A neglected wife, her X-rated diary in Victorian Britain

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

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Isabella Robinson was a well-to-do Victorian lady, the wife of a successful businessman and the mother of three children.

To the outside world, the Robinsons were as prosperous and respectable as could be, living in a smart area of Edinburgh, attended by four servants, mixing with the social and intellectual elite.

But Mrs Robinson’s diary, which she started keeping in 1849, told a different tale.
After a fairly disastrous first marriage, ending in the madness and death of her husband, she had reluctantly accepted Henry Robinson on his third proposal.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2143441/Heres-original-Mrs-Robinson.html#ixzz1ulKQ8GTT

After her fevered confession to her husband - Robinson confiscated his wife’s journals, along with hundreds of other letters, essays, notes and poems of hers, took custody of their two children and turfed her out.

The scene was set for a scandal — played out in the newly constituted divorce courts  that rocked Victorian England’s treasured image of blissful family life and a wife’s happy, subservient role in it.
Observers asked themselves how such a well-brought-up, middle-class lady could have had such lustful thoughts and dreams, let alone acted on them?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2143299/Mrs-Robinsons-Disgrace-A-neglected-wife-X-rated-diary-Victorian-Britain-discovered-women-enjoy-sex-too.html#ixzz1ulLvU51U

Men in high places quivered with anger and anxiety, and the judges even ordered female spectators out of the Westminster Hall courtroom for fear of corrupting their morals, so salacious and inflammatory was some of the evidence thought to be.
 This now largely forgotten case comes back to life in a new book by Kate Summerscale, author of the highly acclaimed, best-selling and prize-winning The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher.

What exactly was going on beneath the starched petticoats and buttoned-up bodices of our great-great-great grandmothers?

With Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, she shifts her forensic eye from a celebrated Victorian murder to the secrets and lies of a monstrous Victorian marriage.

It is an intriguing story that challenges the conventional view of respectable English society in the 19th century.
 What exactly was going on beneath the starched petticoats and buttoned-up bodices of our great-great-great grandmothers? Much much more, it turns out, than we can ever have suspected.
 The case was a complex one, mired in claim and counter-claim, but one fact was largely unquestioned — that Henry Robinson was a rotten husband. Obnoxious, sullen, selfish, uneducated and rude, he married Isabella — a  thirtysomething widow with a son — for her inherited money, which he then purloined for his own purposes, though he was a wealthy man in his own right.  He ran a thriving business building steam boats and sugar mills, which took him away from home frequently.
 This left her feeling abandoned and lonely in a loveless marriage, but also relieved to be without the brute. In his absence, she had time and opportunity for finer things — literature, poetry, philosophy, science, religion.
 And love. And passion. And the search for happiness and fulfilment