Download Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady AudioBook Free
"I believe people marry far too much; it is such a lottery, as well as for a poor girl - bodily and morally the husband's slave - an extremely doubtful happiness." (Queen Victoria to her lately married little princess Vicky) Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at years 31 in 1844. Her first hubby had died out of the blue, leaving his estate to a boy from a previous matrimony, so she inherited little or nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry changed them, by then with two sons, to Edinburgh's tasteful modern culture in 1850. But Henry journeyed often and was frigid and remote control when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies. No doubt a large number of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but Isabella thought we would track record her innermost thoughts - and especially her infatuation with a hitched Dr. Edward Street - 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 personal privacy, read Isabella's personal entries. Aghast at his wife's identified infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce due to adultery. Until that yr, divorce have been illegal in Britain, the marital connection being truly a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause célèbre, intimidating the foundations of Victorian modern culture with the specter of "a new and disturbing physique: a middle class wife who was simply restless, unhappy, enthusiastic for arousal." Her diary, read in court, was as explosive as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, just released in France but considered too scandalous to be translated into English before 1880s. As she achieved in her award-winning and best-selling The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in superb and compelling details the life span of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of your frustrated better half collided with a modern culture clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the restrictions of personal privacy, the institution of matrimony, and feminine sexuality.
