Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace

Starred review from February 20, 2012
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.)

May 1, 2012
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.

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April 15, 2012

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

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