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One April evening in 1779, Martha Ray, the pretty mistress of a famous aristocrat, was shot dead at point-blank range by a young clergyman who then attempted to take his own life. Instead he was arrested, tried and hanged. In this fascinating new book, John Brewer, a leading historian of eighteenth-century England, asks what this peculiar little story was all about. Then as now, crimes of passion were not uncommon, and the story had the hallmarks of a great scandal--yet fiction and fact mingled confusingly in all the accounts, and the case was hardly deemed appropriate material for real history.
Was the crime about James Hackman's unrequited love for the virtuous mother of the Earl of Sandwich's illicit children? Or was Ray, too, deranged by passion, as a popular novel suggested? In Victorian times the romance became a morality tale about decadent Georgian aristocrats and the depravity of wanton women who consorted with them; by the 1920s Ray was considered a chaste mistress destroyed by male dominance and privilege. Brewer, in tracing Ray's fate through these protean changes in journalism, memoir, and melodrama, offers an unforgettable account of the relationships among the three protagonists and their different places in English society--and assesses the shifting balance between storytelling and fact, past and present that inheres in all history.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Murder, Case studies, Crimes of passion, Meurtre, Cas, Études de, Crimes passionnels, Moorden, Crime passionnel, Murder, great britainTimes
1779, Georgian EraEdition | Availability |
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A sentimental murder: love and madness in the eighteenth century
2004, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in English
- 1st American ed.
0374261032 9780374261030
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-331) and index.
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- Created October 20, 2010
- 7 revisions
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April 17, 2024 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
December 30, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 8, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
August 9, 2020 | Edited by HindenburgBaby | Added summary from dust jacket and setting info. |
October 20, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Internet Archive item record |