Ellen Wood’s East Lynne in the New Monthly Magazine

Abstract

In 1862 a young Englishman touring Egypt declined an invitation to join his travelling companions on an expedition to the tombs, choosing instead to finish a particularly engrossing novel. When his friends returned to the camp they found him still reading, and he later insisted that they read it too. The young man was Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Edward, and the novel was Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne. The Prince of Wales went on to organize an ‘East Lynne’ evening, and one of the company, Arthur Penryn Stanley, Professor of Ecclesiastic History at Oxford, later boasted, ‘I came off with flying colours, and put one question which no one could answer — with whom did Lady Isabel dine on the fatal night?’¹ The ‘fatal night’ in question is when Isabel, the novel’s erring heroine, runs away from her respectable bourgeois husband to join a dissipated aristocrat. Disfigured by a railway accident and regretting her hasty action, she returns to East Lynne disguised as a governess to suffer the emotional torments of witnessing her husband with his new wife, and having to educate her own children without acknowledging that she is their mother.