Tesco Book Club

The Scandal of the Season
by Sophie Gee

a brilliant, witty modern love-story - set in 1711

August Book

Book Description

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.

Sophie Gee was born in Sydney in 1974 and grew up in Paddington. She attended the University of Sydney, and graduated in 1995 with a first-class honours degree in English.

After university, Sophie won a scholarship to Harvard, to do a Ph.D. in English literature. She wrote her doctoral thesis about filth, pollution and satire in the eighteenth century. She graduated from Harvard in 2002 and in autumn of that year was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton. Before writing The Scandal of the Season Sophie published academic essays on Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and others... She has been awarded academic fellowships at UCLA, Yale and the Huntington Library and was a visiting teacher at University College London.

When at Princeton she divides her time between Princeton and New York, and returns regularly to Australia to spend time with her family.