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Title details for Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale - Available

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace

The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

by Kate Summerscale
Wanda McCaddon
Audiobook
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2 of 2 copies available
"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 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 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 19, 2012

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452628011
      • File size: 214809 KB
      • Duration: 07:27:31

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In Victorian Scotland, Mrs. Henry Robinson (formerly Isabella Walker) tried to cope with a cold, lonely marriage by writing intimate details of her real and fantasized life in her diary. After discovering the journal, her husband sued for divorce, and Isabella's diary was used as evidence of adultery. Wanda McCaddon narrates the proceedings with aplomb as the account raises the question of whether the emotionally abused Isabella was having an affair with Dr. Edward Lane or her infatuation with her married next-door neighbor was a figment of her imagination. As Summerscale analyzes the practice of diary writing, nascent psychoanalysis, women's diseases, and divorce, all is carefully recounted in McCaddon's crisp, fluid voice. McCaddon brings this fascinating period to the curious listener through the curious diary of Mrs. Robinson. M.B.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 20, 2012
      With intelligence and graceful prose, Summerscale gives an intimate and surprising look into Victorian life. A century before Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” a financially comfortable Victorian named Isabella Robinson defended herself in the newly created English divorce court over a mislaid diary filled with passionate erotic entries, philosophical musings, and complaints against her husband. Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher) suggests that Isabella fought to maintain her marriage to a controlling, tight-fisted husband (himself an adulterer) to protect the reputation of her alleged lover, Dr. Edward Lane, a hydrotherapist who treated her, as well as an ailing Charles Darwin and popular phrenologist George Combe. In two sections, the book first describes Isabella’s flowery, coy memories of the doctor and others who offered her distraction; the second part focuses on her trial on an adultery charge and the scrambling of her male friends to preserve their reputations. Questions raised in the newspapers about Isabella’s sanity and desperate need for attention, coupled with Lane’s firm courtroom denials, clouded the truth for contemporary spectators concerning Henry Robinson’s charge of adultery, resulting in a highly unusual 19th-century divorce case filled with salacious details and unsympathetic characters on both sides of the aisle. 8 pages b&w photo insert. Agent: Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd (U.K.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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