Book extract: The original Mrs Robinson

Yes, I remember Royal Circus. Of course I do: it was our first flat and I loved it from the start. It was where my wife and I brought our babies back from the hospital, on those strangest, most magical car journeys of all. When they grew into toddlers, we’d stand before our second-floor window and point out to them the festival fireworks exploding over the Castle, or the hungover drunks stumbling in the New Year’s Day snow. They won’t remember any of this but I always will.

We lived at No 10, but on account of it being a posh street, there was an X on the front door instead. It being Edinburgh, we didn’t know our neighbours. And then something strange happened. At my college – at the other end of the country – there had only been 12 people studying the subject I chose. One day, I met one of them, on the pavement outside our flat. He said he lived around the corner, but was planning to buy a flat in 8 Royal Circus, so he would be our neighbour. The next thing I heard, he had been killed, a bystander caught up in a shootout between gangs in Russia.

We moved soon afterwards, but whenever I pass 8 Royal Circus, I still think of him. And until I read Kate Summerscale’s astonishing book Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, that was the only tragedy I knew of that took place behind its doors.

Four years ago, Summerscale’s last book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a brilliant retelling of the 1860 hunt for the murderer of the three-year-old child of a well-off English family, won practically every book award going and was adapted into an ITV drama.

Her new book – Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace – is, if anything, even more gripping. This time, though, it’s not the study of a murder, but of an unhappily married middle-class woman who became infatuated with a successful doctor. She wrote about their intimate encounters in her diary. When her husband discovered it, he petitioned for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. In 1858, it was one of the first cases heard by the new divorce court set up in London. When extracts from the diary were read out, Victorian Britain was scandalised.

The previous year, Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, about a bored, provincial wife who had an affair, had been published in France – though it remained too shocking to be translated into English for almost two decades. But the story of Isabella Robinson and her relationship with Edward Lane mirrors it perfectly.

This is a true-life Madame Bovary, but it is a lot more too. It is the story of a woman who ruined her life for love. Of courts that were starting to work out new rules that could bring unhappy middle-class marriages to an end. Of a society that couldn’t understand women’s sexual desire and treated it as madness.

And it’s a story that starts right in the heart of Edinburgh, in the stately sandstone sweep of Royal Circus, right next door to my old house.

In the evening of 15 November 1850, a mild Friday night, Isabella Robinson set out for a party near her house in Edinburgh. Her carriage bumped across the wide, cobbled avenues of the Georgian New Town and drew up in a circle of grand sandstone houses lit by street lamps. She descended from the cab and mounted the steps to 8 Royal Circus, its huge door glowing with brass and topped with a bright rectangle of glass. This was the residence of Lady Drysdale, a rich and well connected widow to whom Isabella and her husband had been commended when they moved to Edinburgh that autumn. Elizabeth Drysdale was a renowned hostess, vivacious, generous and strong-willed, and her soirées attracted inventive, progressive types: novelists such as Charles Dickens, who had attended one of the Drysdales’ parties in 1841; physicians such as the obstetrician and pioneer anaesthetist James Young Simpson; publishers such as Robert Chambers, the founder of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal; and a crowd of artists, essayists, naturalists, antiquaries and actresses. Though Edinburgh was past its glory days as the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment, it still boasted an energetic intellectual and social scene.

A servant let Isabella in to the building. Within the hallway, gas flamed in a chandelier, throwing its light on to the stone floor and the polished iron and wood of the bannister bending up the staircase. The guests took off their outdoor clothes – bonnets, muffs and mantles, top hats and coats – and proceeded up the stairs. The ladies wore low-cut dresses of glinting silk and satin, with smooth bodices pulled tight over lined, boned corsets. Their skirts were lifted on petticoats, layered with flounces, trimmed with ribbons and ruffles and braid. Their hair was parted in the centre and drawn back over the ears into coiled buns sprigged with feathers or lace. They wore jewels at their throats and wrists, silk boots or satin slippers on their feet. The gentlemen followed them in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, narrow trousers and shining shoes.

Isabella came to the party eager for company. Her husband, Henry, was often away on business, and even when he was home she felt lonely. He was an “uncongenial partner”, she wrote in her diary: “uneducated, narrow-minded, harsh tempered, selfish, proud”. While she yearned to talk about literature and politics, to write poetry, learn languages and read the latest essays on science and philosophy, he was “a man who had only a commercial life”.

In the high, airy reception rooms on the first floor, Isabella was introduced to Lady Drysdale and to the young couple who shared her house: her daughter Mary and her son-in-law Edward Lane. The 27-year-old Mr Lane was a lawyer, born in Canada and educated in Edinburgh, who was now training for a new career in medicine. Isabella was enchanted by him. He was “handsome, lively and good humoured”, she told her diary; he was “fascinating”. She chastised herself later, as she had done many times before, for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake.

The Robinsons chose to move to Edinburgh after Henry’s return from America because the city was renowned for its liberal and moderately priced schools. Here, their boys could be well educated without having to board away from home. Henry rented a six-storey granite house for his family at 11 Moray Place, at a cost of about £150 a year. Moray Place was the most lavish development in the New Town, a 12-sided circus of houses built on tilting ground; just to the north, the land sheered down to the Water of Leith, through pleasure gardens planted with rhododendrons and hazel. The heavy grandeur of Moray Place was not to all tastes. “It has been objected,” noted Black’s Guide Through Edinburgh in 1851, “that the simplicity of style and massiveness of structure which particularly distinguish these buildings, impart an aspect of solemnity and gloom repugnant to the character of domestic architecture.” The Robinsons kept four servants: a manservant, a cook, a maid and a nurse.

Inside 11 Moray Place, a broad staircase led to the reception rooms on the first floor and to the bedrooms above. The living rooms were wide, deep and panelled, with large windows that afforded views of a round, green park to the front of the house and a triangular garden to the back. At the top of the stairwell, a stucco frieze adorned a domed skylight: some of the cherubs in the frieze cavorted among the stylised foliage; others perched primly on the leaves, reading books.

A narrower staircase continued up to the children’s rooms on the top floor. From the back windows of her sons’ bedrooms, Isabella could see the roof of 8 Royal Circus, and past it the tower of St Stephen’s, the church in which three years earlier Edward Lane had married Lady Drysdale’s daughter Mary.

Isabella became a frequent visitor to the Lanes and Drysdales’ home. Their house lay a quarter of a mile northeast of her own, a journey of a few minutes on foot or by carriage. She was invited to the family’s parties – on one evening in Isabella’s first year in the city Lady Drysdale held a huge children’s party, on another a “strawberry feast” – and she became acquainted with others in their circle: successful lady novelists such as Susan Stirling and influential thinkers such as the phrenologist George Combe. Lady Drysdale was “a great patroness of everything scientific and literary”, according to Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Another friend, the art critic Elizabeth Rigby, described her as “unique in my estimation in the act of diffusing happiness ... I never met with so warm-hearted and unselfish a woman.” Lady Drysdale was a keen philanthropist who loved to take the dispossessed into her fold – Italian revolutionaries, Polish refugees, and now Isabella, an exile from her own marriage.

Isabella had never loved her husband; by the time they moved to Edinburgh, she despised him. A photograph of Henry in this period conforms to her description of him as narrow and haughty; he sits stiff and upright in a jacket, waistcoat, shirt and cravat, clutching a silver-topped cane in his right hand; he is skinny-chested, tight-waisted, a sure-looking man with a long nose in a long face. Isabella said that she tried not to pry into Henry’s private life, but by now she had discovered that he had a mistress and two illegitimate daughters. She had come to believe that he had married her only for her money.

Within months, Isabella was visiting the Lanes and the Drysdales almost every day. She talked to Edward Lane about poetry and philosophy, debating new ideas and encouraging him to write essays for publication. Henry, by contrast, had no interest in literature, Isabella complained in a letter to a friend; he was quite unable “to parse and interpret any line of poetry I might have quoted – either of my own or other people’s!”. She used to invite the Lanes’ eldest boy, Arthur, to play with her sons, especially after Mary Lane gave birth to a second child, William, early in 1851. Edward, in turn, often invited Isabella and her sons to accompany him and Arthur on drives to the coast – “Atty” was a delicate boy, and Edward tried to strengthen him with regular rides to the sea in a phaeton, a fast, open carriage with a springy body and four high wheels. By the beach at Granton, a few miles north-west of the city, Isabella and Edward sat discussing poetry while they watched the children play on the rocks and sand.

At the party at Royal Circus on 15 November 1850 Isabella had also met the publisher and writer Robert Chambers, a bear-like man with swathes of wavy hair. They were neighbours: the back windows of the Robinsons’ house overlooked the back windows of Robert and Anne Chambers’s house in Doune Terrace. Robert was one of the city’s leading literary men; he and his brother William ran the popular progressive magazine Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, which sold more than 80,000 copies a week. Within two months of meeting the Robinsons, Chambers had twice dined with them at Moray Place, and the Robinsons had twice attended parties at Doune Terrace. The next May, while Henry was away, Isabella went to a dinner party at the Chambers’ house at which the other guests included the bestselling author Catherine Crowe, another near neighbour, and the young actress Isabella Glyn. At about this time Isabella Robinson began to submit poems to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.

The only published verse that can be identified as hers, “Lines Addressed to a Miniature, By a Lady”, appeared under the initials “IHR” in the number of 2 August 1851. The poem describes a woman’s secret longing for a man who belongs to another. Unable to gaze openly upon the man himself, she dwells instead on a miniature portrait of him. Unable to disclose her feelings to him, she confesses herself to his image. She tells the picture: “In vain I met, I knew, approved, and loved/ Him whose most truthful likeness thou dost bear.” For all the poem’s high romance, there is no mistaking the narrator’s physical yearning for this man: “How sweetly on those closed and manly lips/ Firmness and love together hold their sway!/ Thy form I see, with strength and courage braced./ Thy glance with all its native energy!” Her beloved, like the miniature painting, is innocent of her desire for him – “calm and unmoved, unconscious of my eye” – and she burns with jealousy of the woman he has chosen over her. “My heart is rent,” writes the love-struck lady, “my inmost spirit seared.”

Isabella’s journal was the equivalent of this miniature, a memento of the man she loved, a place where she spoke privately in order to keep her public silence. The lady in the poem vows to conceal her feelings –“prayer and silence shall alone be mine” – though by putting words to her thoughts she has already half-broken her pledge. The diary, like the poem, exposed as well as buried Isabella’s secrets. But she insisted on her privacy: “Here I may gaze and dream, and fear no blame,” her poem says. “This I may love and prize unseen – alone.”

• Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £16.99