All Along The River

Isola Disney has been abandoned. Her husband has sailed to India with his regiment, leaving her in a remote corner of the English countryside, isolated and vulnerable. Into this void steps the local nobleman, a man accustomed to taking what he wants. What follows is a devastatingly honest portrait of a woman's fall, not through weakness alone, but through the crushing weight of loneliness, social invisibility, and desire left to fester in silence. Braddon, the controversial Victorian sensation novelist, pulls no punches. This is a novel about the choices women make when the world offers them no good ones, and the consequences that follow them downstream. Like Madame Bovary, it maps the terrain of a lonely heart toward destruction, but with a distinctly English darkness, dampened by river fog and the cold shoulder of society. The prose has a quality of sad clarity: Isola sees her own undoing approaching, but cannot seem to step out of its way. For readers who want their Victorian fiction raw and psychologically acute, who savor the doomed heroines of sensation novels, who understand that some rivers flow only toward the sea.