Mrs Robinson's Disgrace

FROM BRITAIN'S TOP-SELLING TRUE CRIME WRITER 'Extraordinary' PHILIPPA GREGORY, DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Grippingly suspenseful' SUNDAY TIMES When the married Isabella Robinson was introduced to the dashing Edward Lane at a party in 1850, she was utterly enchanted. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake. . . In one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century, Isabella Robinson's scandalous secrets were exposed to the world. Kate Summerscale brings vividly to life a frustrated Victorian wife's longing for passion and learning, companionship and love, in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality. 'I'm all admiration: she has turned a sepia photograph, curling and tattered, into a film that runs through the mind in glorious and unimpeachable Technicolor' RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER 'Summerscale strikes non-fiction gold for the third time' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Moving, compelling and brilliantly executed' DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Summerscale's brilliance lies not only in recognising the power of a particular story, but in charting, with beautiful precision, its strange echoes and reverberations' CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY