Tuesday **29th** May 7pm: Talk & Signing with Kate Summerscale (change of date!)
Kate Summerscale’s forthcoming book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, is one of the most anticipated books of 2012. Her previous book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, became a bestseller and won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2008. The book was later dramatised on TV.
When Isabella Robinson met Edward Lane in 1850, the pair became friends and – according to her diary – intimates, in an affair that was played out in the divorce courts.
In her follow-up to the bestselling ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’, Kate Summerscale tells the true story of a frustrated Victorian wife undone by her salacious personal testimony.
Kate will be giving a talk, followed by questions and a signing in Hungerford Croft Hall about Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. Tickets are £5 (redeemable against the book on the night, making it a beautiful hardback for £11.99). Wine will be avauilable to buy by the glass.
View Kate talking about the inspiration for the book: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9232281/Mrs-Robinsons-Disgrace-by-Kate-Summerscale-extract-one.html
About the book:
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 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. 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, which she was to find hard to shake…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, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife, longing for passion and learning, companionship and love.
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