Tangled Souls: Love and Scandal Among the Victorian Aristocracy

The glittering, poignant and sometimes shocking story of the love affair between two members of the Souls, the group of unconventional aristocrats at the heart of late Victorian society. Outrageously handsome Harry Cust was reputed to be one of the great womanisers of the late nineteenth century. In 1893 he caused a scandal by his affair with the artist Nina Welby. When she fell pregnant, horror swept through ‘the Souls’, the cultured group of writers, artists and politicians who kept company with luminaries such as Oscar Wilde and H.G. Wells. Harry’s seduction of an unmarried woman broke the rules of their class, but passions raged behind the courtly code of the Victorian aristocracy. While Souls women bore their lovers’ children, Harry and Nina fought to rebuild their reputations and maintain a marriage. In Tangled Souls, acclaimed biographer Jane Dismore tells the tumultuous story of the romance which threatened to tear apart this distinguished group of friends, revealing pre-war society at its most colourful and most conflicted. AUTHOR: Jane Dismore is a freelance historian and biographer. Her books include Duchesses (Blink), which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday, and Princess (Thistle; Lyons) on the early life of Elizabeth II, a source for the recent ITV and PBS documentary Our Queen in Wartime. She is a former practising solicitor and a member of the Society of Authors and the Biographers’ Club. She lives in Hertfordshire. 14 b/w illustrations