Contemplating Adultery : The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman
by Lotte Hamburger
Category: Biography & Autobiography

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.