{"id":1021,"date":"2012-05-01T06:03:51","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T06:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2012-10-22T17:13:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T17:13:18","slug":"mrs-robinsons-disgrace-the-private-diary-of-a-victorian-lady-by-kate-summerscale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1021","title":{"rendered":"Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Bloomsbury\u00a030 April\u00a02012<\/strong><\/p>\n

320 pp, hardback, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Review\/interview by Caroline Sanderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Galaxy Book of the Year Award in 2008, Kate Summerscale\u2019s classy true crime tale The Suspicions of Mr Whicher<\/em> was also a huge word-of-mouth success, bringing in sales in excess of 500,000 copies, and inspiring a primetime TV series.\u00a0 Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em>, Summerscale\u2019s eagerly-awaited follow-up is once again set in Victorian times, but it is not another ‘whodunit’.\u00a0 Rather it raises the equally compelling question: ‘Did she or didn\u2019t she?’ And instead of a youthful murder suspect, it places the heart and mind of a woman on trial.<\/p>\n

It was while she was researching Mr Whicher<\/em> that Summerscale came across a reference to a celebrated Victorian divorce case which intrigued her enough to look up the transcript of the trial in question. \u2018Although I wasn\u2019t able to do anything with it at the time, it stayed with me. It was a sort of puzzle. And once I embarked on unravelling the mystery, the book became not merely the solving of that puzzle but an attempt to reconstruct a life, and discover the truth,\u2019 she told me.<\/p>\n

Billed as a real-life Madame Bovary to Mr Whicher\u2019s<\/em> real-life Sherlock Holmes story, Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> centres on the private diary of Isabella Robinson, a well-to-do, but miserably married Victorian lady, whose face must \u2018wear an outward calm though the fires of Etna boil within her breast.\u2019 She pours onto the blank pages of her journal her innermost hopes, fears, miseries, her intellectual hunger and sexual frustrations, her religious doubts, and her likings for other men. Chief among these is Edward Lane, a handsome and brilliant doctor, and a married man, whom Isabella meets for the first time in Edinburgh in 1850, and soon discovers to be her yearned-for intellectual equal. After several years of platonic friendship, albeit fuelled by considerable lust and longing on Isabella\u2019s part, they have a short-lived and intermittent affair. Or do they? Therein lies a mystery that transfixed Victorian England.<\/p>\n

When Isabella fell ill sometime afterwards, her brutish husband took advantage of her indisposition to trawl through her things and discovered the diary, with its passionate account of her affair with Lane, as well as all her unconsummated yearnings. Mr Robinson subsequently sued for divorce, and the case \u2013 one of the first to be heard in the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes established in 1858 – became a sensation, amid public disbelief that a respectable woman and mother would ever dream, not merely of committing adultery, but of committing the intimate details to a diary. In the words of Summerscale, Isabella Robinson had written herself a \u2018drama in which she was the leading lady\u2019. The violence of the rhetoric against her, and the drawn-out nature of the case \u2013 it was not settled for nine months \u2013 is, she adds, evidence of how potentially threatening it was to the strict codes of Victorian society. \u2018It threw up a lot of issues about the sexuality of women, and the admissibility of private thoughts and feelings.\u2019 The veracity of the diary was debated at lurid length both in court and in the newspapers, with Isabella\u2019s (and by association, Edward Lane\u2019s) defence resting on proving that it was a fantasy; the work of a mad woman, rendered insane, and a \u2018sexual maniac\u2019 by the effects of \u2018uterine disease\u2019. But was the diary really a delusion? In the National Library of Scotland, Summerscale uncovered an archive of letters between Isabella and Edward \u2013 inadmissible as evidence in court \u2013 which, 150 years later, seemed to tell a rather different story.<\/p>\n

The Robinson case has a particular resonance because it took place at a time of great uncertainty in Victorian society, with matters relating to marriage, sex, religion, and human consciousness all hotly debated in the intellectual circles in which Isabella and Edward moved.\u00a0 Summerscale believes that there was probably more contemporary identification with Isabella\u2019s plight among her fellow women than was acknowledged by the male-dominated judiciary, and press. Even devoted wife Queen Victoria expressed some surprising doubts about the institution of matrimony. \u2018I think people marry far too much\u2026it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman a very doubtful happiness,\u2019 she wrote to her newly-wed daughter Vicky.\u00a0 And was it of Mrs Isabella Robinson that Wilkie Collins was thinking when he wrote in his 1866 novel, Armadale<\/em>: \u2018My misery is a woman\u2019s misery, and it will speak here, rather than nowhere; to my second self, in this book if I have no-one to hear me\u2019?<\/p>\n

By judicious use of such contemporary quotes, Summerscale beautifully broadens out the engrossing backdrop to this saddest of scandals, weaving in references from the work of Dickens, the Bront\u00eb sisters, and perhaps most appropriately of all, from Gustave Flaubert\u2019s Madame Bovary<\/em>. For in that novel, first published in 1857, another woman contemplates a life that is \u2018cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north\u2019.\u00a0 Summerscale is also fascinating on the contemporary craze for diary writing, as well as the rise of such alternative practices as phrenology, and homeopathy. Convinced of the merits of healing the mind and body in unison, Edward Lane was himself a pioneer of hydrotherapy, establishing a clinic reminiscent of today\u2019s Priory, which specialised in the addictions and nervous afflictions of those who lived \u2018hard and high\u2019. Among his patients was the chronically dyspeptic Charles Darwin, his condition a result of anxieties about his \u2018ever-lasting species Book\u2019.<\/p>\n

So what does Summerscale believe is the truth of the Robinson case? Did Isabella and Edward actually have an affair? \u2018For a long time, I found the diary very ambiguous: a fascinating document but completely irresolvable. After reading their letters, I became convinced that the diary was broadly true. But I hope I present the evidence in such a way that readers can make up their own minds. The fact that there is no absolute conclusion is the thing that gives it life.\u2019 And indeed, this compelling atmosphere of over-arching uncertainty is a trait that Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> shares with The Suspicions of Mr Whicher<\/em>. Summerscale feels that there are other parallels too. \u2018Both books are close-ups on a forgotten and chronologically contained moment. Again I\u2019ve tried to get under the skin of the characters, and tease out all the connections between the social and artistic concerns of the time, and find in them the roots of our own preoccupations and confusions.\u2019<\/p>\n

Despite the clear synergies between the two books, I found Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> a more compelling and satisfying read than its mega-selling predecessor because it examines so many questions which still consume us today. Isabella Robinson\u2019s tragedy was to be born into a time when no one seemed to be listening to those who asked them. \u00a0The crime in Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> is not a murder, but the vilification of an unhappy woman who dared not only to long for a different life, but to write that longing down. Reflecting on a particularly moving diary passage in which Isabella Robinson begs an imagined Reader to take pity on her plight, Summerscale concludes her book with the poignant thought that the readers of today might do exactly that.\u00a0 \u2018We can read her diary in a way that the Victorians could not have done. I wanted to\u00a0be the Reader she was reaching for.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review\/interview by Caroline Sanderson<\/p>\n

Billed as a real-life Madame Bovary to Mr Whicher<\/em>\u2019s real-life Sherlock Holmes story, Mrs Robinson\u2019s Disgrace<\/em> centres on the private diary of Isabella Robinson, a well-to-do, but miserably married Victorian lady, whose face must \u2018wear an outward calm though the fires of Etna boil within her breast.\u2019 She pours onto the blank pages of her journal her innermost hopes, fears, miseries, her intellectual hunger and sexual frustrations, her religious doubts, and her likings for other men[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2896,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions\/2896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}