Nothing is secret

Nothing is secret. Eventually, everything has to spill out for the world to see. Even 144 years later, secrets can still emerge from darkness into bright sunlight. Truth has no hiding place.

This, my 460^th post, is not about the automotive industry, but about a new novel I have just published. Lizzy’s endeavour demonstrates that nothing is secret.

 

For, let’s face it, Lizzy did have a secret. No one would listen or understand, let alone believe her story. After all, was not her husband a famous international nineteenth-century locomotive designer and distinguished newspaper editor, revered by all and sundry, including John Scott Russell, builder of the Great Eastern steamship - then the world's largest liner, and Robert Stephenson, son of the great locomotive icon, George Stephenson.

Lizzy could tell no one; certainly not her beloved parents. She could not even reveal all to Mr. Bentley, the shabby-looking and rather down-at-heel London private enquiry agent she engaged to hunt down her narcissistic husband and in an attempt to bring him to account. And was living with a demon the price she had to pay in exchange for the state of marriage? Lizzy wanted desperately to leave but there was no easy means of escape.

To add to her dilemma, Lizzy received shattering news from America that turned her life upside down and made her marriage even more of a sham.

Lizzy’s desperate story began in 1858 when, as a young woman, she replied in all innocence to an advertisement in The Times newspaper for the position of housekeeper to a mysterious Zeta. What then happened propelled her to New York, Philadelphia and back to London. But it was what took place in Paris later that tore Lizzy’s life apart.

Discover what happened to Lizzy as her life unfolded among the great and the good of Britain’s Victorian engineers, and her struggle to unearth her husband’s devastating and cunning dark mysteries.

Essential facts confirming the authenticity of Lizzy’s autobiography are to be found among her family’s private papers, including a divorce petition dated February 1870 that has been held securely ever since at the UK’s National Archives, Kew, required as it was then by law to remain “closed” and therefore held secret for at least a further 100 years.

Read this Victorian bodice ripper set against a backdrop of awe-inspiring British engineering challenges; a story of lust, deception, betrayal, intrigue and romance, written unsparingly by Lizzy in the fading months of her troubled life.

Lizzy’s endeavour, by Elizabeth Browning. Available from Amazon.com and Lulu.com

Published by John Mortimer. ISBN 978-1-291-84601-0. 341pp, A5, softback.