October 2024 - Adultery

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During October we will be looking at adultery. The definition of adultery is that either the husband or the wife in a marriage has sexual relations with a different partner. Although today we look at infidelity as a reason to end the marriage, years ago it was a common occurrence. Sometimes both parties of an arranged marriage agreed to look the other way but in the days where men set the rules, it was often the unfaithful wife who was punished while the man could behave however he wanted. In fact, in the case of powerful men, having a mistress was expected.

Affairs outside of marriage exist for many reasons. From straight boredom, to growing apart from each other, to simply trying to prove to yourself that you still have “it”. There are also many reasons why couples remain together when the marriage is in tatters. Religion, children, money or social status can all play a part.

From classics to today’s best sellers, there are many books that have adultery as a theme:

Fiction

: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
: The King’s Mistress by Emma Campion
: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
: The French Mistress by Susan Holloway Scott
: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
: Lucy by Ellen Feldman
: American Beauty by Shana Abe

Non-fiction

: Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King by Antonia Fraser
: Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II by Catherine MacLeod
: Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan
: Sex with Presidents by Eleanor Herman
: The Duchess by Penny Junor
: Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels

Whatever you chose to read, enjoy and if you choose, please add it to our Wiki which can be found here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Challenge

I'll be going French, for my ongoing Vive la France! project, and probably going with Stendhal's The Red and the Black (and possibly also The Charterhouse of Parma) and as another possible addition (a pretty quick one) Zola's Thérèse Raquin. I've already read Madame Bovary (in the Lydia Davis translation).

I plan to read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I bought the book after I had watched the film (in 2009!), but have not read it yet.

I am planning on reading The Blue Butterfly by Leslie Johansen Nack which is the story of the affair between Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.

I have just finished reading The Once and Future King. Since the relationship between Guenevere and Lancelot is key to the story--not to mention there being several other adulterous relationships told in that tale--I will go ahead and count that one for this challenge. I had been thinking I might count it for the September Royalty theme, but I think it actually works better here.

why not both?

I think I will attempt Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, one of my all-time fav authors. Reading various reviews I think it includes adultery!

Adultery in Montevideo

The Woman from Uruguay
By Pedro Mairal
Translated by Jennifer Croft
Read by David Desantos
Length:~4 houurs

It’s essentially a comedy of a man’s errors as he, a married middle-aged writer called Lucas tries to satisfy his lust for a girl called Guerra. Lucas has just one day to accomplish this act that he has dreamed of for six months.

Guerra is bold and beautiful. Lucas has arranged to meet her for lunch during his one day trip from Buenos Aires to Uruguay where Guerra lives. I liked Guerra from the moment she said, on realizing Lucas’s sole intention was to bed her, that men will fck anything that moves, and the only reason they don’t have sex with their sisters is that their sisters won’t let them. And even perhaps their mothers…though Lucas, horrified cuts her short on this.

From the moment Guerra turns up at the restaurant we realize things will not run smoothly for Lucas. Guerra brings a borrowed pit bull to their lunch meeting.

Years and years of genetic manipulation had edged it toward what it was today: a jaw of a dog, rough, tough, a canine cudgel of lethal chomps, a Tasmanian devil with a huge square head.

They go shopping, get high on beer and marijuana, visit a tattoo parlor . Lucas who has never had a tattoo in his life has a one inked onto a shoulder. Stoned, he chooses a Celtic symbol for war to remember Guerra, and considers having Paz tattooed on his other shoulder but Guerra tells him his wife may find it suspicious.

We follow Lucas’s trip and trips from his home to Uruguay and back . We meet his fellow travelers who annoy him, as he only wants to think of Guerra and how on earth he’s going to explain his tattoo to his wife.

Toward the middle of the bus across the way a guy answered his cellphone and started screeching into it. He was eplaining something to his secretary coordinating shifts. He was a doctor. He was imposing his bellowing upon the sleep and daydreams of all the other passengers, his scheduling issues, his abuse of that woman who was just trying to put his messy commitments in order. “You can put off the medical group thing until October. For the love of god Isabel don’t plug everything into the same week. Give it just a tiny bit of thought.” I’ve never liked male doctors.

As Lucas lurches from one comedic disaster to another we realise he is writing the novella as a confession to his wife.

There are plenty of side events as Lucas’s conquest becomes increasingly unlikely, and the main disaster which I can’t mention here for spoiler reasons keeps the reader engrossed.

But toward the end, Pedro Mairal appears to lose interest and rushes through the denouement and its aftermath. A pity as the book is as funny as hell and it’s disappointing that the ending disappoints.

Still it’s all worth it. I recommend this novella. A short but smart read.

so much blue which Im liking quite a bit

>9 cindydavid4: I just found it in Audible free for members. Might try it next. I will need a change of pace, place and genre!

oh good! hope you like it

>11 cindydavid4: I expect I will. I’m only up to chapter 3 in The Radetzky March , and starting to get into it and to appreciate it. Once I’m well into it I’ll start So Much Blue.

Like atozgrl, I'll be reading a story about Lancelot and Guinevere; but my selection is the "The Knight of the Cart" (the 12th-century rendering from Celtic folklore to French; translated from the French by David Staines).

I did complete Jude the Obscure and not sure if it contained adultery material or not! Indeed, some parts were "obscure"! There was considerable sexual angst, marriages, divorces, living together without the "benefit" of matrimony, but as to actual adultery---it might have been hinted at, but nothing definitive. While Hardy is one of my favorite authors, this book was a slug fest!

I'm contemplating reading Hester.

I think I will read The Case of the Married Woman. Or maybe a thematic book on the history of sexuality and attitudes towards it.

>15 WelshBookworm: have wanted to read that for sometime!

>16 john257hopper: Have not heard of that book, but I do love the author.

>15 WelshBookworm: oh that does look good. Im always looking for different takes on literature.

I checked the reviews, looks good! thoat will be my book for the month

Hester has arrived!

>20 cindydavid4: It does look interesting, but I’d have to read The Scarlet Letter first. Like needing Huckleberry Finn before James. :(

I recommend Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac B Singer. Isaac Singer is also October’s book of the month (Oct) in the “Monthly Author Reads” group so you can use this for both.

I just realized that if you wish to stay in the Arthurian world for this topic, besides Lancelot and Guinevere you could also read about Tristan and Isolde.

I changed my plans because I see that I am overcommitted for the remainder of the year, so Revolutionary Road will have to wait yet again and I plan to read the short The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov.

02 OCT - I'm currently reading "The Knight of the Cart" from The Complete Romances of Crétien de Troyes; translated by David Staines) and it strikes me, as I'm reading these epic poems-stories, that for all the knights being the most strong, most brave, most loyal to the lords; And the women being the most beautiful, the most charming, and the most courteous; With everyone being the most of the best of everything, these knights cannot refuse keeping their "lances' away from the ladies... And the ladies have seem to have an incredible stock of deceptions to employ against their husbands!

03 OCT - I just finished “The Knight of the Cart” which is the story of the lengths Sir Lancelot goes through to prove his love for King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. This is a twelfth-century consolidation of Celtic songs/stories, written down by two monks in the lingua franca (French) and all the trappings (what people are wearing, how they fight, the court rituals…) are all very much contemporary to the High Middle Ages when they were recorded.
Anyway, the knight is on a quest, endures much hardship and, achieves personal if equivocally moral victory. Interestingly, though the stories contain very human characters, all the action is hyperbolic with a heavy dose of superlatives at virtually every line; but the fun is in the outsized feats and melodrama, magic and fairy tale-like settings.

>15 WelshBookworm: Im enjoying it so far, if that helps

November's Monthly Challenge, "Biographies/Memoirs" has been posted: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364882

Having recently finished several books filled with angst for various reasons, including adultery in one (Singer’s The Manor), I wasn’t really ready to reread Anna Karenina or to embark on Madame Bovary. My thoughts turned to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, several of which have plots based on adultery, and just for the fun of it, I reread The Miller’s Tale, which has to be one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read. Stories about adultery in Chaucer are most often focussed not on the unfaithful wife, but on the stupidity of an elderly husband whose marriage to a much younger wife makes him deserve the cuckoldry in store for him. In The Miller’s Tale, John the elderly carpenter marries 18-year old Alison, beautiful, healthy, and wild as a colt frolicking about the meadow. Boarding with Alison and John is a lusty, handsome young clerk studying at Oxford, “hande (‘handy’, but also ‘convenient’) Nicholas,” whose skills include predicting the weather. Seizing an opportunity, he approaches Alison in a not too gentle way—Chaucer’s language is never anything other than frank, he grabs her “by the quente”—and she immediately agrees to relieve him of the suffering of “love-longynge.” Not being satisfied with opportunities provided by John’s frequent (but alas, brief!) absences on business, they hatch a ridiculous plot based on the coming of a flood worse that Noah’s to get rid of him for a whole night to be whiled away in pleasure. The plot is complicated by another suitor for Alison, the dainty and very spueamish Absalon, another clerk in the parish. There follows utter hilarity with the plot masterfully converging at the end with suitable punishments for the three men, while sexy beautiful Alison has her pleasure with no repercussions at all.

We are now planning our topics for next year's Reading Through Time, if you are interested in hosting a month, or have any comments or questions, please join us here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364789#

I just started reading my choice for this month:
Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery, and Arsenic / Kate Colquhoun

But I'm reading it on OpenLibrary. It's been down for a few days now, so hopefully whatever is going on will be fixed and I will be able to get back in soon!

>29 LibraryCin: That must be so frustrating! I hope it is fixed so you can get back to your book soon.

>30 DeltaQueen50: OpenLibrary is connected to (part of? the same thing?) Internet Archive, and someone on another thread mentioned it's a DDoS attack (cyber attack). I thought I'd read that a few days before I tried to get back to my book, but couldn't remember for sure when I posted here if that was the issue or not. So, I suppose it's possible it could take some time.

I read The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton and Her Fight for Women's Justice by Antonia Fraser, which centres on the suit for adultery made by Caroline Norton's husband against the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. But there was so much more to Caroline Norton than that.

My full review is here:

"From time immemorial, changes in the laws of nations have been brought about by individual examples of oppression. Such examples cannot be unimportant, for they are, and ever will be, the little hinges on which the great doors of justice are made to turn." This was the example that early 19th century author and fighter for the rights of married women Caroline Norton saw herself as fulfilling, as she expressed in this quote from her Letter to the Queen of 1855. Married as teenager to George Norton, Caroline (the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan) soon fell foul of her husband's violent rages whenever he did not get his own way. At this time, the 1830s, a husband had absolute authority over his children, and in the event of marital breakdown, custody was granted to a mother only in extreme cases (for example when a father was in prison about to be transported to Australia). The irony was that, notwithstanding Victorian morality, an unmarried mother had more rights over her children than a married mother. In due course, Caroline's efforts led to the law being changed so that the default position would be that children under the age of 7 would be in the mother's custody (Infant Custody Act 1839). Further, despite being a successful writer, in law Caroline's earnings from her work belonged to her husband. In time, her efforts led to the law being changed so a married woman could own her earnings from business (Married Women's Property Act 1870), and so that the grounds for divorce were made somewhat fairer (the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857).

Mostly before all these developments, though, Caroline became famous through her association with a notorious court case in 1836 where her husband accused her of adultery (then called "criminal conversation") with no less than the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. It is undoubtedly true that she was very close to him, and there were surely some reasonable grounds for outsiders to suppose an affair (and her mother thought she was Melbourne's mistress), though the court found it was merely "great familiarity", a conclusion with which the author agrees, so the court acquitted Melbourne of adultery with her (again, as a married woman, she could not be sued by her husband, so, in effect, Melbourne was being sued for depriving George Norton of his wife's services). Caroline and Melbourne clearly had great mutual affection, though they became more distant after the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria the year after the trial, when the new young monarch relied heavily on her Prime Minister's advice (even to the extent of still seeking his advice after he was replaced as Prime Minister after a few years by the Tory Robert Peel).

Caroline's later life was less dramatic though tinged by frustration as she was still tied in marriage to George Norton, and even more by sadness due to the fates of her children, her youngest son Willie who died in an accident aged 9 and her eldest son Fletcher who died of consumption aged 30. Tragically, her middle son Brinsley, only outlived his mother by a few weeks, dying also of consumption at the age of 46. That said, she found some happiness and peace of mind in her last few months by marrying Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, ten years her junior. Many of her novels and pamphlets sound fascinating and Caroline Norton should be better known as both an author and pioneer of female equality.

Won't be participating for a while. Fell in driveway and broke my hip last Friday (I'm 73yo), had surgery on Saturday, am now in rehab. ~Mike

>33 CurrerBell: So sorry to hear this, Mike! All my best wishes that recovery goes well.

>33 CurrerBell: yes all the best for a swift recovery, Mike

>33 CurrerBell: Oh no!!! hoping you heal quickly and use the time to read all the books o your stacks. come back when you can

>37 DeltaQueen50: So sorry to hear this, Mike. Hopefully you will recover quickly and regain your mobility. We will be thinking of you and sending healing thoughts.

>33 CurrerBell: Oh no! I hope you have a speedy recovery!

>33 CurrerBell: So sorry to hear this, Mike. Prayers for a quick recovery.

>33 CurrerBell: Oh no, I'm sorry to hear the bad news! I hope for a quick recovery, and as little pain as possible. Sending my thoughts and prayers.

>33 CurrerBell: oh, no :( Sending good thoughts your way.

>33 CurrerBell: :-( Good luck with the rehab.

I have just read Enemies: A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer who was the subject of October's Monthly Author Reads, but it would have suited this theme also. I had never read anything by this author before, but this was an interesting, humorous and slightly frustrating story. Herman Broder is a Holocaust survivor in New York in the early 1950s. His wife Tamara and their children were killed by the Nazis and he now lives in an apartment with Yadwiga, a Polish peasant woman who saved his life by hiding him in her hayloft for three years. At the same time though, Herman is having an affair with Masha, another Holocaust survivor, who is separated from her husband and living with her mother. As if this wasn't complicated enough, he finds out that Tamara has managed to survive (though sadly not their children). She is now in New York too, and living with her uncle and aunt. He must dodge between these three women, and this throws up a range of humorous sitcom-like situations, though with a blackly comedic tinge as the characters are mentally scarred by their wartime experiences, feeling survivor guilt and often deep scepticism of their religion for "allowing" the Holocaust to happen. A number of them characters veer between a determination to create new lives and relationships, and suicidal ideation or reckless promiscuity. I enjoyed seeing how things would turn out, but I found the ending a bit disappointing and ambiguous. I would read more by this author.

>25 cindydavid4: I have it checked out on Libby. Need to finish my current book club book first...

hester took a bit for me to get into; there was a lot of necessary set up which at first i didnt appreciate. Im at the point now its very welcomed. I dont care for the earlier story probably coz we did the crucible in HS and felt for me this didn't give me any new information, But liking this upcoming ending.

>15 WelshBookworm: are you reading it?

I don't know if/when I'll get back to my book. I started it on OpenLibrary, but they've since had a cyberattack and are currently shut down. I still hope I can get back to it and finish it!

>45 cindydavid4: Not yet, I've got another audiobook with multiple holds that I need to read for my bookclub. But I have it on Libby and was just able to renew it, so soon I hope!

Did She Kill Him? A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery, and Arsenic / Kate Colquhoun
4 stars

In the late 1800s, Florence was an American who married James Maybrick from England, although he was 24 years older than she was. He was a hypochondriac who took a lot of “medicines”, including many with various poisons in them, including arsenic. Florence and James were having trouble in their marriage and both were cheating. He went through a time period where he was in all kinds of pain and he eventually died. Florence, along with servants and two brothers and various doctors were all trying to help him. But James’ brothers didn’t trust Florence and pointed a finger at Florence suggesting that she may have killed him with arsenic. A couple of the servants also reported things they found odd that Florence did, indicating a possible poisoning by James’ wife.

So, it seems Florence’s trial was… maybe not undertaken in the best way. The jury was (of course, due to the time frame) all men, but also all farmers and tradespeople. Not people who might easily understand a confusing array of medications and how much arsenic was or was not in each of many different bottles. Even the experts disagreed on whether or not arsenic was even what killed him. The judge seemed predisposed to find her guilty, but not because he necessarily thought she killed him, but because she was a middle class woman with loose morals – that is, he didn’t like that she had had an affair. The judge wasn’t the one to decide anything, but he did summarize for the jury… in a way that seemed somewhat biased. Anyway, this was interesting and frustrating to read about this case, well-known at the time. Fun fact: James Maybrick has been suggested as a possible Jack the Ripper (this wasn’t discussed much in the book, just mentioned, so I don’t know why he has been suspected – something about a diary… that has not been proved to be his or to be real?).

I haven't gotten to Hester yet, and not likely to before the end of the year. Too many random challenges I'm trying to finish up. So I'm counting a different book that was read, To Die For, which doesn't revolve around the act of adultery but certainly on the accusation of adultery....