Miranda Seymour

The Marriage Plot

The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England

By Elizabeth Foyster

Oneworld 330pp £20 order from our bookshop

Lunacy, as lovers of Wilkie Collins’s novels will be aware, was a lucrative business in 19th-century England (and not only for the owners of the country’s innumerable asylums). Anybody who wanted to lay their hands on a fortune – as did Collins’s magnificently wicked Count Fosco and his less lovable sidekick, Sir Percival Glyde – found it remarkably easy to lock away a perfectly sane heiress and to seize her estate.

…

Subscribe to read the full article

KentState_Sept2016_online

hamilton_sept2016_online

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Costume of the life force? Words fail.' Germaine Greer on an ode to the condom ,
    • It's Write on Kew for the next four days. There are free copies of Literary Review about; why not dip your toe into the magazine?,
    • Which sci-fi author time-travelled to ancient Rome and lived a parallel life a persecuted Christian named Thomas? ,
    • You can pick up free copies of Literary Review at Write On Kew, which begins tomorrow. Fill your boots (with magazines).,
    • Michael Burleigh reads a survey of the rise of Asia ,
    • The Book of Kells, the Codex Amiatinus and the Carmina Burana: manuscript celebrities ,
    • 'Her bias is firmly towards all that is subterranean, hidden, buried, cavernous': Gillian Tindall explores Crossrail ,
    Follow Us