Book Festival review: Past disgrace teaches us about who we are

KATE SUMMERSCALE has a knack for rescuing Victorian histories from obscurity and turning them into the most compulsive books you’re likely to find in any non-fiction section. Her enthusiasm is just as infectious in person. In this packed event, the award-winning English writer enthralled us with the kind of details that continue to gnaw at you long after you’ve left Charlotte Square: a destroyed diary, an illicit kiss at a Berkshire hydrotherapy centre, the discovery of the letters of an Edinburgh phrenologist who once felt the contours of George Eliot’s head.

Summerscale, below, has a thing for Victorian scandals. Last time it was her creepy reconstruction of a murder investigation in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This time, it’s Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, the story of one couple’s divorce that illuminated an entire society’s attitudes to sex, women, marriage, madness, and more. She began with the fateful summer evening in Edinburgh, 1850, when a woman called Isabella Robinson attended a party in Royal Circus and fell in love with a doctor called Edward Lane, a man who would go on to treat Charles Darwin for flatulence. We were hooked.

“The pleasure and pain of non-fiction is that there remain mysteries,” she went on during a fascinating discussion about how she decides what to leave out or interpret for herself in her books. “It’s my story as well,” is how she put it.

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is ultimately about the elasticity of truth. “The diary,” Summerscale said, “is an intense example of the unreliability of a source. Is it more true because it’s raw? Is it less true because it’s subjective? Can a diary be used as evidence in court?” Thought-provoking stuff from a writer who, in putting the past in the dock, teaches us about who we are now.

I wonder what Peter Stamm, spoken of as one of Europe’s most exciting writers, would have made of Summerscale’s work. He told us of his desire to create literature from the here and now: “Why would I want to write about the past when I can read writers who were around in those times?”

As dry-witted and insightful as his prose, he spoke elegantly about his novel, Seven Days, the story of a beautiful couple of architects and the man’s affair with an “unattractive” but devoted Polish woman. I would have liked more discussion of the novel’s representation (and arguably objectification) of women but his response to a question about how male and female critics responded differently to his portrayal of infidelity was disappointing.

His lifelong theme is “the images we make of ourselves”, which led to an amusing discussion of love, relationships, and Le Corbusier. Stamm was even better on the complexities of not writing in his mother tongue (like almost all Swiss writers he speaks Swiss German and writes in High German). Finally, he spoke about our woefully low percentage of literature in translation. When he said “you are cut off on your little island”, Stamm got the biggest cheer of the hour.

CHITRA RAMASWAMY