East Lynne

Lady Isabel leaves her husband and children for a man who does not want the burden, and returns — governess to her own children, unrecognised, in her own former house. Mrs Henry Wood wrote lying on a couch, curved from childhood by a spinal condition, and produced the sensation novel of the century: the stage version played for fifty years, and the line about the dead boy became a byword for Victorian excess. Fifty-seven plates of painting, among them works by Arthur Hughes and William Bell Scott, bring the Victorian domestic interiors, portraits and landscapes of the novel's world into the volume.