The Lady in Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal, and Divorce
“Hallie Rubenhold’s captivating new cultural history gives an account of one of this century’s strangest marital scandals, the tale of the adulterous Lady Seymour Worsley and her vengeful husband, Sir Richard Worsley. . . . Ms. Rubenhold's book brings to life the dissipated and alluring world of aristocratic Georgian England, particularly its vexed sexual morality, through the story of a marriage and its unraveling . . . an impressive feat.”—Washington Times“Because the market is saturated with eighteenth-century bodice biographies, most indistinguishable from the next, [The Lady in Red] should come with a warning: nothing else in the genre is close to being this good. As a historian and a storyteller, Hallie Rubenhold is in a league of her own. She keeps you glued to the very last page when, exhausted, exasperated, and elated, you can at last put the book down and get yourself some sleep.”—Frances Wilson,Literary Review(UK)“The story of the Worsley divorce has never been revealed before, and Hallie Rubenhold tells it with panache. Her account of the elopement is gripping, but this is far more than an eighteenth-century bodice ripper. Rubenhold combines narrative skill with historical expertise, and she traces the knife edge that women walked between social success and public disgrace with subtlety and assurance.”—The Spectator(UK)“[The Lady in Red]is told as a mystery, with Rubenhold keeping up the suspense and providing some surprises along the way. . . . In this thoughtfully crafted ‘tale of sex, scandal, and divorce’ she shows how Lady Worsley’s sexual energies carried her through to a kind of triumph.”—The Times Literary Supplement(UK)“[Rubenhold] has an eye for an antique story . . . [and] is sure footed in her research . . . Her special forte is rakes and roués: her depiction of Coxheath Camp, where the country’s militias gathered for months as a glorified Home Guard, idling and fornicating, is deliciously lurid.”—The Sunday Times(UK)“This is a fabulous eighteenth-century tale of sex, scandal, and divorce, and Hallie Rubenhold tells it beautifully.”—The Telegraph(UK)