![]() 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. 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. ![]() ‘I leaned back at last in silent joy,’ her husband read, ‘in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face, so radiant with beauty, that had dazzled my outward and inward vision since I first saw him.’ In page after page she poured out admissions not only of her all-consuming desire for the doctor but how, in the end, seemingly she had had her way. What came tumbling out that day in the spring of 1856 were her graphic confessions of dread, contempt and disgust - which cannot have been a complete surprise, because their 12-year marriage had been a disaster from day one.īut what sent him into a rage were Isabella’s florid descriptions of her desperate emotional, intellectual and physical - yes, physical - ache for a doctor friend, Edward Lane. He went to her desk - unlocked, for once - took out the red-backed private diaries he knew she kept hidden away there and began to leaf through them. Isabella Robinson's florid descriptions of her desperate emotional, intellectual and physical desire for a man not her husband shocked the time ![]() Passion: The Victorians preferred classical allusions to sex. ![]()
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