Contemplating Adultery : The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman

Rating:
Summary: I turn my heart inside out to you
Review: This true story, researched by Lotte and Joseph Hamburger of Yale University, is a kind of Victorian forerunner of 'You've Got Mail' set in the 1830s.

She is Sarah Austin, a 39-year-old Englishwoman from a respectable and religious family, learned, lively, beautiful, energetic, resolute and driven by the need to be challenged. She is unusual for her time in many ways, and is well known as a translator and author.

He is a minor Prussian nobleman, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. eight years older than Sarah, famous as a travel author and park designer and for his hedonistic lifestyle. He is playful, full of vitality, curious about everything around him, enthusiastically reaching for every new experience - and particularly those involving women.

Sarah is trapped in a loveless and dutiful marriage to John, an austere legal scholar. While she is translating Hermann's book into English they begin to exchange letters, and despite their differing backgrounds a romance develops. Hermann encourages Sarah to be frank and honest and to indulge her imagination. Their letters become increasingly intimate, and after a few exchanges she is eagerly confiding her innermost thoughts about her life, her disappointment in marriage and her hunger for love and sexual satisfaction. She finds the affection, intimacy and emotional sustenance that is so lacking in her marriage, and pours out her feelings with complete openness - completely counter to the customs of her time, and fraught with the danger of discovery as their letters are carried by German embassy couriers right under her husband's nose.

As the erotic tension builds Sarah becomes increasingly desperate to love and be loved "as a woman, passionately". Her thoughts return constantly to adultery, in spite of her strong feelings of duty towards her husband and daughter.

The book is an absorbing journey into the mind of a gifted woman who dared to circumvent the repressive customs of her day. It is based on her recently rediscovered letters, which were hidden away for so long in case of censure but which are now more likely to elicit sympathy rather than condemnation. Its appeal is partly in the sheer unlikeliness of the story, and partly in the passion of the letters - which were meant for his eyes only and then the flames.

So did they or didn't they? You'll have to read the book to find out.

Rating:
Summary: I turn my heart inside out to you
Review: This true story, researched by Lotte and Joseph Hamburger of Yale University, is a kind of Victorian forerunner of `You've Got Mail' set in the 1830s.

She is Sarah Austin, a 39-year-old Englishwoman from a respectable and religious family, learned, lively, beautiful, energetic, resolute and driven by the need to be challenged. She is unusual for her time in many ways, and is well known as a translator and author.

He is a minor Prussian nobleman, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. eight years older than Sarah, famous as a travel author and park designer and for his hedonistic lifestyle. He is playful, full of vitality, curious about everything around him, enthusiastically reaching for every new experience - and particularly those involving women.

Sarah is trapped in a loveless and dutiful marriage to John, an austere legal scholar. While she is translating Hermann's book into English they begin to exchange letters, and despite their differing backgrounds a romance develops. Hermann encourages Sarah to be frank and honest and to indulge her imagination. Their letters become increasingly intimate, and after a few exchanges she is eagerly confiding her innermost thoughts about her life, her disappointment in marriage and her hunger for love and sexual satisfaction. She finds the affection, intimacy and emotional sustenance that is so lacking in her marriage, and pours out her feelings with complete openness - completely counter to the customs of her time, and fraught with the danger of discovery as their letters are carried by German embassy couriers right under her husband's nose.

As the erotic tension builds Sarah becomes increasingly desperate to love and be loved "as a woman, passionately". Her thoughts return constantly to adultery, in spite of her strong feelings of duty towards her husband and daughter.

The book is an absorbing journey into the mind of a gifted woman who dared to circumvent the repressive customs of her day. It is based on her recently rediscovered letters, which were hidden away for so long in case of censure but which are now more likely to elicit sympathy rather than condemnation. Its appeal is partly in the sheer unlikeliness of the story, and partly in the passion of the letters - which were meant for his eyes only and then the flames.

So did they or didn't they? You'll have to read the book to find out.