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East Lynne
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East Lynne
Unavailable
East Lynne
Ebook144 pages1 hour

East Lynne

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

A classic of Victorian literature, East Lynne was published in 1861. It was a sensational success, selling more than 500,000 copies and making its author as famous in her lifetime as Charles Dickens himself.

Beautiful, kind and unblemished, Lady Isabel Vane is the perfect wife and mother. Until, in a fit of jealousy, she leaves her neglectful husband and infant children to elope with her aristocratic suitor. Her fall from grace is absolute. Can she be redeemed? And will she ever see her children again?

Dramatic and moving, East Lynne draws aside the curtains of the respectable Victorian middle-classes to reveal their hypocrisy, cruelty and lust. And we witness the terrible punishment of those that dare to disobey a merciless moral code.

This dramatisation of East Lynne opened at the New Vic Theatre, Staffordshire, in June 2005.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherOberon Books
Release dateAug 2, 2016
ISBN9781783197958
Unavailable
East Lynne
Author

Lisa Evans

Lisa Evans was trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Speech and Drama after which she worked in radio, stage and TV in Britain and the USA before becoming a playwright. She has written over 30 produced plays, several of which have won awards. She has been Resident Writer for Theatre Centre, Temba Theatre Co. and Associate Writer for Theatre by the Lake Keswick. She was the recipient of the Writers Guild Award 2011 for Best Play for Children and Young People for The Day The Waters Came. She also writes for television, radio and film and runs writer's workshops.

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Reviews for East Lynne

Rating: 3.7142856734693876 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

98 ratings6 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another Goodreads reviewer likened this book to a Victorian soap opera, and I think that is a very good description. It is dramatic and fast-paced, often utterly unlikely and outrageous. There is adultery, assumed identities, a murder-mystery, an election, a murder trial and so on and so on. Until the last few chapters I was ready to give this novel five stars, but unfortunately the ending with the two pious deaths was a bit too sentimental even for me.I spent most of the story wondering what sort of a name Afy was - turns out it's short for Aphrodite. The writing is extremely accessible for a Victorian novel. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love Victorian fiction - Dickens, Trollope and all the other writers. For some reason I had never read anything by Mrs Henry Wood. so a year ago I downloaded 'East Lynne' to my Kindle. And there it sat, and sat, and sat - unread. A week ago, having finished a rather gory murder mystery I decided to have a change of tempo, and started reading it.What a revelation! Within two chapters I was hooked. The TV Series Downton Abbey has taken the west by storm, and here is a novel that is better than Downton Abbey. 'East Lynne' would make the most amazing/fantastic TV series or film. It has everything: heroes, heroines, evil men, governesses, honour, murder, betrayal, loss of fortune, scheming servants, illegitimacy, Victorian social mores,repentance, forgiveness - as I said, it has everything and more.I was hooked, couldn't wait to see what would happen next, the plot twisted and turned all the time.At the time it was written (1861) it was what was called a 'sensation novel' that did not mean a 'sensational' novel, but rather a novel where the story, characters, situation, plot and denouement raised 'sensations' such as anger, sympathy, tenderness etc within the reader. And to my mind it succeeded in spades! I would have awarded it the full 5 star status, but for the two rather overly sentimental death-bed scenes, which may well have been accurate given a Victorian perspective, but irritated me. A terrific read, not at all heavy and dreary - I heartily recommend it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent Victorian sensation novel that will appeal to fans of Lady Audley's Secret and No Name. I can't really talk about it without giving something away, but it kept me on the figurative "edge of my seat" the entire time! (Don't read the book description if you don't want to be spoiled.) I read the 1883 edition, and it didn't seem "racy" or "slang-ridden" to me; it would interesting to see how different the original 1861 edition is.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This Victorian "sensation" novel, a huge bestseller in its time, has it all - murder, mystery, romance, elopement, deception, and a fallen woman. It was a gripping book. And since it was almost 700 pages I think I might take it along anytime I anticipate the possibility of being stranded on a deserted island. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I could say that ‘East Lynne’, a huge popular success in its day, has unremarkable writing, is horribly contrived, holds no real surprises, drifts into silliness and goes on for much too long.But I could also tell you that I had to keep reading, that I was very well entertained, and that the book was very easy to read.I’d read it before, many years ago, when my love for Victorian sensation novels was very new; and though I remembered that arc of the story I had forgotten so many details.East Lynne is an estate, located near the small town of West Lynne. It’s owner, the Earl of Mount Severn, was far from old but he was crippled by gout and very close to bankruptcy. He hoped to sell East Lynne, the only unentailed property still in his possession, privately, so that his creditors would not find out. Archibald Carlyle, a successful young lawyer from West Lynne, visited the Earl as he was very interested in the property.At dinner, he met the Earl’s daughter, Lady Isabel Vane. He saw that she was beautiful, that she was innocent, that she loved her father dearly, and that she had no idea how precarious his – and her – position was.After dinner, Lady Isabel left to attend a party with her cousin and chaperone Mrs Vane. Lady Isabel met Captain Francis Levison, her chaperone’s cousin from another wing of her family, at that party. He was charming but clearly no good; she was blind to his failings, and utterly smitten.The Earl dies suddenly, and his estate and his title are inherited by a distant cousin. He is a good and decent man and he takes Lady Isabel into his home. He grows fond of her but his wife is unhappy with the situation and takes that out on Lady Isabel. When Carlyle has occasion to visit he discovers Lady Isabel in an agitated state and when he sees her position, and she reluctantly tells him what has happened to her, he offers her an escape. He proposes marriage, knowing that she has the qualities to become an excellent wife. She was still in love with Levison, but he had failed to show himself, and so she agreed to the wedding so that she could leave a horrible situation and return to the home she loved at East Lynne.Meanwhile, in West Lynne, another young woman was trouble. Barbara Hare’s brother, Richard was a fugitive from justice, accused of the murder of George Hallijohn. He had been found standing over Hallijohn’s corpse, gun in hand. It was known that Richard was he had been courting the dead man’s daughter Afy, whom he used to visit in their isolated cottage, despite his father’s angry opposition. Richard paid a furtive visit to his family home, to see his mother and ask for money. He told his sister that there was another man present on the night of the murder, a Captain Thorn, who had also courting Afy. He thinks that Captain Thorne must be the murderer, but he has no idea who he was or where he came from, and Afy has disappeared.Barbara turns to Archibald Carlyle – a friend and neighbour of her family, and the man she had hoped to marry – for help. (for whom her feelings are more than friendly). Her father has disowned Richard, her mother is frail, and so she and he begin to work together, to try to clear Richard’s name.In these early chapters I was wonderfully caught up with the story and the characters; developing firm opinions about the different characters, about what had happened, and what – in all probability – was going to happen.Archibald Carlyle was a good man, but he was foolish in many ways.He allowed his imperious spinster sister – Miss Corny – to shut up her own home and move into East Lynne, without giving a thought to whether she and his sweet-natured wife would be compatible. They weren’t.He kept Barbara Hare’s secret and he failed to give his wife any explanation about why he spent so much time at her family home. It didn’t occur to him that his wife might fear the worst. She did.Captain Francis Levison reappeared when Lady Isabel was at a very low ebb. He charmed her all over again, and she made a decision that would have terrible consequences ….This was where things started to go wrong; because what I knew of Lady Isabel wouldn’t let me believe that she did what she did.There was much drama as the story played out:- A train crash- A parliamentary election- A trial for murder- A deathbed scene or two.I was increasingly aware that there was far too much melodrama, there was too much that was implausible and that there were far too many coincidences. I was still turning the pages quickly, I was still being wonderfully well entertained; the story was full of incident and I continued to be engaged by the characters and their situations.I was fascinated by Ellen Wood’s attitude to them to. When she addressed her reader she had a very firm moral stance, but her story suggested that she really had a little more empathy and understanding. Even after her fall, Lady Isabel remained the heroine, and even though her creator put her through the mill she did allow her glimpses of true happiness and a promise of redemption.I had to sympathise with her; a fundamentally good woman whose circumstances led her to make one mistake, that she would quickly realise was that and pay for so dearly.I was sorry that the villain responsible for her fall was a little one-dimensional.The women in this story were more interesting that the men, and they made must have made this story feel very modern in its own time. Afy was a minx, but she was doing what she had to, left to make her own way in the world. Barbara may have been rather proud, but her family situation was difficult, the prospects for a young woman whose brother had been labelled a murderer weren’t good, and she did the best she could for herself and the people she loved. Miss Corny – well I don’t quite have the words, except to say the her dress sense, her economies and her firm principle were wonderfully entertaining. I’d love to send her into the future – maybe into another book – to see what she made of it and what the future made of her.East Lynne is a very big book, and because it became less plausible and more predictable as I went on I wasn’t entirely sorry to reach the end.I have to say though, that because there was so much going on its pages, so much to think about, I’m very glad that I decided to visit it again.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If Danielle Steele had lived in the 1860s, East Lynne is probably the type of novel she would have written. Murder, disguise, adultery, divorce, illigitmate children—and oh, yeah, a horde of bats—are at the center of this sensationalist novel that was in and of itself a reflection of the time period in which it was written.When William Vane, Earl of Mount Severn, dies, destroyed by debt, his daughter, the Lady Isabel, marries a country solicitor, Archibald Carlyle. Later, she abandons her husband and children in favor of a well-known rake, Francis Levison. When he abandons her with her illigitimate child, Lady Isabel becomes, in an ironic twist of fate, governess at East Lynne.It’s a pretty far-fetched book, all things considering, and the foreshadowing is laid on pretty thick. In one scene, a horde of bats appears at East Lynne one night; next thing you know, the Lady Isabel’s father is dead. The novel is full of people “screaming,” “crying,” “sobbing,” and “raving,” instead of simply “saying” things. It’s pretty much all the melodrama you could ask for, and more.Ellen Wood wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a good writer—at one point, when Francis Levison sneaks around in the bushes listening in on a conversation between Barbara Hare and Mr. Carlyle, the author describes him as “strolling down like a serpent behind the hedge.” Oh, if only serpents could stroll! There are also minor inconsistences; for example, when Mr. Carlyle marries a second time, his sister moves back to her old home; but later, the author tells her reader that Miss Carlyle vacated her room upstairs in favor of one downstairs. It’s a book that’s passed out of the canon because it’s so quaint and dated. But it seems as though Ellen Wood sure knew how to titillate her Victorian readers.