Editions

The Scandalous Lady W

The Scandalous Lady W

  • An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce (by the bestselling author of The Five)

‘Deliciously lurid’ Sunday Times

The Sunday Times bestselling author of The Five exposes the divorce that scandalised Georgian England.

She was a spirited young heiress. He was a handsome baronet with a promising career in government.

Their marriage had the makings of a fairy tale but ended as one of the most salacious and highly publicised divorces in history.

For over two hundred years the story of Lady Worsley, her vengeful husband, and her lover, George Maurice Bisset, lay forgotten. Now Hallie Rubenhold throws open a window to a rarely seen view of Georgian England, one coloured by passion, adventure and the defiance of social convention.

Originally published with the title Lady Worsley's Whim.

Reviews

  • A fabulous story and Rubenhold tells it beautifully

    Daily Telegraph

  • 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.... Nothing else in the genre is close to being this good

    Literary Review

  • Deliciously lurid

    Sunday Times

  • Hallie Rubenhold's account of the elopement is gripping but this is far more than an 18th-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

    Spectator

  • A well-researched account... Highly diverting tale

    Daily Telegraph

More from this Author

About the Author

Hallie Rubenhold

Hallie Rubenhold is the Number One Sunday Times bestselling and Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction prize-winning social historian whose expertise lies in revealing stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history. As well as The Covent Garden Ladies, Rubenhold's works of non-fiction include the award-winning and Number One bestselling The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and Lady Worsley's Whim, dramatized by the BBC as 'The Scandalous Lady W'. Her latest work of non-fiction, Bad Women, the story of the disappeared wives and partner of Dr Crippen, is due to be published in 2022. She has also written two acclaimed novels Mistress of My Fate and The French Lesson which are a feminist homage to the literary tropes of the Eighteenth Century. She lives in London with her husband. Meet her @HallieRubenhold

Hallie Rubenhold

Read more

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Features

How the victim became the heart of true crime

From Hallie Rubenhold to Rosamund Lupton, books are starting to uncover the narratives podcasts and TV often leave behind: those belonging not the perpetrator, but the people whose lives they ruin.
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Features

Meet the author: Hallie Rubenhold

The author of The Five explains why she wanted to tell the story of Jack the Ripper's victims, her love of a late-night library trip and which other writers she most admires.
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Features

5 things you didn't know about the women killed by Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper is famous for brutally murdering five women in East London. But what about the women themselves? Time and time again women have taken a backseat in their own narratives, but historian Hallie Rubenhold wants to set the record straight and give the female victims back their voices.

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