Review: Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, Kate Summerscale (2012)

My debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress (2020), is about Lydia Robinson, the married woman who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, the Bronte sisters’ brother. So I was intrigued to read a (non-fiction) book about another real Mrs Robinson—Isabella Robinson—whose divorce scandalised the nineteenth-century press.

Kate Summerscale’s 2012 book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, is less of a biography of Isabella, and more of a social history about the advent of divorce in Victorian Britain, which takes the Robinson vs. Robinson & Lane case as its centrepiece. 

Like my Mrs Robinson, Isabella was in her forties when she began an affair with a younger man. However, in this case, the object of her passions was also married and her social equal—a doctor and proponent of hydropathy, whose business would be significantly damaged if courts found he had committed adultery.

But, wait, you might be thinking—wasn’t divorce illegal in England? It was during the 1840s when Branwell and Lydia engaged in their ill-fated affair but, in 1858, when Henry Robinson read his wife’s private diaries and exposed her infidelities, the legal system had just provided a provision for a total separation, albeit with caveats. 

Divorce still couldn’t be procured due to incompatibility or unhappiness. But a man could now divorce his wife for adultery. For wives things were harder. They had to demonstrate that their husband had been guilty of an additional crime (e.g. abandonment or cruelty)—breaking the marital vow was not enough. 

In practice then, divorce was complicated and expensive, so it was largely the upper middle classes who flocked to the court. The Robinsons were wealthy and well connected. Henry was fixated on revenge. The story was one designed to capture the public imagination.

A curiosity of the case was Mrs Robinson’s written confession—her diary, a document she’d assumed her husband would never read. Isabella’s legal counsel ultimately “defended” her from the charge of adultery by arguing that she was insane. She was, they claimed, a nymphomaniac who had blurred the lines between fact and fiction in her journal, an adulteress in her heart, but not in reality. 

This Victorian refusal to accept the simplest explanation for women’s actions, especially when this involved acknowledging their sexual appetites, is one I’ve written about previously on this blog, for instance in my 2013 Women in the Witness Box series. This pattern played out in both literature and life, from the notorious murder trial of Madeleine Smith to Isabella’s divorce hearing.

The testimony about the diary also reveals public uneasiness about the influence of novels on their (largely female) readership. Women were considered prone to hysteria, exaggeration and dangerous excitement. And Isabella Robinson was seen as having novelised her own life, whether by acting out her fantasies or just indulging in them privately. As Gwendolen Fairfax notes in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

Overall, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is a good read if you’re interested in the history of divorce and/or women’s rights in the nineteenth century. There are also great passages on Victorian medicine and pre-Freudian psychology, as Summerscale discusses how the Robinsons and their circle engaged with phrenology and sought “cures” for masturbation (spoiler: prostitutes). But don’t pick this up expecting titillation. Isabella and the men she desired don’t leap of the page. This is a scholarly, if accessible, work; Summerscale leaves sensation to the novelists. 

What book would you like me to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. If you’d like to read a novel about Lydia Robinson, whose disgrace preceded Isabella Robinson’s, make sure to check out Bronte’s Mistress in hardcover, audiobook and e-book. And, for updates on my writing and blog, subscribe to my monthly email newsletter below. 

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Women in the Witness Box: Naomi

Over the past few weeks I've looked at a range of female characters who appear in fictional Victorian trials, considering novels and short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. While I hope to come back to this topic, following up on suggestions from readers, for now I’m bringing this discussion to a close by returning to Braddon to review one last female witness, whose theatrical performance in court has implications for the convergence of the theatrical and domestic discussed in an earlier post.

A nineteenth-century divorce court

Naomi, a central character of the novella ‘As The Heart Knoweth’ (pub. 1903) appears as witness at her father’s inquest, succeeding in maintaining a calm demeanour when she has in fact murdered him herself. Braddon’s discussion of trials at this juncture makes the connection between court and theatre even more explicit than we have seen elsewhere:

‘[In the courts there are] tragedy and comedy, crime, treason, love, jealousy, all the throes and workings of human passions, all the shifts and expedients of human craft, exhibited in their naked realism. The strongest naturalistic novel or the wildest sensational romance is a fairy tale for children compared with the revelations of the Old Bailey, or the Inns of Court, or the Palais de Justice.’

This is not a straightforward alignment in any way. The court is a place of performance and Naomi’s performance allows her to get away with murder (‘she answered even the most trying questions quietly and firmly’) but Braddon’s narrator insists that the passions displayed in the court are natural – more natural than the realist novel – just as defenders of the theatre spoke of acting as the display of natural feelings.

What’s more, Naomi’s composure makes her not only an ideal witness and actress, but the perfect middle class wife. The vicar Gray admires her appearance at the inquest, noting that ‘that calm good sense of hers enabled her to suppress all hysterical and emotional demonstrations’. From the first moment of her appearance in the story Naomi’s fitness for the domestic sphere is based on her murderous qualities – she would be ‘a magnificent model for a painter who wanted a Charlotte Corday’.

Like Mrs Beauly then, Naomi’s quiet, respectable kind of display, which gives her the appearance of a Mary Barton or an Esther Lyon, is even more dangerous than the showy, over-sexualised performer like Phoebe or Lady Audley. Her naturalism and embodiment of middle-class virtues – the two most common areas of praise for real Victorian actresses – disguise her ability to transgress and the courtroom (a place of apparent ‘truth’)  is the perfect arena in which to pull this off.

‘As the Heart Knoweth’ is available in the same volume of short stories as ‘Sweet Simplicity’. If there are any other Victorian trials you think the Secret Victorianist should return to at a later date, let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Women in the Witness Box: Mrs Beauly

A nineteenth-century divorce court

Moving on from the transparent innocence of Mary Barton and Esther Lyon, and the deceitful doubleness of Braddon’s two heroines, Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) gives us yet another perspective on the fictional trial and the Victorian female witness. While she is not the one on trial here, merely a witness like Mary or Esther, Mrs Beauly encapsulates the difficulties of court ‘performance’, as the reader, as much as the assembled crowd, is left in total doubt as to how much she should be trusted.

Again, we see an emphasis on the female witness’ appearance, perhaps more than on what she says – Mrs Beauly, like Lady Audley or Phoebe, is powerful because her attractiveness can win her sympathy in a potentially dangerous way:

‘An interest of a new kind was excited by the appearance of the next witness. This was no less a person than Mrs Beauly herself. The Report describes her as a remarkably attractive person; modest and lady-like in her manner, and, to all appearance, feeling sensitively the public position in which she was placed.’

While this passage seems initially to praise Mrs Beauly, there are hints of unease. The insertion ‘to all appearance’ suggests the possibility of the kind of duplicity we have seen elsewhere, while the ‘interest of a new kind’ is undoubtedly a sexual one. This is complicated by the fact that we cannot be sure who this cynicism about Mrs Beauly’s performance originates with – with the narrator Valeria, who is naturally suspicious about a woman who previously enjoyed her husband’s affections, or with the written ‘Report’ of the trial she is summarising. In the sections quoted verbatim from the Report however, there are suggestions that this work plays up the dramatic nature of the criminal court (even if Valeria contributes to this likewise). The legal professionals (who are described by Valeria as ‘actors in the Judicial Drama’) are even laid out in the Report in a list formatted to resemble the dramatis personae section of a play text. Collins seems to be taking the destabilising theatricality of the court even further by suggesting it continues outside the courtroom, in the way cases are reported in the press and presented to the public in volumes presented very similarly to his own fiction.

The Law and the Lady destroys the ideal of the court as a place of truth telling entirely, with the ‘Not Proven’ verdict leaving legal process in an ambiguous state of uncertainty. The verdict, as well as other details of the crime Valeria’s husband has been tried for (the revelation of private documents, the use of arsenic etc.), also deliberately recalls a famous real life murder trial – that of Madeleine Smith in 1857 – which had been highly theatrical in its playing out in the press, and was seen by many as the ultimate example of a woman getting away with murder because of her youth and attractiveness.

Madeleine Smith

While the potential murderer in this novel then is male, the inconclusiveness of the novel on the question of Mrs Beauly and its debt to the Madeleine Smith case (dealt with well here), makes it a great read for those interested in the courtroom, performance and gender. Again (as in the other sensation novels I have dealt with in this series) we can have no faith in the Law, and, consequently, the truth can only come to light through investigation outside the courtroom – and, perhaps for the first time in English literature, Collins makes his ‘detective’ figure a woman.

Who should be next in my witness box? Let me know on Facebook, Twitter (@SVictorianist) or below!

Women in the Witness Box: Lady Audley and Phoebe

‘But Lady Audley doesn’t appear in court!’ I imagine quick-witted readers of M.E. Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret protesting. She doesn't. My consideration of female witnesses in fictional Victorian courts (introduced here) continues with someone very different from Mary Barton or Esther Lyon - someone who is not only very guilty, but who is infamously kept from appearing in court.

A nineteenth-century divorce court

Lady Audley does not stand in a dock – she is sequestered in an asylum. The doctor who attends her presumes Robert Audley wishes to deny Lady Audley a court appearance ‘to save the esclandre of a Chancery suit’, casting the court as an arena of shameful display. But Robert has another fear. Lucy will not only face a divorce hearing, but be tried for murder, and she is simply too good (and too attractive) an actress for this to be allowed to happen. It is the ‘sea of eager faces’ looking at the woman he himself has fetishised which he fears – Lady Audley could excite the jury’s sympathy through her falsity, just as Esther Lyon does in Felix Holt with her sincerity, and her innocent appearance will allow her to do this.

Lucy’s 'sister' in the Braddon canon does just this – the child-killing Phoebe in the 1894 short story ‘Sweet Simplicity’. Phoebe’s closeness to Lady Audley is clear. Like Lucy, she is blonde, blue-eyed and child-like. Like Lucy, she is guilty of a heinous crime and has a history of sexual transgression. And, like Lucy, she has had a semi-servile role (she is a nursemaid, while the future Lady Audley was a governess). Phoebe’s adversary is called Roger, Lucy’s Robert, and each man is a member of the central household’s extended family, but inhabits an outside position in the home. Phoebe’s own name also conjures up the earlier novel (Braddon’s most popular from its publication to today). The name ‘Phoebe’ is shared with Lady Audley’s servant, who acts as Lucy’s double in many ways in the book (‘Do you know, Phoebe, I have heard some people say you and I are alike?’).

The Phoebe of ‘Sweet Simplicity’ finds herself appearing at the inquest of the child killed in her care and very nearly manages to act her way out of punishment:

‘There was an inquest the following day, and Phoebe repeated her story of Roger’s sending her to the house for letters, in exactly the same words as she had used in the study at the Cliff, and with the same flood of tears; and again Roger declared, this time upon oath, that Phoebe’s story was a tissue of lies; but Roger’s white angry face made a very bad impression upon the jury, as compared with the roses and lilies of Phoebe’s childlike countenance, and the simplicity of her words and manner.’

This passage is a strong contrast to the ideal of the court as an arena for truth presented in Mary Barton. Roger is innocent – but does not appear so. Phoebe is the opposite. There is a disconnect between presentation and reality – the very difficulty which makes the theatre suspect is applied to a court setting. The narration goes on to call the inquest ‘a triumph for Phoebe, her tears and her childlike prettiness having touched all hearts’, in language evoking theatrical reviews, and Phoebe’s earlier misdemeanours centre around her involvement with ‘a theatrical gentlemen in Londesborough’.

As in Lady Audley’s Secret, eventually a lawyer saves the day, but in each case he must do so by operating outside the courtroom. The realist novels we have looked at have true-hearted women reflecting the justice of the court system – in the world of sensation, women perform, and allowing them into the witness box can be very dangerous.

Who should be my next woman in the witness box? Let me know here, on Twitter (@SVictorianist) or on Facebook!

The only modern reprint of ‘Sweet Simplicity’ (to my knowledge) is from the Sensation Press in The Fatal Marriage and Other Stories.

Women in the Witness Box: Esther Lyon

A nineteenth-century divorce court

The court, much like the theatre, is a place of revelation and display, and trials, inquests and other court hearings play a prominent role in Victorian fiction, providing great opportunities for dramatic action and the analysis of ‘truth’. When women appear in fictional courts they are subject to the same concerns about performance that I have discussed in relation to the theatrical. Some authors choose to use the court as an arena in which true feelings can be revealed, as loquaciousness is demanded, rather than the usual emotional repression; others – largely sensation writers – do the opposite, depicting the court as the perfect stage for deceptive performance, with its corresponding associations with sexual deviancy. Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at several women who appear as witnesses in fictional trials – looking at how the theatricality of the justice system is played against its ‘detective’ role, in uncovering truth. I began by looking at the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton. Today it’s the turn of Esther Lyon from George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866).

The two women, Mary and Esther, despite their different social backgrounds, find themselves in strikingly similar positions, acting as witnesses as the man they love is tried for murder. Each has had rival suitors for her affections and, for each, her appearance in court reveals the true bent of her romantic feelings, giving her the opportunity to express what society demands she repress under more usual circumstances. There are, however, two important differences. Esther has not, like Mary, been called upon to act as witness. She chooses to speak, disrupting the normal course of court proceedings. And, in a related point, while both women speak ‘truth’, Eliot locates this truth as similarly outside the remit of legal process, not as its natural result (as Job had it in Mary Barton). She writes:

‘When a woman feels purely and nobly, that ardour of hers which breaks through formulas too rigorously urged on men by daily practical needs, makes one of her most precious influences: she is the added impulse that shatters the stiffening crust of cautious experience. Her inspired ignorance gives a sublimity to actions so incongruously simple, that otherwise they would make men smile. Some of that ardour which has flashed out and illuminated all poetry and history was burning today in the bosom of sweet Esther Lyon. In this, at least, her woman's lot was perfect: that the man she loved was her hero; that her woman's passion and her reverence for rarest goodness rushed together in an undivided current. And today they were making one danger, one terror, one irresistible impulse for her heart. Her feelings were growing into a necessity for action, rather than a resolve to act. She could not support the thought that the trial would come to an end, that sentence would be passed on Felix, and that all the while something had been omitted which might have been said for him.’

The above passage is highly gendered, with women being associated with feelings and impulses restrained by a male-dominated society. The passage’s inclusion at this point in the trial associates the Law with the ‘formulas’ opposed to the expression of Esther’s pure and noble feelings, while the scholarly knowledge of the lawyers praised in Mary Barton is rejected in favour of a woman’s ‘inspired ignorance’. Yet this is not unproblematic. Esther is undermined repeatedly. Only ‘some’ of the ardour which has informed the past deeds of the famous (presumably men) is found in her action which comes across as a little bathetic. And Eliot’s qualifiers add to this effect – in these feelings, ‘at least’, she is perfect, but how worthy are her actions of praise at all if they arise from ‘necessity’, not ‘resolve’?

But Esther’s actions also provoke a further, more serious, suspicion. She is not, like Mary, unaware of the effect her appearance may have on the assembled crowd:

‘If it was the jury who were to be acted on, she argued to herself, there might have been an impression made on their feelings which would determine their verdict. Was it not constantly said and seen that juries pronounced Guilty or Not Guilty from sympathy for or against the accused?’

The vocabulary here is interesting. The phrase ‘acted on’ suggests the performative nature of court testimony, while the appeal to ‘sympathy’ fits in with contemporary acting theory. When Esther speaks, we are told:

‘There was no blush on her face: she stood, divested of all personal considerations whether of vanity or shyness.’

But while this excuses her of the sexual suspicion arising from an awareness of the effect she can have on a viewer, the prospect of a woman ‘divested of all personal considerations’ again suggests the task of an actress. Esther, even at her most active, is a vessel, a vessel for feeling, influenced by others. And while, in her case, she is acted upon by an individual – Felix -, in allowing herself to act as a vehicle for the expression of feeling, regardless of social etiquette and decorum, she is aligned with the actress who must do likewise:

‘This bright, delicate, beautiful-shaped thing that seemed most like a toy or ornament—some hand had touched the chords, and there came forth music that brought tears.’

Which fictional Victorian trial should come under the microscope next? Let me know below, on Facebook or on Twitter!

Women in the Witness Box: Mary Barton

A nineteenth-century divorce court

The court, much like the theatre, is a place of revelation and display, and trials, inquests and other court hearings play a prominent role in Victorian fiction, providing great opportunities for dramatic action and the analysis of ‘truth’. When women appear in fictional courts they are subject to the same concerns about performance that I have discussed in relation to the theatrical. Some authors choose to use the court as an arena in which true feelings can be revealed, as loquaciousness is demanded from female witnesses, rather than the usual emotional repression; others – largely sensation writers – do the opposite, depicting the court as the perfect stage for deceptive performance, with its corresponding associations with sexual deviancy. Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at several women who appear as witnesses in fictional trials – looking at how the theatricality of the justice system is played against its ‘detective’ role, in uncovering truth. First up is Mary Barton.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s eponymous heroine in Mary Barton (1848) finds herself as a witness for the prosecution against her lover Jem in a murder trial, although he is (of course) innocent. She asks the advice of her friend Job for dealing with this situation. His answer indicates an idealised view of the law court as a place where performance is futile:

‘Thou canst do nought better than tell the truth. Truth's best at all times, they say; and for sure it is when folk have to do with lawyers; for they're 'cute and cunning enough to get it out sooner or later, and it makes folk look like Tom Noddies, when truth follows falsehood, against their will.’

Job’s answer may be a pragmatic and practical one, with a humorous overtone (truth is necessary when dealing with educated lawyers). But his belief in the essential supremacy of truth in the justice system sets the tone for Mary’s appearance in court and testimony. Not only does the truth about the murder win out, but the court even gives Mary the opportunity to speak a further truth - about the romantic feelings she would otherwise be unable to express. The moment at which Mary chooses to speak truthfully is a personal climax, prompted by a very public scenario. Asked if she loved Jem or the victim, we have access to her inner reaction:

‘And who was he, the questioner, that he should dare so lightly to ask of her heart's secrets? That he should dare to ask her to tell, before that multitude assembled there, what woman usually whispers with blushes and tears, and many hesitations, to one ear alone?

‘So, for an instant, a look of indignation contracted Mary's brow, as she steadily met the eyes of the impertinent counsellor. But, in that instant, she saw the hands removed from a face beyond, behind; and a countenance revealed of such intense love and woe,—such a deprecating dread of her answer; and suddenly her resolution was taken. The present was everything; the future, that vast shroud, it was maddening to think upon; but NOW she might own her fault, but NOW she might even own her love. Now, when the beloved stood thus, abhorred of men, there would be no feminine shame to stand between her and her avowal.'

Mary’s virtue here is demonstrated not only by her truthfulness, but by the lack of concern she shows for how she will appear in her conclusive thoughts. Her initial questions deal with this worry about self-revelation, but this is subsumed by her love and concern for Jem which is greater, as her focus shifts to looking at him and thinking about how he appears to the rest of the courtroom ‘audience’. Throughout this chapter Gaskell is at pains to demonstrate how closely connected Mary’s appearance is to her thoughts and feelings – the way she looks is no act, but the organic manifestation of her emotions. The ‘look of indignation’ which crosses her brow can reveal to those watching the feelings which the narration gives us access to, and, a few lines earlier, Mary has been shown to disappoint those looking for a woman who plays up her beauty in her courtroom ‘performance’:

‘Many who were looking for mere flesh and blood beauty, mere colouring, were disappointed; for her face was deadly white, and almost set in its expression, while a mournful bewildered soul looked out of the depths of those soft, deep, grey eyes. But others recognised a higher and a stranger kind of beauty; one that would keep its hold on the memory for many after years.’

This passage is interesting in several ways. Mary, although beautiful, is disassociated from fleshy beauty with its carnal implications. Her beauty provides direct access to the soul (and so truth). The artificiality of the other imagined woman is indicated by the use of the word ‘colouring’, which suggests make-up, while Mary’s almost fixed expression is a direct contrast to the fluid expressiveness praised in stage acting of the period. Mary is still on display in court, and is an object of admiration. But she does not set out to be attractive. She has little concern for how she appears at all, so focussed is she on Jem. In these ways, she is not so much shown to be opposed to the theatrical – she is a natural actress, who allows her body to become a vessel for the expression of emotion, giving the kind of a natural, artless but affective performance which garners praise.

Which fictional Victorian trial should I write about next? Let me know here, on Facebook, or on Twitter (@SVictorianist)!