Wedlock
How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
WEDLOCK is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain's richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young, and pregnant with her lover's child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week.
But nothing was as it seemed. Stoney was broke, and his pursuit of the wealthy Countess a calculated ploy. Once married to Mary, he embarked on years of ill treatment, seizing her lands, beating her, terrorising servants, introducing prostitutes to the family home, kidnapping his own sister. But finally after many years, a servant helped Mary to escape. She began a high-profile divorce case that was the scandal of the day and was successful. But then Andrew kidnapped her and undertook a week-long rampage of terror and cruelty until the law finally caught up with him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How did a wealthy, self-absorbed adulteress who despised her eldest son and aborted three pregnancies by a man she didn't love, transform into a devoted mother and pioneer of women's liberty? British author Moore (The Knife Man) examines this remarkable conversion in Mary Eleanor Bowes (1749 1800), England's richest heiress, whose impulsive marriage to a violent Irish fortune seeker revolutionized divorce in Georgian England. A published poet-playwright and accomplished botanist, Mary expected to live an indulgent life. Yet she was lured into marriage to army captain Andrew Robinson Stoney, who proved to be a rapist, liar, kidnapper and philanderer who half-starved and beat Mary into submission. Stoney's own best friend called him "inhuman and savage, without a countervailing quality." Moore offers a well-informed if dispiriting glimpse into 18th-century marriage and the patriarchal legal and church systems as experienced by Mary still her husband's property and financially supported by her devoted servants as she fought to regain her fortune, her children and, especially, her status as a person.
