Catherine Peters
Court in the Act
Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
By Kate Summerscale
Bloomsbury 303pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Kate Summerscale has done it again. Her rare combination of scholarly precision and novelistic skill, displayed in her award-winning account of a Victorian murder, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, are used to tremendous effect in this account of a scandalous divorce case. Once more her dark Victorian page-turner also reveals much about the age in which it took place.
By the 1850s England was in flux. New scientific theories and discoveries collided with established religion, and the increasing pressure for women’s rights was in conflict with legal precedent, social norms and the medical theories of the day. The generally accepted ideas about sex and gender in the 1850s were
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony