Kate Summerscale
Tuesday 31st July 2012, 7.30pm
St Peter's Church, Broad Street, Ely, CB7 4AH
7.30pm
Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher won the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is an opening into another vanished world: repressed Victorian womanhood. It’s a compelling story of romance and fidelity, insanity, fantasy, and the boundaries of privacy in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality.
On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.
Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife, longing for passion and learning, companionship and love.