East Lynne
Mrs. Henry Wood
The sensation novel of its age, and the source of a line every Victorian could quote.
3 versions · 1913–1982
On the stage, the mother returning in disguise to nurse her dying child produced the cry “Dead! and never called me mother!” — a line not in the novel at all, which nevertheless became a byword for theatrical excess and stayed in the language for a century.
Filmed repeatedly from 1913, it is the archetype of the fallen-woman melodrama: a plot machine so efficient that soap opera is still running on it.
1861 — the year divorce reached the newspapers
The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 had just moved divorce out of the ecclesiastical courts and into a public one, and the newspapers reported the cases in detail. A wife who left could lose her children entirely; the law gave a father near-absolute custody.
Mrs Henry Wood wrote the sensation novel of that moment, and it sold in the hundreds of thousands. Its subject is not adultery so much as what the law did afterwards.
On screen
3Film and television, earliest first.
- 1913 East Lynne Bert Haldane
- 1916 East Lynne Bertram Bracken
- 1982 East Lynne David Green
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.