Reading Guide: The Scandal of the Season

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Sophie Gee

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About Sophie Gee

Born in Sydney in 1974, Sophie Gee was brought up and educated in the inner-city suburb of Paddington, graduating from the University of Sydney in 1995 with a first-class honours degree in English. She won a scholarship to Harvard, where she wrote a doctoral thesis about pollution, filth and satire in eighteenth-century London. She received a PhD in 2002 and was immediately appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Princeton. Recently she held a research fellowship at UCLA and has recently taught at University College London before returning to Princeton.

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About the Book

What would you do if you were faced with a dangerous temptation you feared you couldn’t resist? The Scandal of the Season tells the story of the real-life seduction of the beautiful, clever Arabella Fermor by the charming, enigmatic nobleman Robert Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone. Arabella is in need of rich husband, but knows that girls have been ruined by risking an affair like the one she contemplates. The object of her desire is also flirting with a perilous Jacobite plot against Queen Anne. Watching the pair with a beady eye, is an outsider, a cripple, destined to become the genius of his age the poet Alexander Pope. He arrives in London from the country, burning with ambition. If he fails, he will be left destitute. But can he find a story for his next poem powerful enough to make his reputation? A seductive novel about risk and dangerous liaisons in a time of Jacobite plots and Popish fears, when marriage was a market, and sex was a temptation fraught with danger, The Scandal of the Season is a brilliant, witty modern love-story set in 1711. Sophisticated, sexy and hugely enjoyable, this dazzling debut novel is inspired by events that gave rise to the era s most celebrated satirical entertainment, The Rape of the Lock . The story plays out against the backdrop of 18th-century London: dirty, teeming street-life and glorious buildings, newly restored after the Great Fire; the River Thames, artery of England s trade and commerce; masked balls, operas, eating houses, clandestine courtships and political intrigue.

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Sophie Gee interview/review

How I Came to Write The Scandal of the Season

Most people who read The Scandal of the Season comment on the vividness of the historical recreation. The London of the novel feels as real as the world of the present, but it’s in the past. A lot of people have asked me how I made this happen, so I thought I’d write a little bit about it here.

When I was writing my Ph.D., I sat in the archives at Harvard, reading about life in eighteenth-century London. I read newspapers, medical manuals, religious tracts, government edicts, personal diaries, doctors’ bills, advertising pamphlets, ballads, bawdy poems, court records. Towards the end of this time, I happened to pick up a copy of the New York Times while I was taking a coffee break in the Harvard Square Starbucks. Something about the stories in the Times seemed strange to me. The language sounded stilted and arcane; the issues and op-ed pieces out of date.

I realized that the period that I was researching had come to seem more real, more immediately recognizable, than the actual present. Daily life in the eighteenth century had become more familiar to me than my own.

After I finished my degree that memory of historical immersion stayed with me. I loved the discovery that the quotidian details of the past, however remote, could be found again, and that they were powerful enough to make me feel that I’d been transported in time.

I wanted to get this feeling back again — and I wanted to turn it into a book that many different readers could enjoy.

During my first year as an Assistant Professor at Princeton I taught a class on eighteenth-century literature, in which I gave a series of lectures about Alexander Pope’s most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock. The poem has always felt to me like a Jane Austen novel written a hundred years early. On the surface, it is light and bright and sparkling, but closer up it becomes a wry, cynical picture of a society corrupted by its own power and prosperity. The poem is set in London, which in Pope’s day was a much rougher, tougher place to live than we might imagine, but it was also most glamorous, modern city in the world.

As I did more research into The Rape of the Lock , I realized that the true story of its characters and composition would make a wonderful book. It is a love-story and a literary mystery, recounting an untold tale of political intrigue, sexual scandal and literary celebrity.

So I came to write The Scandal of the Season . I wanted it to be a book that would show two very different sides of the time and place — eighteenth-century London — that I had grown to love. The city of my Ph.D.: chaotic, unruly, teeming with filth and waste; overcrowded, but filled with irrepressible energy. The literary capital of the world. And the London that we know from the grand portraiture and classical architecture of early Georgian England: magnificent, celebratory, courtly, proud. I wanted to write a book that would make people feel as though the past had become the present. It seemed the happiest use I could make of all those years in the archives.

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Starting Points for Discussion

“Scandal” was a common word in the eighteenth-century, used to describe sensational events that were gossiped about among the small, self-contained circles of the fashionable rich. “Season” was also an important term, referring to the time when fashionable society met to orchestrate new engagements, friendships and alliances in town. Why might these two words be chosen for the title?

Ambition, and the risk are key themes of The Scandal of the Season. What kinds of hopes and ambitions are rewarded in the world of the novel? What kinds of risks don’t pay off?

The objects that circulate in the world of the novel are very often delightful but ephemeral: flowers, delicate silks, feathery costumes, letters, costly food and drink. What do such perishable goods suggest about the world and the characters described?

Several characters who seem to be very different turn out to be oddly similar. In what sense might Alexander and Arabella be seen as strangely comparable? Are Lord Petre and Teresa similarly misguided in any ways?

Martha is different from the other characters in that we feel she has special qualities that deserve to be rewarded. And yet she doesn’t achieve all that she would like. What are the circumstances that limit Martha? Would an Australian girl living now face any of the same limitations, and how might she attempt to overcome them?

Alexander is constrained by his disability, and by being a Catholic in a Protestant country. How would these problems affect a person today, what do they tell us about ways the modern world has changed?

Lord Petre seems a very historical character, but a young man, inflamed by passionate ideals, is a timeless figure. What might such a person be like now? What are some of the issues that youthful idealism are now directed towards?

In some ways the experiences in this novel seem very familiar to modern readers. But the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the language reminds us that the past is very far away, different from our own. Why might the author want to suggest of these both ideas?

Some of the most important moments in the novel involve exchanges between servants and masters, and other characters whose social status differ markedly. Why would the author want to draw attention to the significance of such asymmetrical, imbalanced relationships?

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