conservative critics, who believed that it might represent the normalisation of vice within the middle classes, and an enthusiasm for the lurid and gruesome within published entertainment.

[3] In an anonymous review published in 9 November 1865 edition of The Nation, Henry James argued that Aurora Floyd represents an improvement not only of Wilkie Collins' mode of the sensation novel, but also serves as a more complex and nuanced tale than Miss Braddon's previous book, Lady Audley's Secret: Lady Audley was diabolically wicked; Aurora Floyd, her successor, was simply foolish, or indiscreet, or indelicate-- or anything you please to say of a young woman who runs off with a hostler.

Thus Wiley-Blackell's A Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011), the first comprehensive guide to the sub-genre, while devoting three chapters to Wilkie Collins, gave five to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one specifically to Aurora Floyd.

[8] In 1863, the same year as the novel was published, Aurora Floyd was adapted for the stage by Colin Henry Hazlewood and first performed at the Britannia Theatre Saloon in the Hoxton district just north of the City of London.

[citation needed] The script was subsequently published by Thomas Hailes Lacy as the 85th in his series Acting Edition of Plays.