From the number one bestselling, multi-award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher comes a brand new true story of Victorian scandal
Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008, winner of the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama. Her first book, the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Kate Summerscale has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in London. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace is her third book.
Like her previous book, I was hooked after the first few pages.
It's as good as non-fiction could possibly get
*Victoria Hislop, Daily Mail*
Extraordinary ... As one would expect from the author of The
Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the material here is handled with
confident subtlety. The history goes from the individual to the
individual's world with seductive ease. This is a highly considered
social history teased ... fascinating *****
*Daily Telegraph*
Summerscale strikes non-fiction gold for the third time
*Independent on Sunday*
As in the wildly successful The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the
strange tale of Mrs Robinson acts as a whirlpool for all the
furious undercurrents of an era. 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 *****
*Mail on Sunday 'Book of the Week'*
You'll find Fifty Shades of Grey on beaches everywhere ... but the
story of Mrs Robinson deserves a place on summer reading lists. She
is pretty hot stuff
*Boston Globe*
A masterful retelling of a true Victorian scandal ... a
breathtaking achievement ... Summerscale's account of this court
case is faultless; her seemingly inexhaustible capacity for
research renders what could be tedious and vividly dry alive ...
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
*Observer*
Book of the week ... a winning blend of biography and courtroom
drama - and an important slice of social history ... an absorbing
tale, admirably told by a mistress of her craft
*The Times*
Grippingly suspenseful ... Mrs Robinson's Disgrace displays a
scalpel-sharp investigative mind, and it vividly conveys the
immediate surroundings of the case, from the stench of the polluted
Thames infiltrating Westminster Hall to the degradations of
Victorian marriage
*Sunday Times*
As a guide to mid-Victorian cultural life ... Summerscale is simply
superb, and she sets a fine example of what cultural history can
do
*Guardian*
Told with dazzling detail and exquisite tenderness, this
non-fiction tale reads like a perfect novel
*Elle*
Absorbing ... grippingly told ... Summerscale's book is detailed,
expansive and well informed
*Spectator*
It's brilliant. Summerscale is a historian who writes like a
novelist. A good novelist
*Time Magazine*
Moving, compelling and brilliantly executed
*Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year*
The best kind of detective story ... Summerscale triumphantly
avoids fairy ink and poesy both, producing a gripping account of
the destruction of a marriage ... Sure to be a hit
*Sunday Telegraph*
This real-life Madame Bovary's ensuing divorce case scandalised
society and Kate Summerscale brilliantly re-creates a Victorian
world clinging to its rigid ideas about marriage and women's
sexuality
*Good Housekeeping*
Her first book since the genre-busting Mr Whicher, and it makes a
suitably gripping follow-up ... Summerscale puts this peculiar case
in a wonderfully rich context of fads of the day ... Her courtroom
reconstructions are vivid and enthralling, her research is
impeccable and her narration coolly authoritative as she draws
together what was happening around her subject and makes Mrs
Robinson's volatile state of mind much more explicable
*Evening Standard*
Where Kate Summerscale's exhaustively researched book is most
fascinating and disturbing is in laying bare contemporary anxieties
about female sexuality ****
*Sunday Express*
Far more than the account of a failed marriage and its aftermath -
or even the story of a torrid affair, imaginary or otherwise. In
the manner of her prize-winning The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate
Summerscale takes the records and reports of the court case and
treats them like a detective story, skillfully building up the
suspense
*Financial Times*
Utterly engrossing
*Woman & Home*
A marvellously compelling narrative as well as a superb piece of
historical detection. But more than that, Summerscale has astutely
positioned the case at the intersection of various legal and social
developments
*Times Literary Supplement*
Kate Summerscale has a knack for rescuing Victorian histories from
obscurity and turning them into the most compulsive books you're
likely to find in any non-fiction section ... Thought-provoking
stuff from a writer who, in putting the past in the dock, teaches
us about who we are now
*Scotsman*
A great book-group read
*Red*
A gripping read: thoughtful, and studded with asides on Victorian
culture
*The Lady*
A highly original and intimate look into the double standards of
Victorian life ... Mrs Robinson could be as big a hit as Downton
Abbey
*Washington Times*
Kate Summerscale follows The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, her gripping
reconstruction of a Victorian murder case, with a look at domestic
horror of a very different kind. It's the heart-breaking true story
of Isabella Robinson
*Irish Times ‘30 Great Summer Reads’*
A fascinating insight into the inequalities of Victorian society,
women's place in it and the boundaries of privacy
*Psychologies*
A fascinating story of desire, prejudice and cover-up ...
Summerscale turns super-sleuth again
*Tatler*
Summerscale painstakingly analyses medicine, property, divorce and
the treatment of women
*Guardian Readers’ Books of the Year*
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