Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

Summerscale, Kate

Published by Bloomsbury, New York, 2012

About this Item

New condition blue boards with gold spine lettering, contained in a new condition non price-clipped color illustrated/photographic dust jacket. Includes Family Trees; List of Lawyers in the Robinson Divorce Trial; Prologue; Coda: Do you also pause to pity?; Notes; Select Bibliography; Acknowledgments; and Index. Second printing. "One eloquent doozy of a true-crime thriller." - Entertainment Weekly "The story of a true-life Madame Bovary and the scandalous trial that rocked Victorian England.Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age thirty-one 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 Robinson 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 the married Dr. Edward Lane - in her diary. Over five years the entires mounted - passionate, sensual, suggestive. One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced on the diary and, broaching her 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 spector of "a new and disturbing figure: a middle-class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid for arousal." Her diary, read in court, was an explosive as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, just published in France but considered too scandalous to be translated into English. .Kate Summerscale brilliantly re-creates 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.". Seller Inventory # 001232

Bibliographic Details

Title: Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary ...

Publisher: Bloomsbury, New York

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: New

Dust Jacket Condition: New

Edition: 1st Edition