From the number one bestselling, multi-award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

FROM BRITAIN’S TOP-SELLING TRUE CRIME WRITER

'Extraordinary' PHILIPPA GREGORY, DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Grippingly suspenseful' SUNDAY TIMES

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.

‘I’m all admiration: she has turned a sepia photograph, curling and tattered, into a film that runs through the mind in glorious and unimpeachable Technicolor’ RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER

'Summerscale strikes non-fiction gold for the third time' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'Moving, compelling and brilliantly executed' DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘Summerscale’s brilliance lies not only in recognising the power of a particular story, but in charting,
with beautiful precision, its strange echoes and reverberations’ CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY

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