سقوط یک فرشته

by Mrs. Henry Wood, شیده جلالی فر (برگردان)

When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution.

Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and promiscuity threatened the sanctity of the family.

In her novel the simple act of hiring a governess raises the spectres of murder, disguise, and adultery. Her sensation novel was devoured by readers from the Prince of Wales to Joseph Conrad and continued to fascinate

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.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Victorian, 19th Century, Gothic, Historical Fiction, British Literature

696 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1861

About the author

Ellen Wood (née Price) was an English novelist, better known as "Mrs Henry Wood". She wrote over 30 novels, many of which (especially East Lynne), enjoyed remarkable popularity. Among the best known of her stories are Danesbury House, Oswald Cray, Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles, The Channings, Lord Oakburn's Daughters and The Shadow of Ashlydyat. For many years, she worked as the proprietor and editor of the Argosy.

Reviews

[Nikola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isabel 😭

[The Book Whisperer (aka Boof) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eat your heart out Wilkie Collins. What a fantastic book this is! I just loved every minute of it (and there were a LOT of minutes – for some reason it took me an age to read). For about three weeks I felt like I was living in the middle of a Victorian soap-opera. There was murder, betrayal, divorce, disguises and death and all this set among a backdrop of stately homes and horse-and-carriages. What’s not to love?

I can’t understand why this book is not better known or held in higher esteem. Hallelujah for Oxford World Classics reviving this book (with a fab cover too). I haven’t read anywhere near the amount of Victorian classics that I want to yet but for me, this ranks among my favourites now. Classed as a sensational novel in the 1800’s when it was written, this book was serialised in a weekly newspaper. How I would have waited with baited breath for each new edition to hit the news- stands!

The books main character is Lady Isabel Vane who lives at East Lynne (a grand stately home) with her Father. When her Father, the Earl of Mount Severn, dies and his debts are discovered Lady Isabel is proposed to by the lovely young lawyer, Archibald Carlyle (much to the heartache of one Barbara Hare who, unbeknown to Archibald, is in love with him). Lady Isabel and Archibald seem happy together and go on to have three children, but all the while Archibald is helping Barbara Hare to clear her brother’s name for a murder that was committed some years ago and for which he escaped the scene of the crime and hasn’t been seen since. With all the clandestine meetings between Archibald and Barbara, Lady Isabel is overcome by jealousy and in the heat of the moment abandons her entire family for a man of very dubious character. I don’t want to say too much else for fear of spoiling the book for anyone, but needless to say that this is most definitely not the last we see of Lady Isabel (or the “cad” she ran off with). With misinterpreted conversations gallore, hushed secrets and christmas-cracker disguises this book gallops along with you not daring to let go.

I can honestly say that, for me, there was not a dull moment in this book. It is very accessible and easy to read, even for those who find Victorian literature hard going, and long though the book was, I was sad when I came to the end.

I think I can honestly say that the sensational novels of the Victorian era are becoming my favourites, having also loved Lady Audley’s Secret (Mary Elizabeth Braddon) and The Woman In White (Wilkie Collins). I love the dramatic story-lines and the fact that you can almost hear the swish of the stage curtain at the end of a chapter and the “DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN”!!!

Fabulous book. Highly recommended! Why oh why is this book not better known???

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was one of the most exciting Victorian novels I've ever read. Fascinating themes, poignant characterisation and wonderful plotting - I'd highly recommend!

[Alex.andthebooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5

Przeczytałam 650 stron tej książki w jeden dzień. Była jak rollercoaster emocjonalny, z którego bardzo chciałam i nie chciałam zsiadać. Jest mi ciężko rozstawać się z tymi bohaterami…

[Christmas Carol ꧁꧂ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5★

I nearly gave up on this title, but I was reading this as a group read & Charlene (one of the moderators of the Women's Classic Literature Enthusiasts) encouraged me to carry on - & I'm very glad I did.

This is an interesting book. Wood I think has a naturally engaging writing style and used a lot of dialogue to drive her narrative forward. One of the main problems for me was that even allowing for Lady Isabel's start in life with a very selfish father, is her sickliness and determination to take the worst possible view of other characters actions - except for the person she really should be wary of!

By the middle of Part Two the unrelenting misery was getting to me a bit and if it hadn't been a group read I would have made this a DNF. And this would have been a pity as this book is not only about Isabel and her elopement with the dissolute Francis Levison.

But the third part ties things together really nicely! The boredom I felt in the middle had made me forget that there was also a murder mystery in the first part. It becomes very obvious who the murder is but I did enjoy reading him getting his comeuppance - and a ducking!

Of course in this age, Isabel must pay for her crimes against society. But although improbable this part does have some touching moments.

Illustration from my copy

I don't think I will read another Wood title, but I'm glad to have read her most popular title. It shows an interesting take on Victorian morality.

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...

[Piyangie · Rating 2 out of 5]

East Lynne is a sensation novel written in the Victorian era. It is also my first read of Ellen Wood. Sensation novels were very a popular genre in the Victorian era, and East Lynne was a best seller along with Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Adultery, murder and mistaken identity were the popular themes of this genre and in all three above mentioned books these themes are touched at differing degrees.

Coming to the book, East Lynne, there is murder, adultery and mistaken identity. The book looked conceptually good and the sensation element was pretty intriguing. The knowledge that I acquired that this novel was held equal with the above mentioned novels which I really liked and became my favourites was enough recommendation for me to look upon this with an eager enthusiasm. But needless to say that I was very much disappointed.

It is in every sense a sensation novel; no disagreement there. It had all the mentioned alluring themes. But unfortunately these interesting themes were presented to us in a far-fetched and implausible plot. It gets more and more unrealistic with the progress of the story to the extent of exasperating the reader. This was still alright; still tolerable. But what was worst was Ellen Wood’s writing style. She clearly has adopted a predictable, unambiguous writing style affirming the doom of certain characters even before the catastrophe really strikes. This predicable way of writing destroyed the element of suspense and made it an uninteresting and a tedious read.

It is really sad that a conceptually and thematically promising book fell flat due to the writing and its presentation. Although thematically East Lynne could be similar to The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret , in its execution of the plot and characters, East Lynne fall far too short to reach the excellence displayed in the other two novels.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

When one wants to read a Victorian author who wrote salacious stories full of intrigue and unrequited love and a dash of murder, they usually reach for Wilkie Collins. And there's nothing wrong with that because Collins is one of my favorites and he is truly delicious. Or they turn to his BFF, Charles Dickens, arguably the most famous Victorian author evah.

The more I read, however, the more I realize there are a lot of other books that are really great and, I dare say, better than Dickens. This is one of them.

Mrs. Henry Wood was Ellen Wood who apparently wrote some 30 novels. East Lynne is, apparently, the most well-known of the batch. I say this because it's the only book my normally awesome library system has by her.

If you want sensational, you'd be doing yourself a favor by picking up this book. This story has it all - there is a murder mystery, and there's also (sort of) unrequited love, and love triangles, and sneaky financial sorts, and even a courtroom drama. I really enjoyed the entire story and felt connected to most of the characters throughout, even if they did lean towards the melodramatic with some swooning and lots of tears.

There's a heart here that is missing from a lot of Dickens's stories, or even those by Collins. One could say that as a female author, Wood was able to get into the hearts of her female characters in ways that her male counterparts might struggle with, being the repressed Victorian fellows that they were and all. But maybe it's just that Wood is a better writer, and understands human nature better than they. In any case, she rocked the socks off of characters.

She didn't shy away from awkward parts of her story, either. There's less than subtle references to sex, and female characters who weren't really excited by it. That also seems unusual for the time period but was sort of refreshing to read.

There are a few different storylines in this book, but they all come together fairly well in the end. Wood focused on one person or one family for a bit, and then turned her focus to another person or family for another bit, but throughout all of that, the reader never loses sight of the other persons or families which I found to be rather artfully done. Even though I was reading about the Carlyles, for example, I never stopped thinking about the Hares, and vice versa, mostly because Wood managed to tie pieces of the other family's stories into one another so they were never very far from the reader's mind, even if they were not the focal point at that particular moment. So often while reading Dickens, we meet characters and then they disappear for a great part of the book, and by the time they show up again it's like "Oh, shit, yeah, this guy. Riiiight..." and then I have to remember what his story even was. I didn't have that problem with Wood. Because she was good.

I highly recommend this to people who dig sensational Victorian novels as I do, and especially to those who like to read less well-known Victorian authors. This was a delicious read. My only complain was actually on the last page that made me roll my eyes and feel differently about the entire story, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons here.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sensational Victorian novel that tackles jealousy, love triangles, mistaken identities, murder, and divorce, East Lynne was seven hundred pages of unputdownable. I was enthralled by the character of Lady Isabel Carlyle and her ill-fated life story. Not that she doesn’t hold some responsibility for her own fate, but was there ever a woman born under a less auspicious star?

For the Victorians, marriage was still a sacred institution and inviolable, divorce was a new idea and allowed only for the most immoral of infractions. For someone who wrote under the appellation, Mrs. Henry Wood, it must have been a struggle to understand what forces could compel a decent woman to end up with one. While there could be no doubt where Mrs. Wood stood on this, I thought she handled the subject in a fair and thoughtful manner and painted a sad and tragic, but not a villainous, figure in Lady Isabel.

I followed the story with relish beginning to end, and just when things seemed predictable, I found they weren’t. For anyone who enjoys the works of Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell or Wilke Collins, I would say this book is a must.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could tell you that ‘East Lynne’, a huge popular success in its day, has unremarkable writing, is horribly contrived, holds no real surprises, drifts into silliness and goes on for much too long.

But I could also tell you that I had to keep reading, that I was very well entertained, and that the book was very easy to read.

I’d read it before, many years ago, when my love for Victorian sensation novels was very new; and though I remembered that arc of the story I had forgotten so many details.

East Lynne is an estate, located near the small town of West Lynne. It’s owner, the Earl of Mount Severn, was far from old but he was crippled by gout and very close to bankruptcy. He hoped to sell East Lynne, the only unentailed property still in his possession, privately, so that his creditors would not find out. Archibald Carlyle, a successful young lawyer from West Lynne, visited the Earl as he was very interested in the property.

At dinner, he met the Earl’s daughter, Lady Isabel Vane. He saw that she was beautiful, that she was innocent, that she loved her father dearly, and that she had no idea how precarious his – and her – position was.

After dinner, Lady Isabel left to attend a party with her cousin and chaperone Mrs Vane. Lady Isabel met Captain Francis Levison, her chaperone’s cousin from another wing of her family, at that party. He was charming but clearly no good; she was blind to his failings, and utterly smitten.

The Earl dies suddenly, and his estate and his title are inherited by a distant cousin. He is a good and decent man and he takes Lady Isabel into his home. He grows fond of her but his wife is unhappy with the situation and takes that out on Lady Isabel. When Carlyle has occasion to visit he discovers Lady Isabel in an agitated state and when he sees her position, and she reluctantly tells him what has happened to her, he offers her an escape. He proposes marriage, knowing that she has the qualities to become an excellent wife. She was still in love with Levison, but he had failed to show himself, and so she agreed to the wedding so that she could leave a horrible situation and return to the home she loved at East Lynne.

Meanwhile, in West Lynne, another young woman was trouble. Barbara Hare’s brother, Richard was a fugitive from justice, accused of the murder of George Hallijohn. He had been found standing over Hallijohn’s corpse, gun in hand. It was known that Richard was he had been courting the dead man’s daughter Afy, whom he used to visit in their isolated cottage, despite his father’s angry opposition. Richard paid a furtive visit to his family home, to see his mother and ask for money. He told his sister that there was another man present on the night of the murder, a Captain Thorn, who had also courting Afy. He thinks that Captain Thorne must be the murderer, but he has no idea who he was or where he came from, and Afy has disappeared.

Barbara turns to Archibald Carlyle – a friend and neighbour of her family, and the man she had hoped to marry – for help. (for whom her feelings are more than friendly). Her father has disowned Richard, her mother is frail, and so she and he begin to work together, to try to clear Richard’s name.

In these early chapters I was wonderfully caught up with the story and the characters; developing firm opinions about the different characters, about what had happened, and what – in all probability – was going to happen.

Archibald Carlyle was a good man, but he was foolish in many ways.

He allowed his imperious spinster sister – Miss Corny – to shut up her own home and move into East Lynne, without giving a thought to whether she and his sweet-natured wife would be compatible. They weren’t.

He kept Barbara Hare’s secret and he failed to give his wife any explanation about why he spent so much time at her family home. It didn’t occur to him that his wife might fear the worst. She did.

Captain Francis Levison reappeared when Lady Isabel was at a very low ebb. He charmed her all over again, and she made a decision that would have terrible consequences ….

This was where things started to go wrong; because what I knew of Lady Isabel wouldn’t let me believe that she did what she did.

There was much drama as the story played out:
•A train crash
•A parliamentary election
•A trial for murder
•A deathbed scene or two.

I was increasingly aware that there was far too much melodrama, there was too much that was implausible and that there were far too many coincidences. I was still turning the pages quickly, I was still being wonderfully well entertained; the story was full of incident and I continued to be engaged by the characters and their situations.

I was fascinated by Ellen Wood’s attitude to them to. When she addressed her reader she had a very firm moral stance, but her story suggested that she really had a little more empathy and understanding. Even after her fall, Lady Isabel remained the heroine, and even though her creator put her through the mill she did allow her glimpses of true happiness and a promise of redemption.

I had to sympathise with her; a fundamentally good woman whose circumstances led her to make one mistake, that she would quickly realise was that and pay for so dearly.

I was sorry that the villain responsible for her fall was a little one-dimensional.

The women in this story were more interesting that the men, and they made must have made this story feel very modern in its own time. Afy was a minx, but she was doing what she had to, left to make her own way in the world. Barbara may have been rather proud, but her family situation was difficult, the prospects for a young woman whose brother had been labelled a murderer weren’t good, and she did the best she could for herself and the people she loved. Miss Corny – well I don’t quite have the words, except to say the her dress sense, her economies and her firm principle were wonderfully entertaining. I’d love to send her into the future – maybe into another book – to see what she made of it and what the future made of her.

East Lynne is a very big book, and because it became less plausible and more predictable as I went on I wasn’t entirely sorry to reach the end.

I have to say though, that because there was so much going on its pages, so much to think about, I’m very glad that I decided to visit it again.

[Issicratea · Rating 4 out of 5]

East Lynne was an extraordinary publishing success in its day, and it’s not difficult to see why. It’s right up there with the best of Victorian sensation fiction, which, for me, means Wilkie Collins. (I have also tried Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which was fun, but not quite in the same league.)

Ellen Wood’s literary career had a distinctive and unusual shape. She began her life as a wealthy Victorian wife and mother; then, when her husband’s business failed, she reinvented herself, in her mid-forties, as a highly successful novelist and magazine editor. The fact that she was writing to keep her family financially afloat presumably explains the racy, populist, “sensational” character of her fiction. My impression from East Lynne is that she had the writing skills to craft a very different kind of fiction had she wanted to—perhaps something along the lines of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, whose provincial-town setting East Lynne shares.

This is a novel of two halves. The first is a morality tale, so clearly portended from the opening pages that I don’t feel any scruples about spoilers in revealing the plot. Penniless but beautiful Isabel Vane, daughter of a spendthrift nobleman, marries a wealthy country lawyer, Archibald Carlyle, whom she admires and likes but does not love. After a marriage of some years, when the couple have three children, Isabel abandons her family in a moment of madness for an old flame (and notorious rake), Francis Levison, with predictably disastrous results.

So far, so archetypal as a morality tale, but the novel doesn’t stop there; instead, it takes a plunge into the bizarre and quasi-Gothic for the final, long stretch of the book. The plotting gets more convoluted in this section, as the novel’s subplot, concerning an unsolved murder, becomes ever more closely enmeshed with its main, sentimental plot. There are some highly unexpected developments in the second half of the book, and spoilers would truly be spoilers. Suffice to say that Lady Isabel gets a peculiar, and grotesque, second act, something akin to a Dantean contrapasso.

One striking thing in the novel is to watch a highly upright Victorian female novelist engaging sympathetically with the plight of a “fallen woman”—and one who, on the face of things, has far less justification than more famous sisters-in-sin, such as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina (her husband, Archibald Carlyle, is pretty close to a model spouse: warm, witty, intelligent, handsome, kind, loyal.) Ellen Wood heaps all kinds of opprobrium on Isabel and inflicts all kinds of punishment on her in narrative terms; yet she sticks with her and refuses to condemn her in absolute. This seems to me positively enlightened by Victorian standards.

Like other Victorian “provincial novels,” East Lynne has a strong interest in class and in social stratification. I found Wood’s take on this intriguing. One subplot of the novel is the displacement of the landed aristocracy, represented as morally and physically degenerate, despite a certain surface glamour, by a new, rising, meritocratic bourgeois class. Where male characters are concerned, this dichotomy plays out most clearly in the contrasted figures of Levison and Carlyle. Where women are concerned, the starkest contrast is between Isabel and her love rival Barbara Hare, the daughter of a local magistrate and a childhood friend and distant cousin of Carlyle. The contrast has an almost Darwinian character—in a novel published hardly more than a year after On the Origin of Species—with Isabel physically delicate and illness-prone, and Barbara the picture of energetic good health.

This makes the novel sound very schematic, and that’s a little unfair. Barbara’s brother Richard, falsely accused of murder, is an interesting attempt to portray a sympathetic male character who is self-declaredly lacking in courage (and considerably less “virile” than his sister, for example.) There’s an interesting pairing to be explored across the novel’s class divide, between Isabel and Richard, both of whom spend part of the novel in disguise.

A further, outstanding feature of East Lynne—worth noting precisely because it is so unusual in Victorian middle-class fiction—is that a servant emerges as a genuine character in the novel: Joyce Hallijohn, who works first for Carlyle’s termagant sister Cornelia, and then in the household of Carlyle. Joyce is represented as a woman of sense and sensibility: an intelligent and sympathetic observer of the novel’s domestic melodrama, as well as an occasional plot agent. Fortunately for the reader, Wood equips her with the kind of family background that allows her plausibly to be portrayed as speaking in standard English (she is the daughter of a legal clerk and a downwardly mobile “lady”), so we are spared the tiresome, over-colored attempts at dialectal speech that generally characterize Victorian novelists’ forays below stairs.

[Anne]

The Librivox narrator leaves much to be desired. I heard every breath she took and there is no nuance at all in her narration.

[spillingthematcha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Niestety nie dołączę do miłośników tej książki. Czytało mi się ją dobrze, jednak nie miała w sobie czegoś, co pozwalałoby mi wracać do niej z wielką ciekawością. W wielu momentach mi się dłużyła, ale były też wyjątkowo zajmujące fragmenty.

[Todos Mis Libros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maravilloso, fantástico, me ha encantado!

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been Sensation Novel Spring here, and I've said a lot of what I have to say about them in my review of Lady Audley's Secret. East Lynne is more of the same. Disguises, mountains of foreshadowing, Nancy Drew-esque use of italics, it's all here. That's certainly a lot of fun, and so is this book.

Here's the general plot: Isabel marries Mr. Carlyle. Romantic comedy complications - the type that could easily be cleared up if anyone had an honest conversation with anyone else - creep in. Isabel runs off with the loathsome Levison, who shortly abandons her with their lovechild, who's then killed in a deus ex trainwreck. Isabel pulls a Mrs. Doubtfire, disguising herself as a governess to infiltrate her former household, where Mr. Carlyle has remarried to his former flame Barbara. Levison is finally exposed as a murderer; everyone dies in lengthy and maudlin death scenes that involve plenty of Jesus talk. The end!

The dangerous thing about fun like this is that when morals creep in, they can get past your hackles. And Ellen Wood, make no mistake, is working in the Anna Karenina tradition of creating plots that reinforce staid morals.

Reader, believe me! Lady - wife - mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of women to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees, and pray to be enabled to bear them - pray for patience - pray for strength to resist the demon that would tempt you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you do rush on to it, will be found worse than death!

This is not at all true. It's true in books like this and Anna Karenina*, but in real life of course there are going to be plenty of cases where someone (of either gender) is like "This other person is way better than my spouse" and they're totally right. When authors invent stories like this, where the other person is a cad / rake and the lady's new life wicked sucks, they're not accurately describing the world - and they're directly contributing to the subjugation of women. (Sorry to sound all "I just took Women's Studies 101 and learned a new word" there, but this is a real problem with Victorian literature.)

But if you can get past the stale lectures about never leaving your shitty husband, this book is a blast. It's funny: "You always were lazy, Emma—and given to use those French words. I'd rather stick a printed label on my forehead, for my part, 'I speak French,' and let the world know it in that way," says the acidic Miss Carlyle. The characters are nicely complicated: neither Isabel nor Barbara, our chief female characters, are entirely good or bad. That's nice.

There are two major types of mid-century Victorian books: the Trollopian novel of society, and the sensational novel of murder and confusion. Both types reinforce conventional morals of the time, and both often feature similar plot contrivances. The sensational ones are, of course, more fun and more silly. East Lynne is maybe a tiny bit more fun than Lady Audley's Secret, still a tiny bit less fun than Woman in White. If you're jonesing for a fix of Victorian madness and murder, here you go.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victober 2025. This was such a great read! I loved chatting about it with my buddy readers Penny and Catherine too. There was so much to chat and gasp and laugh about. The plot is so compelling and there was so much about it that I didn't guess. I love how all the plot points come together in the end. I love the mix of the sad and hopeful ending. Lady Isabel is a delightfully complex character. I love noble Mr. Carlyle. Miss Corny is hilarious. Afy is hilariously awful. The villain is despicable! I will gladly reread this. Actually, I'm off now to listen to the BBC radio adaptation. I'd love a miniseries of this!

[wiktoria.reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Czytanie „Posiadłości East Lynne” to było niesamowite przeżycie! Myślałam, że sięgam po staroangielską obyczajówkę, a dostałam wzruszającą, złożoną historię, opartą o głęboką analizę ludzkiej psychiki. Losy bohaterów na pewno zostaną ze mną na dłużej, a książka zdecydowanie trafia na półkę ulubionych powieści ❤️

[Marta Demianiuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bardzo mi się podobała! I o dziwo nawet nie przeszkadzało mi, że to cegiełka.

[La gata lectora · Rating 4 out of 5]

No sé qué puede haber mejor que una novela victoriana que habla de los dramas de personas ricas y pobres que intentan salvar las apariencias a pesar de las tremendas cosas que les llevan a hacer las pasiones humanas.

“La gente puede decir lo que quiera, pero es imposible expulsar las pasiones humanas del corazón. Se pueden reprimir, aplastar, contener, pero no se pueden arrancar sus raíces.”

Entre taza y taza de té tenemos:

Celos. Flirteos. Apariencias. Bodas. Fugas. Despilfarro. Herencias. Deudas. Diferencias de clases. Malas personas. Malentendidos. Asesinatos. Mentiras. Secretos.

Salseo. Drama.

Una novela que para ser victoriana pasan muchas cosas, aunque mantiene el ritmo pausado característico, y que nos muestra la injusticia de ser mujer en esa época y las consecuencias de tomar según qué caminos siéndolo.

Tenemos mujeres casadas, fugadas, casaderas, solteronas… ricas, pobres… madres, hijas, hermanas… morales, buenas, mentirosas, leales, celosas, malas… que de un modo u otro dependen de los hombres que tienen alrededor.

Bien escrita, entretenida y bastante triste.

(4/5)⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ me ha encantado

[Penny -Thecatladybooknook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a fun book and so well written! This is only one of the few sensation novels I've read and it has a different feel from the Wilkie Collins I've read. It has less of a calculating feel to it and more of a domestic, small town feel but still plenty of secrets and a murder mystery. While it has a standout plot, there was so much character growth from SO many characters! It was the perfect balance between plot and characters with some you hate and some you care for. I even cried three times from such moving dialogue been some of the characters.

If you read the synopsis here on GR (DON'T!), it would seem that you start with Lady Isabel as a married woman, but you don't. We get her has an unmarried young woman and meet her father and learn about her family plus other families in the area and situations they are going through. Perfect set ups for where the characters go from there.

I had such a fun time reading this with Elizabeth and Catherine! I can't wait to try more by Mrs. Wood.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you met a book that you carry around all day and pull out of your purse to eagerly read at every moment you can spare? I've met a few and this is one of them. I even found myself reaching for it while stuck in traffic! (terrible, I know). East Lynne is the very definition of a Victorian sensation novel - murder, disguise, exile, deception, a love triangle, humor, a horrific train accident, - it had it all. I hesitate to talk about any plot details because this book launches right into the drama in the first chapter... just read it, you won't regret it. I can't for the life of me figure out why this book isn't more widely read since it has all the twists of a Wilkie Collins novel and the lovely conversational tone of an Anthony Trollope book. I wish I could find more Ellen Wood books available in print but I can't seem to!

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

East Lynne is a classic among 19th century sensation fiction but a sadly neglected gem in the history of English literature. The author, Ellen Wood, is among the “big three” of sensation authors alongside Wilkie Collins and Marie Elizabeth Braddon. Whenever people are in the mood for this type fiction they usually reach for Collins’ The Moonstone or Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Unfortunately, East Lynne gets passed up for these more famous works and the book became a one hit wonder for Ellen Wood. Nevertheless, this mystery story is a must read if you are interested in the genre.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Would have been 5 if it weren’t for the ending

—-

UPDATE 14/11/2020

I’m changing my rating to a 5 because this is one of my top five favourite books of all time and I haven’t found anything that compares to it since.

[Priyanka · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so enjoyable and such a page-turner. The story was beautifully written, tragic, and trilling.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the joys of reading through the Guardian's 1000 novels list is coming across those books that deserve to be far more widely known. East Lynne falls into that group for me. It's a big fat dorstop novel that is usually described as a "sensational" novel, in that it relies for its effect on scandal and gossip and salacious tittle tattle: it falls into the group of novels that include The Woman in White or Lady Audley's Secret. Yet this book appears to have slipped down a crack.



It really doesn't deserve that fate. Yes, it's sentimental as a painting of a crying child with a faithful dog, and it's a moralistic as a southern baptist preacher, but boy does it pack a lot in. And it veers between an unsolved murder with a falsely accused man forced into exile, and a suspicious wife falling into a doomed adulterous affair with a cad of the highest order - but there's also a train crash, small town gossip, a ducking in a village pond, disguises and a court room trial. There were times when I really didn't want to put it down.

Every section is kept just the right length and there are some genuine "oh my!" moments throughout - the benefits of publishing in serial form.

I'm amazed that this hasn't been adapted for TV or film for almost 40 years! For me, it's as good as the famous Wilkie Collins books, Dickens, Trollope and Gaskell. Worth your time.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

When her father dies leaving only debts behind, Lady Isabel Vane marries the good-looking, hard-working lawyer Archibald Carlyle. When she becomes foolishly jealous of him, she runs off with a scapegrace aristocrat, abandoning husband, children, and respectability.

This bestselling Victorian sensation novel is too long, awkwardly written, and overly moralizing, but I found it compellingly readable regardless. It's mostly a sensation novel, anyway, full of death, desertion, adultery, and disguise, as any good sensation novel ought to be, though in an unusually domestic, village setting.

I did get tired of Wood's moralizing and addressing the reader directly with dire warnings of the fate lying in wait for wives who do not toe the line; on the other hand, she does sort of backwardly show by this the restrictions her characters must live under and create sympathy for them thereby. Generally, I'd take Wilkie Collins any day, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon, but I did enjoy this and found it hard to put down at night (and equally hard to pick up -- it's heavy!).

[Sera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Wood is considered one of the early writers of "shock literature" in literary fiction. Unlike her Victorian counterparts, the women in this book have their own ideas of what being a woman in Victorian society should be, and Wood introduces some twists and turns of which even Dickens would have been proud. However, like other Victorian literature, much of the poor decision making could have been avoided if people would simply have communicated and not made any assumptions about the motives and behaviors of others. It also features a "fallen woman" and a murder mystery, both of which provide for a compelling read, but because of the confusion of the characters, it left me feeling like the book was more of a 4 star read than a 5 star one.

[Reesha (For the love of Classics) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for Victober 2019.

This book was full of drama. It’s hard to believe that it was written in the Victorian era because of the issues it raised: infidelity in marriage, divorce, second marriages. These are themes not openly discussed in other Victorian books I have read.

There is also a murder mystery spread through out the book which get mingled with the infidelity plot.
The good thing about this book was that it explored both sides of the story. The reasons for Mrs Levison running away and also the heartbreak she caused her husband by doing so. You feel sympathy for both parties: may be more so for one than for the other. But you get to know the motive for her actions and that completes the story.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn't a book that I expected pure genius from. Indeed, the best part about it was the well written and engaging introduction, as I've come to realize in recent reads how little one can take such for granted, even when the press is of high repute and the work itself is marked as a classic. In the case of Ellen Wood (I see the GRAmazon choice of her name and raise you the fact that Anglo legal structures no longer practice coverture: leastwise, not overtly), her life makes for a much more interesting and inspiring tableau than this, her most famous fiction on this site, so while I won't be perusing any more of her works unless something really stands out, I'm glad she had the success that she did. In any case, with this work, the first volume is best, the second is gradually middling, and the third is a sopping mess that beggars almost all belief in a significant chunk of its dialogue and circumstance. Authorial intrusion and omniscient narration is one thing, but intermittently making a big to do about going back and forth between oh but she sinned but oh she is contrite but oh she never would have done it but oh the fatal stroke was hers for a combined length of several pages near the very end is one of the fastest ways of making a reader utterly sick of it all after a 500-600 page trudge, depending on your edition. If there had been less of this and far more interesting variations in character and consequence beyond the ideal, the tempter, and the hivemind of the villagers, it'd be a far better work today. Such may have caused it to be less popular back in the day, but the risk may have well been worth taking.

I suppose, for me, the other weakness of this work is how easily it goes down: I think it had a single footnote in the entirety of its contents, if that. It makes for a good introductory work for those who want the contemporaneously written Victorian times, but considering how much this book goes under the radar compared to its fellow blockbuster sensation novels 'The Woman in White' and even Lady Audley's Secret, it's not likely to attract those who'd benefit most from said introduction. So, despite its length and the relatively text-packed pages, this made for a good palate cleanser when paired with one of the more intense and/or complicated works in the current reads pile (I tend to read a chunk from two of the four on any particular day: it helps break up any developing tedium, and lord am I in need of that these days). I was especially keen on it when the author went some way in denormalizing antisemitism and racism about eighty pages in, but after a good three hundred pages subsequent to this that refused to even look in the direction outside of proprietary WASP behavior, I had to chalk it up as a misleading blip on the radar. After that, I was rather unfortunately resigned to watching the various cardboard cutouts scuttle about in an increasingly hysterical manner as the predictable penultimate conclusion raced towards its completion. Interesting from the level of encountering a never before read author and somewhat entertaining in parts, but otherwise, nothing much to write home about.

Lackluster as I found this to be, I've run across too many women novelists who were rabidly popular in their time and sunken down in these 'progressive' days to think it is entirely the various authors' fault. Much as I love the Brontës and Evans, there are too many who read them and perhaps a Gaskell or two and think themselves well finished with Victorian women novelists. As such, if I find a work by a name of the period, or anything prior to 1950 to be perfectly honest, that I am less than redundantly familiar with, I am almost guaranteed to pick it up. It is very much a system of trial and error, but thanks to the particular period I'm aiming at, even the less than satisfactory ones come in handy for the various reading challenges I subject myself to each year. So, this work is, as is most of the reading I do these days, is less an individual disappointment and more a part of a larger appraisal of various underrepresented sections of literature that didn't go as well as others of its kind have. As I said, this would make a decent introduction to the theme, length, and cultural context of typical Victorian works, so anyone who is looking to dip their toe in to something that isn't a whirlwind of references and outdated lingo and can deal with some of the more exigent display of pathos would be a good fit for this. Worst comes to worse, they'll likely get as much a kick as seeing the phrase 'what's up?' in all its Anglo conjugated forms a good 130 years earlier than expected as I did.

[majra · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Adela · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25*