An edition of A sentimental murder (2004)

A sentimental murder

love and madness in the eighteenth century

1st American ed.
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Last edited by ImportBot
April 17, 2024 | History
An edition of A sentimental murder (2004)

A sentimental murder

love and madness in the eighteenth century

1st American ed.
  • 1 Want to read
  • 1 Have read

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.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
340

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: A sentimental murder
A sentimental murder: love and madness in the eighteenth century
2004, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in English - 1st American ed.

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-331) and index.

Published in
New York

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
364.152/3/09421
Library of Congress
HV6535.G6 L525 2004, HV6535.G6L525 2004

The Physical Object

Pagination
x, 340 p. :
Number of pages
340

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL24380037M
Internet Archive
sentimentalmurde00brew
ISBN 10
0374261032
LCCN
2003064345
OCLC/WorldCat
53975518

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Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
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