The Scandal of the Century

About the book

A CLANDESTINE AFFAIR. AN OUTRAGEOUS ELOPEMENT. STOLEN LETTERS. SCHEMING SERVANTS. SEX. SENSATION. CELEBRITY.

THIS IS THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY.

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In 1682, a young woman in the throes of a passionate affair flees her parents’ home in Surrey to seek a new life in London. A scandal in its own right, but this is no ordinary young woman: Lady Henrietta Berkeley is the daughter of one of England’s most powerful men, and her lover is her own sister’s husband. As news of this notorious adulteress spreads, her flight, capture and the lawsuit that follow tear through society as the scandal of the century.

To the playwright and poet Aphra Behn – herself condemned as a scarlet woman of loose morals – Henrietta’s trial would be more than a source of intrigue and entertainment: it would inspire her to write Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, a thinly veiled fiction and arguably the first novel in English literature. An immediate bestseller, it propelled Behn, if only temporarily, out of poverty and disgrace – yet for all her notoriety, Aphra Behn is an enigma, the facts about her life continually disputed.

In The Scandal of the Century, Lisa Hilton interweaves the story of these two rebellious and ruthless women. Against the backdrop of seventeenth-century England, with its strict traditional conventions of love, duty and identity, she shows just how far these women would go to break free.