“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.
About Kate Summerscale
Kate Summerscale is the author of the bestselling books The Queen of Whale Cay and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. She lives in London with her son.
Editorial Review
The excerpts from Isabella Robinson’s diary show a woman in a loveless, miserable marriage. Her desperate longings for love, or at least someone to talk to, fed her imagination and fired her writings with delusional tales of amour. Women living in the mid 19th century had no legal existence, so she couldn’t file a lawsuit, control her own money or even claim her own clothes and jewelry. Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, 2008, etc.) may have set out to write about one woman’s fall from grace, but she also exposes the horrendous misery of even gently born women during the reign of Queen Victoria. It was during that period that the government at last allowed both men and women to sue for divorce without parliamentary approval. A man seeking to put away his wife could do so by implication only, but women needed to prove at least two incidents of adultery. Apparently, in Mrs. Robinson’s case, the fact that her husband had a mistress who bore him two children was not sufficient. At this time the use of insanity as a plea came into more common use, and Mrs. Robinson’s friends strongly suggested that she claim she was insane at the time she wrote things like “the happiness of loving” and “long, passionate, clinging embrace.” – Kirkus Reviews
‘Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady ,’ by Kate Summerscale
The Washington Post Book Review – June 15, 2012 (Excerpt)
In the 19th century, Kate Summerscale reports, keeping private diaries became all the rage among the educated and genteel of England: “Of all the written life stories that fascinated the Victorians — biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, journals of health and travel and politics — the personal diary was the most subjective and raw, the most revealing of the problems of writing and reading about the self.” The fad “was fueled by the popularity of Romantic poetry, which prized introspection, and by the first publications of personal journals: the seventeenth-century diaries of John Evelyn originally appeared in 1818 and those of [Samuel] Pepys in 1825.”
Diaries were especially popular among women, even the most privileged of whom led sharply constrained lives and were granted virtually no rights. Married women lived at the mercy of their husbands, who had total control over whatever money they brought to their marriages, and single women — especially those old enough to qualify as spinsters — were similarly disenfranchised. Small wonder that many of them turned to diaries as a means of self-expression and exploration of emotions and experiences about which they could not, or would not, speak to others. This was not without its risks: “The act of diary-keeping honoured many of the values of Victorian society — self-reliance, autonomy, the capacity to keep secrets. But if taken too far, these same virtues could turn to vices. Self-reliance could become a radical disconnection from society, its codes and rules and restraints; secrecy could curdle into deceit; self-monitoring into solipsism; and introspection into monomania.” [Read the full article...]
Divorce, ‘Disgrace’ And One Steamy Victorian Diary
NPR Book Review – June 19, 2012 (Excerpt)
If Isabella Robinson had a Facebook account in 1858, her relationship status would be “It’s complicated.” Unhappily married to civil engineer Henry Robinson — a most “uncongenial partner” — Isabella set her lonely sights on the dashing and very much attached hydropath Dr. Edward Lane. In a perfect world, Isabella and Edward’s respective spouses would die quick and painless deaths, freeing the paramours to be joined in holy, socially sanctioned matrimony. But Victorian England was not a perfect world.
Instead, Isabella turned to her diary to record her innermost thoughts on all things Edward, from the first pangs of attraction (“I find it impossible to love where I ought, or to keep from loving where I ought not”) to a later evening “full of passionate excitement, long and clinging kisses, and nervous sensations.” Unsurprisingly, Henry — living up to his uncongenial billing — found the journal and used it as his basis to demand a divorce, a new avenue for middle-class Victorians wanting to be rid of their cheating or abusive spouses. Kate Summerscale — perfectly at home in the 19th century, as evidenced in 2008′s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, her grisly but addictively readable tale of an 1860 murder investigation — blends cultural history with all the elements of a doomed love story in her tale of a real-life Madame Bovary, Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace. [Read the full article...]
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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll
A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!
Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
