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Kate Summerscale

Tuesday 31st July 2012

Venue
St Peter's Church, Broad Street, Ely, CB7 4AH
Start Time
7.30pm
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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.