Wedlock, by Wendy Moore

The full title is Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.

Having enjoyed her other lengthily subtitled book on How to Create the Perfect Wife, I moved on to this one, also in roughly the same period of English history. If anything, it's even better. While the young women of 'Wife' are largely ciphers (at least in the sense of having left behind written records), here both members of the disastrous marriage are vivid creatures with long paper trails.

The actual title of this book is.... Worst. Husband. Evar.

All wives (I guess I should say, all those with husbands) should be handed a copy of this book, so that they know their husband is not the worst ever.

Mary Bowes was a wealthy heiress, whose first husband was the Earl of Strathmore, who died of TB (though not before the marriage produced 5 children). Since Victorianism was still in the future, Mary dallied fairly freely during and after her marriage.

And now the highlighting feature of the Kindle will haunt you with long blockquotes.

Educated to an unusually high standard by her doting father, Mary Eleanor had established a modest reputation for her literary efforts and was fluent in several languages. More significantly, she had won acclaim in the almost exclusively male-dominated world of science as a gifted botanist. Encouraged by senior figures in London's Royal Society, she had stocked her extensive gardens and hothouses with exotic plants from around the globe and was even now planning to finance an expedition to bring back new species from southern Africa. According to one writer, she was simply “the most intelligent female botanist of the age.”
...
Indeed, learned women were often viewed as objects of ridicule, if not scorn, since they offended the idealized image of the acquiescent, passive female. “Nothing, I think, is more disagreeable than Learning in a Female,” declared Thomas Sherlock, the bishop of London, while Lord Bath blamed the headaches suffered by the poet and classicist Elizabeth Carter on her devotion to learning. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu confessed to “stealing” her education by surreptitiously studying Latin when her family believed she was reading “nothing but romances.” Writing to her own daughter, Lady Bute, in 1753, she urged that her granddaughter should enjoy a similarly advanced education since “learning (if she has a real taste for it) will not only make her contented but happy in it.” But equally she took pains to urge that her granddaughter should “conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness” since revealing her knowledge would engender envy and hatred.

Now an heiress and a countess, Mary chose as her next husband...
( an Irish fortune hunter )