Mrs Robinson's Disgrace

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.

Simply superb, Extraordinary, Like her previous book, I was hooked after the first few pages. It's as good as non-fiction could possibly get, Grippingly suspenseful ... Mrs Robinson's Disgrace displays a scalpel-sharp investigative mind, and it vividly conveys the immediate surroundings of the case, from the stench of the polluted Thames infiltrating Westminster Hall to the degradations of Victorian marriage, as evidenced in contemporary divorce cases, Summerscale strikes nonfiction gold for the third time

Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama. Her first book, the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Kate Summerscale has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in north London.