East Lynne

East Lynne is the story of Lady Isabel Carlyle, beautiful, refined, and young, who leaves her respectable husband and her infant children to elope with a suitor. Bearing their illegitimate child after he has deserted her, she then returns in disguise to become a governess in the household of her husband and his new wife.

The runaway bestseller of the 1860s, East Lynne brought Wood success, celebrity, and notoriety. Adapted for the stage, it became one of the most frequently performed plays of the day and, in this century, it has been turned into a number of films. Filled with disaster, guilt and repentance, East Lynne is an archetypal sensation novel, but it also documents a dissatisfaction with Victorian women's roles. Among the appendices included are a selection of Victorian medical views on men, women, and sexuality, and extracts from T.A. Palmer's immensely popular theatrical adaptation of the novel.

This edition returns for the first time to the racy, slang-ridden narrative of the first edition, rather than the subsequent stylistically 'improved' versions hitherto reproduced by modern editors.