Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale: review Mrs Robinson's Disgrace describes the affair between this lonely, passionate, intelligent woman and a younger man, from their first meeting in Edinburgh when she was a regular and welcome visitor in the house where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law to the time when, at a hydrotherapy spa run by him as the resident doctor, they walked together alone, lay on dry fern, and - as she wrote in her diary - "I shall not state what followed." This highly wrought account of their encounters was stolen by Mrs Robinson's husband, a vindictive and bad-tempered man whose own moral position, as father to two illegitimate daughters, did not prevent him taking the high ground with his wife, and suing for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. He offered her own writing as the only material evidence. Mrs Robinson's defence was to claim that the diary was a fiction - a hallucinatory account of dreams and fantasies. Her lawyer explained that she suffered from nymphomania or erotomania, that a uterine condition had driven her mad with lust. Her private writing had to be offered up by herself as proof of her own madness. Faced with the choice of describing herself either as a sexually active woman or as insane, Mrs Robinson chose to save her reputation for chastity by sacrificing her reputation for sanity. In so doing, she cleared the reputation of the man she loved, and saved his marriage and his business. Summerscale has rescued this extraordinary story from the archives, and set it into the context of a time when the debate about women, sexuality and marriage reached a new level of anxiety. She takes us into the heart of the sexual double standards of Victorian England, where a woman would lose her husband, children, property and reputation if adultery was proved. Meanwhile, a husband's adultery was condoned: he could only be divorced if he was guilty of sexual or physical abuse of his wife. A conduct book of the time advised of the "inalienable right of all men to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses." Summerscale gives us a considered and complex view of Mrs Robinson's world - Madame Bovary and Charles Darwin walk through these pages; her lover's brother-in-law fakes his own death because of his horror of masturbation; gynaecologists avoid using a speculum for fear of their patients" pleasure; and the divorce courts have to clear women from the public gallery because the material is so disturbing. As one would expect from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), Summerscale's prize-winning analysis of a Victorian murder and its detective, the material here is handled with confident subtlety. The history goes from the individual to the individual's world with seductive ease. Mrs Robinson is no cardboard feminist heroine in this account: Summerscale is unsparing about her heroine's silliness, flirtatiousness and emotional neediness. The judges at the divorce court, ostensibly the very bastions of patriarchy, are thoughtful and considerate, and their even-handed ruling is described in detail. As in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, readers are allowed to form their own opinion as to guilt and motive. This is a highly considered social history teased out from a fascinating personal document, and Summerscale takes the reader through layer upon layer of understanding as this extraordinary divorce case opens up the world of 1850 middle-class England and the women who fitted themselves into its strictures. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale 299pp, Bloomsbury t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £14.58)