Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match by Wendy Moore

But Wedlock is not such a big story and is stretched out too long. This may not be Moore's fault: books are, incomprehensibly, supposed more commercial if a certain length and the publisher, Weidenfeld, may have insisted; but still, however you slice it, a sandwich is not better with three slices of bread.

Moore tells the story of Andrew Robinson Stoney's marriage to Mary Eleanor, Countess of Strathmore. On marriage, Stoney took his wife's family name, Bowes (ancestors of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). Bowes was the model for Thackeray's Barry Lyndon in The Luck of Barry Lyndon. A scoundrelly soldier, he had already slept around and married for money by the time he schemed to meet Mary Eleanor, a young, educated and accomplished widow — one of the richest heiresses in Europe, and a tremendous catch.

Bowes won her by pretending to have been fatally wounded in a faked duel. But from the moment he tottered, apparently morbid, away from the aisle, everything went wrong.

Under Georgian law a married woman had no rights and ceded her person, property, money and children to her husband. Unusually, Mary was so rich that she wrote a pre-nup, which her husband soon believed he had destroyed.

Canny enough to have made and saved a copy, Mary retrieved and used it much later in the drawn-out court cases that ended in her eventual divorce.

The story of this marriage ought to make heart-breaking reading. Bowes tortured his wife by pinching, beating, slapping, ripping out her earrings, punching, kicking, raping, threatening with pistols, dragging, starving and incarcerating. He forbade her the right to walk in her garden or grow her beloved botanical plants. He portrayed her as deranged and dressed her in rags.

He knocked up most of her female servants, practically in front of her, and took her five children away from her.

Bowes's aim was absolute control of the money. On one occasion he fired a pistol at close range at Mary's chest but the powder was damp. Why he did not manage to kill her, given his extensive, protracted and ingenious cruelty, is anybody's guess. Perhaps like all sadists he had a lingering admiration for his prey: a woman who would not capitulate, or die..

But Wedlock isn't heart-breaking, and the light-heartedness of Barry Lyndon is missing. If this book has a hero it is Mary. She triumphs in the end, achieving a (very unusual) divorce at 40 years old, leaving her former husband to rot in the Fleet prison until he died.

Moore points out that Georgian society — which was largely indifferent to the mistreatment of women — was appalled by the sustained assaults inflicted on the Countess of Strathmore, so that The Times said the charges against Bowes contained "a detail of barbarity that shocks humanity and outrages civilisation".

Wedlock is a blow-by-blow, almost dayby day account of the miserable marriage between a sadistic bastard and a stalwart, intelligent aristocrat with little legal means of escape or redress.

Moore provides a long and faithful account of a very nasty example of Georgian misogyny..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

When Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore, was abducted in Oxford Street in broad daylight in 1786, the whole country was riveted to news of the pursuit. The only daughter of a wealthy coal magnate, Mary Eleanor had led a charmed youth. Precocious and intelligent, she enjoyed a level of education usually reserved for the sons of the aristocracy. Mary was only eleven when her beloved father died, making her the richest heiress in Britain, and she was soon beset by eager suitors. Her marriage, at eighteen, to the beautiful but aloof Earl of Strathmore, was one of the society weddings of the year. With the death of the earl some eight years later, Mary re-entered society with relish and her salons became magnets for leading Enlightenment thinkers - as well as a host of new suitors. Mary soon fell under the spell of a handsome Irish soldier, Andrew Robinson Stoney, but scandalous rumours were quick to spread. Swearing to defend her honour, Mary's gallant hero was mortally wounded in a duel - his dying wish that he might marry Mary. Within hours of the ceremony, he seemed to be in the grip of a miraculous recovery. Wedlock tells the story of one eighteenth-century woman's experience of a brutal marriage, and her fight to regain her liberty and justice. Subjected to appalling violence, deception, kidnap and betrayal, the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes is a remarkable tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming odds.