Novel 022: Lady Harriet Anne Scott, The Hen-Pecked Husband (1848)
A quiet, successful lawyer marries a beautiful woman with expensive tastes and dubious loyalties.
Lady Harriet Anne Scott (1819-1894), née Shank, wrote nine novels between 1838 and 1862.This one, despite its silly title, is a keen, nuanced portrait of an unhappy marriage.
It is “lightly and easily told” and “replete with social meanings.” New Monthly Magazine, February, 1848
“One of the best novels we have perused for a long while. . . . The vivid history” of the novel’s “social sphere” is “drawn with a force and truthfulness which bespeaks a mind of no common order.” “There is a deep knowledge of human character in it, and an admirable tracing of momentous consqeunces to apparently trifling causes. . . . Nothing can be more individual and distinct than the characters.” Literary Gazette, March 18, 1848
“The interest of the story is larger than the title (not a good one) would intimate; and certainly it is in no small degree life-like and natural.” Morning Post, March 31, 1848
Download this week’s novel:
v.1 https://archive.org/details/henpeckedhusband01scot