Review: Sedition

Katharine Grant

Set in 1794 in London, this tale of seduction and piano-playing is gripping. The tale revolves around the daughters of city men. The fathers, many from humble backgrounds, are desperate to marry their daughters off to eligible bachelors.

One father, Tobias Drigg, wants to teach the girls to play the pianoforte and have them perform a concert for prospective husbands. Drigg sets off to find a pianoforte, and meets facially deformed Annie, daughter of the shopkeeper, and also a French pianoforte teacher. Both women become key to the story.

What follows is a lot of sex of all kinds — extra-marital, cherry-popping, gay and incest. The only people who aren’t having sex are the married couples. This is no 50 Shades Of Grey, though — the encounters aren’t described in detail and are brief — and there is much more to this book. Power — both male and female — is explored, and in a time when the French Revolution was causing a stir, anything seemed possible, especially for women.

A book to recommend.