Contemplating Adultery
The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
This is the passionate story of a true epistolatory love affair between a Victorian lady and a German prince. In the early 1830s, an unhappily married Englishwoman falls in love with a man she has never met - a German prince, author of the bestseller that she is translating into English. Using the German embassy couriers to carry their letters back and forth, they correspond ever more audaciously, right under the nose of her melancholy, preoccupied husband. Swept up by a storm of passion, she writes in an unveiled way about her disappointment in marriage, her hunger for affection, intimacy and love. Yet in reality she is anything but an unprincipled woman, and since divorce is out of the question her thoughts turn to adultery. This book reveals her dilemma in a fascinating and poignant journey into the mind and soul of a gifted woman who dared to circumvent the mores of the day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sarah Austin, a wife, mother and accomplished writer in early Victorian England, fell passionately in love with a dashing German prince, an author of novels and travel journals whose works she translated. Although they never met, they carried on a passionate, long-distance courtship. Over a period of three years, Austin vented her frustration about the austere, hypochondriacal scholar who was her husband and poured out her love in epistles so extraordinarily emotional and erotically charged as to disprove the Victorian stereotype of the prudish, sexually passive female. Having discovered the correspondence in Poland in the 1980s, Joseph Hamburger, a professor of political science at Yale, and his wife, Lotte, coauthors of Troubled Lives , linked the letters with meticulous research. Their narrative offers information as engrossing as the correspondence itself regarding the double life and circumstances of this remarkably independent, brilliant and charming woman. Illustrations not seen by PW.
