Login
0
Love and Scandal Among the Victorian Aristocracy
Outrageously handsome, witty and clever, Harry Cust was reputed to be one of the great womanisers of the late Victorian era. In 1893, while a Member of Parliament, he caused public scandal by his affair with artist and poet Nina Welby Gregory. When she revealed she was pregnant, horror swept through their circle known as ‘the Souls', a cultured, mostly aristocratic group of writers, artists and politicians who also rubbed shoulders with luminaries such as Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells.
For the rest of their lives, Harry and Nina would fight to rebuild their reputations and maintain the marriage they were pressurised to enter. In Tangled Souls, acclaimed biographer Jane Dismore tells the tumultuous story of the romance which threatened to tear apart this distinguished group of friends, revealing pre-war society at its most colourful and most conflicted.
Harry Cust has long needed to emerge from the shadows. A rich tapestry unfolds
Hugo Vickers, author of The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon – Duchess of Marlborough,
Brilliant ... Through original research, Dismore has crafted an upper-class soap opera to rival Downton Abbey and The Crown
Lyndsy Spence, The Lady,
With painstaking skill, Dismore lays bare the double standards of the Souls - a brilliant group who thought themselves superior, in morals and intellect, to the rest of their class
Artemis Cooper, author of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure,
3rd March, 2025 in Biography & Memoir, History, Society & Culture, Women in History
When Lady Dorothy Mills was a young girl, a female relative told her she would never be beautiful so she had better be interesting – and she was. Yet extraordinarily, this is the first book about this fearless woman who became the best-known female explorer of the 1920s and 30s,…
