Customer Reviews

Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, a Trial, and a Self-Made Woman

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Wild Romance is the true story of the life of Theresa Longworth, a woman who, in 1852, met William Yelverton aboard a steamship. Their romance was a mostly one-sided affair, which concluded with two secret marriages. When Yelverton later abandoned Theresa for marriage to another woman, Theresa instigated the first of several court cases to determine that her marriage to him was valid.

On the whole, this story of this book is stretched a bit thin. Only half of this 250-page book is devoted to the "romance" and trial; the rest to Theresa's travels throughout America and Asia. I was expecting something meatier, something that would explain why Yelverton led Theresa on to the extent that he did. It's quite possible that all he was after was sex; but in that case, why would he go so far as to have two weddings to her? The rhetoric of the court suggested that Yelverton was seduced by Theresa, and was led astray by his desires, but I tend to think that things were much more complicated than that. I guess the largest problem I had was that Yelverton as a person never really came across. In fact, he's hardly mentioned in the second half of the book as Theresa went abroad. I'd love to have known, too, what his wife, Emily Forbes, thought of the whole affair. After all, if Yelverton had been forced to take responsibility for his actions, he would basically have been committing bigamy, and his children with his second wife illegitimate.

Although the reader was privy to Theresa's thoughts and actions, I never really empathized with her. I'm not sure that I agree with the author's assessment of her; in fact, I'm not sure that she wasn't simply out for her fifteen minutes of fame, frequently making an exhibition of herself, making her look flighty at best and stupid at worst. In the end, I realized that both parties in the Yelverton case were simply subjects of their own stupidity and bad decisions.

Although I thought the book was well-researched, and the author is a competent writer, I thought the photographs in the book needed improvement. For example, there's only one picture in the entire book of Yelverton--a grainy, blurred miniature at the beginning. The rest of the photographs are vague, indistinct photographs and paintings (some anachronistic) of the places Theresa and Yelverton visited. I'm not one for judging a book solely on the pictures reproduced inside, but these definitely weren't of great quality. In all, this is a decent work of nonfiction.

I decided to read/review this book because the title of the book screams SCANDAL - and everyone loves to read about a good scandal! This was certainly quite the scandal, but the book overall didn't quite pan out that way I would have liked.

The first half of the book focuses on detailing Theresa's relationship with Yelverton and then going into the various trials that ensued in Scotland, Ireland and England that were to prove whether these two were actually married or not. This section of the book I found the most interesting. Most striking were the legal rights and the differences between a married, single, or an abandoned woman. Theresa had to tread carefully along these lines in carrying out her case. The mental characters that I created of Yelverton and Theresa is that they were both, to some degree, crazy. Theresa was fixated on Yelverton and I wouldn't put it past her to have made up some things as she went along. Yelverton, on the other hand, would constantly verbally push Theresa away, but he would always keep coming back - talk about mixed messages! Reading about these two people kept me glued to the first portion of the book.

The second half I didn't love much at all and I lost a lot of interest. The second half focuses primarily on Theresa as a Victorian travel writer following the outcome of her trials. We follow her through the US National Parks and meet John Muir. I know that travel writing became a big thing in the Victorian days and the idea is somewhat interesting to me, but I think the execution wasn't spot on here. The transition from the trial to the travel writing was somewhat awkward and not nearly as exciting. It also was dominated by more of a description of women travel writers than specifically about Theresa's travels. I just found this portion to be more dry and stuffy than the first, which was exciting.

On a side note - there were pictures scattered throughout the book that really helped to break up the text and were much appreciated.

This was really more of a 3.5 star read - but I decided to round up to 4.

This book was received from the publicist in exchange for an honest review.