Quick summary - Isabella Robinson is a widow whose second marriage to Henry Robinson is not a happy one--probably emotionally, if not physically, abusive. Isabella is a woman with strong "Romantic" passions, and she is attracted to a doctor (also married) who is 10 years younger and a family friend. Over several years, Isabella records her infatuation with Dr. Edward Lane (and a couple of other younger men) in her diary. At one point, her desire for Lane seems to be reciprocated; there are several entries in the diary that, although they are written in flowery, euphemistic Victorian language, seem to indicate that Isabella and Edward may have had a brief sexual affair. While Isabella is delirious with fever, Henry goes snooping through her things and finds the diary. He immediately began trying to get a divorce under Britian's new Divorce Act (this is in 1858) on the grounds of adultery, based on her diary entries.
The book details the progress of the trial, the strategy the defense attorneys for both Isabella and Edward used, and the public reaction to the salacious (to the Victorians) diary entries (which were read aloud in court and published in newspapers). The law specified that when a woman was accused of adultery, her lover had to be named as part of the divorce suit (oddly enough, that was not the case when a man was accused - hmmmm), and Edward Lane was desperate to preserve his reputation, since his business (a medical spa that many women used) would be ruined if he were found to have committed adultery with Isabella. The strategy was to portray Isabella as essentially insane and her diary entries as overly-imaginative fiction from a sexually-obsessed woman suffering from "uterine disease."
I felt a little sorry for Isabella as I read the account of the trial, although how stupid was she to write all this down??? No one seemed at all concerned with her reputation or her humiliation; I felt like she was completely de-humanized and turned into a case study for all the (male) doctors with their pet theories about women and their sexuality. I remember from my Rhetoric of Women's Suffrage class in my Ph.D. program that women were seen as likely to suffer from hysteria that arose from their uterus, making them unsuited for intellectual activities like, say, voting or anything, really, that was not within the "domestic sphere." Don't we still see echoes of that line of thought today? Why is it so often an issue that a woman is trying to do something outside of traditional gender roles?
I was also kind of disgusted by the media coverage of the trial and the apparent appetite the public had for all the juicy details. The Saturday Review condemned the publication of the diary entries, calling them a "stream of filth" that were "unfit for the reading of any decent woman" (that "hysteria" thing again, I guess). And yet, the "filth," not just of the Robinson case but of other divorce trials, continued to be published, to the point that even Queen Victoria decried them as making it "almost impossible for a paper to be trusted in the hands of a young lady or boy." We think of the Victorian age as a period when people were extremely prudish, to the point that piano legs had to be covered with skirts. Yet, there was apparently a thriving market for pornography in Holywell Street in London. It's the hypocrisy that gets to me, I guess - on the one hand, condemning Isabella's diary while on the other buying and devouring the newspaper accounts that included the diary's details.
Henry Robinson lost his divorce suit, but Isabella was ruined; she lived the rest of her life in several rented houses, moving from town to town (maybe to escape public notoriety?). Summerscale has a poignant conclusion to her work when she tries to answer my question above (why write a diary about things you are doing you know will get you in trouble?). She says, "Part of her, at least, wanted to be heard." Poor Isabella. Stuck in an abusive marriage, consumed by wanting someone she shouldn't want, having her private thoughts made a public spectacle, unable to escape the rigid place her time in history squeezed women into. I didn't really like her, but I felt for her.
One last thought - while I liked the look into Victorian social history, there were several times while I was reading this book when I thought, "how, HOW can someone take a subject like this and make it so boring?" Granted, that wasn't my reaction through the entire book, but there were a lot of side trips into social history (like about diary-writing in general) that interrupted the flow of the narrative. But....isn't the social history why I read it in the first place? I guess you could say I'm ambivalent about the book.
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