East Lynne is an English sensation novel of 1861 by Ellen Wood, writing as Mrs Henry Wood. A Victorian best-seller, it is remembered chiefly for its elaborate and implausible plot, centring on infidelity and double identities. There have been numerous stage and film adaptations. The much-quoted line "Gone! And never called me mother!" does not appear in the book; both variants come from later stage adaptations. The book was originally serialised in The New Monthly Magazine between January 1860 and September 1861, being issued as a three-volume novel on 19 September 1861.
Plot summary
Lady Isabel Carlyle, a beautiful and refined young woman, leaves her hard-working lawyer-husband, Carlyle, and her infant children to elope with an aristocratic suitor, Francis Levison, after wrongfully suspecting and becoming jealous of her husband's friendship with Barbara Hare. However once abroad with Levison she realises he has no intention of marrying her, despite her having borne their illegitimate child. He deserts her, Lady Isabel is disfigured in a train accident and the child is killed. Following this Isabel is able to take the position of governess in the household of her former husband and his new wife allowing her to be close to her children but which also becomes a source of great misery. The pressure of keeping up a façade and being constantly reminded that her husband has moved on eventually physically weakens her. On her deathbed she tells all to Carlyle who forgives her.
Adaptations
There have been multiple adaptations for stage, radio, films and television. East Lynne has been adapted for the stage many times; the play was so popular that stock companies put on a performance whenever they needed guaranteed revenue. It became so common that theaters stuck with a badly received play famously would assuage audiences with the hopeful promise, "Next week, East Lynne!" The play was staged so often that critic Sally Mitchell estimates some version was seen by audiences in either England or North America every week for over forty years. The novel was first staged as Edith, or The Earl's Daughter in New York in 1861 and under its own name on 26 January 1863 in Brooklyn; by March of that year, "three competing versions were drawing crowds to New York theaters." The most successful version was written by Clifton W. Tayleur for actress Lucille Western, who was paid $350 a night for her performance as Isabel Vane. Western starred in East Lynne for the next 10 years. At least nine adaptations were made in all, not including plays such as The Marriage Bells that "used a different title for the sake of some copyright protection." There have been many silent film versions of the book including a 1913 film. Another, starring Theda Bara, was made in 1916, and there was an Australian film six years later. In 1925, another version reached the screen which starred Alma Rubens, Edmund Lowe, Lou Tellegen and Leslie Fenton. In 1930 the film Ex-Flame was released which shifted novel's setting to contemporary England. As the more melodramatic aspects of the story became dated, there were several parodies and burlesques made, including East Lynne in Bugville with Pearl White, Mack Sennet's East Lynne with Variations, and in 1931 the comedy East Lynne on the Western Front in which British soldiers fighting in the World War I stage a burlesqued version of the story.
Some critics argue that the novel champions middle classes over the lower orders; others, however, find this claim "too simplistic" and argue that the novel "highlights the shortfalls inherent to bourgeois masculinity." Sally Mitchell argues that the novel simultaneously upholds and undermines middle-class values. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing, who read the book whilst staying in Rome in March 1898, wrote in his diary that it was "not at all a bad book, of its sort".
