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Summary
The longings of a frustrated wife collide with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.
Summary
"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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Romance and repression abound as a Victorian matron's innermost secrets are revealed in court via her private diary. When Henry Oliver Robinson petitioned the newly formed Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes for the dissolution of his marriage on the grounds of infidelity in 1858, he presented as evidence his wife's personal diary. In one of the first and most scandalous civil divorce proceedings in Great Britain, the details of the Robinson case, including the anguished and often salacious musings of an unhappy and possibly abused middle-class housewife, were fodder for a scandal-hungry press and a public transfixed by the titillating legal spectacle. As Isabella Robinson's male associates ran for cover, she was left twisting in the wind by a hypocritical, male-dominated society eager to stigmatize and brutalize a woman for showing any overt signs of sexuality or desire. Summerscale does a nice job of placing both the case and the diary firmly into historical and sociological contexts.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON Nov. 15, 1850, 37-year-old Isabella Robinson went to a party in Edinburgh where she was introduced to Edward Lane. Later she noted in her diary that he was "handsome" and "fascinating," the first of many entries describing her feelings for Lane, a married medical student 10 years her junior. Isabella was herself unhappily married to Henry Robinson, a curmudgeonly businessman and civil engineer who also had a mistress and two illegitimate children. In fact, Isabella despised this "uneducated," "selfish" and "harsh-tempered" man, who, in turn, treated her with contempt. Robinson was, she told herself, only interested in money, while she yearned for the intellectual stimulation that could be found at the home the Lanes shared with Mrs. Lane's mother, Lady Drysdale, among their circle of literary and scientific friends. Upon finishing his studies, Lane opened a fashionable spa for hydropathy at Moor Park in Surrey, where his patients - including Charles Darwin - underwent a fanciful range of water cures to calm their irritable nerves. Isabella visited regularly, sometimes to be treated, sometimes just as a family friend - but always, as her diary revealed, to be nearer to Lane. In those years, her journal's pages were infused with unrequited longing for the young doctor, whose every word and gesture was weighed and judged. Isabella was downhearted when he "hardly looked at me," ecstatic when she sat next to him at a lecture. They talked about Byron, God, hot-air balloons and Coleridge's poems, and went on walks that left her "too much roused to sleep." There was much sadness in Isabella's diary, moments when "all is dark to me," but also descriptions of dreams "of romantic situations, and Mr. Lane." Kate Summerscale argues, convincingly, that these pages, like a novel, could "conjure up a wished-for world, in which memories were colored with desire." Then, in October 1854, during a visit to Moor Park, Isabella suddenly wrote of passionate kisses in the nearby woods and in Lane's study. "Oh, God," she declared, "I had never hoped to see this hour." From here on, the diary was filled with even more romance and desire, though Isabella refrained from describing a sexual act - "if, that is, there ever was one. On their walks, she and Lane kissed, caressed and rested on a bed of dry ferns. But, she wrote, "I shall not state what followed." A little more than a year later, in the spring of 1856, those words were enough to shatter her world. When Isabella fell ill and, delirious with fever, mumbled the names of other men, her suspicious husband read the diary. He promptly took it and their children and left her, then filed for divorce. In her hugely enjoyable account of a sensational 11860 English murder case, "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," Summerscale demonstrated her talent for forensic investigation. Once again, in "Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace" she prods, scrutinizes and examines, employing a real-life historical episode to shed light on Victorian morality and sensibilities. This time, however, the chief evidence she presents to tell her fascinating story isn't a corpse but a diary. Just as she used the killing of a child in her previous book to provide insight into mid-19th-century domestic life and the rise of detective novels, Summerscale now uses Isabella and Henry Robinson's scandalous divorce case to explore such diverse subjects as the era's romantic novels, peculiar health fads and views of marriage. Until 1858, the union between a husband and wife could be dissolved only by an individual act of Parliament, which was extremely expensive and therefore unobtainable for all but the very rich. Yet in that year, the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes made the severing of such bonds affordable, thus bringing it to the middle class. The Robinson case was one of the first to arrive at the court. Summerscale is graciously evenhanded in her depiction of Isabella, who, despite being vilely neglected in her marriage and treated appallingly during the trial, was also a flawed character. It's difficult to warm to her when, for example, she fumbles around with Lane inside a carriage while her son is perched up top with the driver or when she writes about "dear little innocent Mrs. L," sitting with her baby just after Isabella has amused herself with Mrs. Lane's husband in the shrubbery. The court proceedings make for disturbing but engrossing reading. The contents of Isabella's diary were divulged to the lawyers and judges and reprinted in the newspapers. Her innermost feelings, wishes and dreams were revealed at breakfast tables across the country. And, as if her situation weren't awful enough, her lawyers argued that she was a sex maniac who had created an imaginary erotic life. Since the diary was Henry Robinson's only proof of his wife's adultery, her lawyers insisted that parts of it were fictional - the product of her "uterine disease," evidence merely of temporary insanity. Medical witnesses explained that her condition could cause sexual delusions and nymphomania. The newspapers gorged on every detail. "Isabella's defense," Summerscale writes, "was far more degrading than a confession of adultery would have been." By agreeing to her lawyers' strategy, she sacrificed herself for Lane, whose career was at stake. If Isabella wasn't lying, how many female patients would be willing to seek treatment at his spa? Desperate and decidedly ungallant, Lane described his reputed paramour as "a vile and crazy woman" who was "goaded on by wild hallucinations." The question was and is - did Isabella really have an affair with Edward Lane or was it all wishful thinking? The end of the court case is surprising, and to give it away would be an insult to Summerscale's cleverly constructed narrative. But she stresses that one thing is clear: the diary "may not tell us, for certain, what happened in Isabella's life, but it tells us what she wanted." Isabella Robinson's lawyers argued that she was a sex maniac who had created an imaginary erotic life. Andrea Wulf's latest book, "Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens," has just been published.
Kirkus Review
Not just a scandalous diary, but a portrait of the plight of women in the early Victorian era. 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." A revealing portrait of the straight-laced Victorians who produced innumerable sex scandals, delved into new and sometimes bizarre health fads and generally dismissed anyone considered beneath them, like colonials and women.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
On the surface, the mid-19th-century marriage of Henry and Isabella Robinson seemed both normal and successful: he was a well-off civil engineer, she an intelligent and spirited woman in her 30s; they had three children and a financially stable household in Edinburgh. However, the emotionally charged entries of Isabella's diary tell quite a different story. Unhappy with her husband's coldness and frequent absences, Isabella spent years confiding in her diary about her loneliness, her longing for intellectual companionship, and her passionate infatuation with a married doctor. When Henry chanced upon the diary, the situation exploded into a vicious divorce trial that filled the newspapers and dragged Isabella's record of her innermost thoughts into the public's critical eye. Following the pattern of her previous book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Summerscale combines a thorough examination of her topic with a wider view of relevant social issues-in this case, Victorian attitudes toward marriage, divorce, and the figure of the unhappy housewife. VERDICT A deft unraveling of a little-known scandal that should appeal to any reader interested in women's history or the world behind the facade of the Victorian home.-Kathleen McCallister, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
