Contemplating Adultery: The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman
Title
Contemplating Adultery: The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman
Subject
Biography
Description
"Contemplating Adultery tells the story of Sarah Austin, a 'heroine of domestic life', learned daughter of a respectable family, dedicated mother, devoted helpmate to her austere husband, legal scholar John Austin. Her epistolary lover was Hermann von Puckler Muskau -- colorful, eccentric, outrageous, a Byronesque charmer who few women could resist. He moved in an extravagant unbridled circle in which sexual intrigue, infidelity, and divorce were the rule; the ideas of German romanticism were stamped on everything he thought and did. Virtually from his first letter to her, Sarah was under his spell.
How Sarah Austin resolved her dilemma makes Contemplating Adultery a fascinating journey into the mind and soul of a gifted woman who dared to circumvent the mores of the day. In their stinging candor, Austin's letters give us an early nineteenth-century woman's intimate thoughts about sex and tenderness, work and ambition, lesbianism and homosexuality, and above all, the competing demands of family duty and erotic desire -- subjects that rarely surface in Victorian women's letters and diaries."
How Sarah Austin resolved her dilemma makes Contemplating Adultery a fascinating journey into the mind and soul of a gifted woman who dared to circumvent the mores of the day. In their stinging candor, Austin's letters give us an early nineteenth-century woman's intimate thoughts about sex and tenderness, work and ambition, lesbianism and homosexuality, and above all, the competing demands of family duty and erotic desire -- subjects that rarely surface in Victorian women's letters and diaries."
Creator
Lotte Hamburger
Joseph Hamburger
Publisher
Ballantine Books
Date
1991
Format
Cover
Language
English
Type
Book
Files
Citation
Lotte Hamburger and Joseph Hamburger, “Contemplating Adultery: The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman,” The Vice Collection, accessed May 18, 2024, https://vice.omeka.net/items/show/21.