Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, and for a poor woman--bodily and morally the husband's slave--a very doubtful happiness. --Queen Victoria to her recently married daughter Vicky

Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then with two sons, to Edinburgh's elegant society in 1850. But Henry traveled often and was cold and remote when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies.

No doubt thousands of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but Isabella chose to record her innermost thoughts-and especially her infatuation with a married Dr. Edward Lane-in her diary. Over five years the entries mounted-passionate, sensual, suggestive. One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced on the diary and, broaching its privacy, read Isabella's intimate entries. Aghast at his wife's perceived infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Until that year, divorce had been illegal in England, the marital bond being a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause celebre, threatening the foundations of Victorian society with the specter of a new and disturbing figure: a middle class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid for arousal. Her diary, read in court, was as explosive as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, just published in France but considered too scandalous to be translated into English until the 1880s.

As she accomplished in her award-winning and bestselling The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.

Kate Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph (London), is the author of The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was short-listed for the Whitbread Biography Award. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a number one bestseller in the UK, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. The Wicked Boy won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. The Haunting of Alma Fielding was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Summerscale lives in London.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781608199341
ISBN 10	1608199347
Title	Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace
Author	Kate Summerscale
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Usa
Year published	2013-05-21
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.