The Scandal of the Season Sophie Gee Chatto & Windus, 304pp, £12.99
When the struggling young poet Alexander Pope arrives in London, the odds are stacked against him. He is crippled, poor and, worst of all, Catholic at a time when the metropolis, populated by famous literary characters such as Jonathan Swift, John Gay and Richard Steele, the founder of Tatler and the Spectator, is buzzing with rumours of papist plots.
By contrast, Arabella Fermor, a young woman of “almost perfect face and figure”, is “uniquely positioned to put her talents to the use for which they had been cultivated: the acquisition of a rich husband”. But her fate veers off in a different direction when she meets the dashing and mysterious nobleman Robert Petre: “a man in want of adventure”. While extra-marital liaisons are the favourite pastime of married ladies, for single women they are fraught with danger. And in addition to dalliances with shop wenches and married aristocrats, Petre also flirts with a Jacobite conspiracy against Queen Anne. The story of their affair inspires Pope’s immortal “The Rape of the Lock”, the poem that made his name.
Sophie Gee has brought bawdy, chaotic 18th-century London to life with verve. While her prose sometimes feels a little contrived, she vividly renders her characters’ quirks, neuroses and individuality.
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