This weekend, I finished a book that, halfway through, I considered not finishing at all. The reason was that the protagonist was so disgusting and evil that she made me almost physically sick. I decided to just skim through the second half, just to see if she suffered the consequences of her depraved behavior.

The book is Wideacre, by Philippa Gregory, and it is set in Georgian England (1716-1830 approximately), though no exact years are given. I am a lover of historical fiction and novels set in earlier and ancient time periods. This book is the first of a trilogy, and I was tempted to quit reading halfway through and return it to Half Price Books where I got it, and not reading the next one in the series. I am not joking, just reading this book made me feel soiled, as if I had imbibed some of the evil it contained.

The protagonist is a woman called Beatrice Lacey, an aristocrat who lives with her family (parents and brother) on an estate in the Sussex region. They are wealthy, and the estate is surrounded by a home farm, and a village where the family owns woodland and fields, including a Common where the villagers graze their cattle and plant and reap some of their own crops. For much of the story, the family is well-loved by the villagers, and the estate prospers.

The beautiful, pastoral picture begins to change once Beatrice hits puberty. She turns out to be literally obsessed with “the land” and the estate she lives on. She has decided that it is her destiny to own the estate, in spite of British law that prevents women from inheriting land. There is a law of Primogeniture, passing property down to only the male children in any family. Beatrice decides that she will defy that law, which has held for centuries. Please note that I did learn a lot about the firmness of that law by watching Downton Abbey, which has the same sort of issue.

Beatrice Lacey’s first step on her descent into absolute evil is an affair with the son of the gamekeeper on the estate. Ralph is a smart, ambitious guy, and early on he tells Beatrice of his desire to, through her, own the estate and literally “sleep in the Master’s bed.” He not only wants the estate for himself, but he wants Beatrice to help him do it, so HE can be the Master, putting her in a subordinate position, which she definitely does not want.

They begin a torrid affair, where they steal off to a secluded spot to have sex and discuss plans to take over the estate together. One time, they actually discuss murdering her father as a first step to their takeover. Ralph actually wants to do the foul deed right away. Beatrice isn’t so sure about that, but she does approve the idea, her second step on the path of evil. Then, the next step appears… In this tryst, they are discovered “in flagrante delicto” by Beatrice’s brother Harry.  He is horrified by the scene before him, BUT he shows himself to be nearly as depraved as his sister, when it turns out that he welcomes punishment by Ralph and asks to be beaten by him in a show of groveling submission.  So their secret is safe.

In the next few days, the slippery slope gets slipperier, and Beatrice’s father is killed in an “accident” while riding his horse on the property. Beatrice knows that Ralph has done it, with HER tacit approval, and it disgusts her. She makes plans to pay him back, and she does. From this point on, things get darker and darker, and before the end of the book, Beatrice has engaged in further murders, incest, and bears two children with her brother. Her brother marries a woman from an estate nearby, and this is a threat to Beatrice’s plans to take over Wideacre herself, so she does as much as she can to discourage her new sister-in-law.

So Beatrice engages in sin after sin, continuing to have sex with her own brother, humiliating him with punishment, and concealing this activity from the rest of the family, including Harry’s new wife! Beatrice carries on a whirlwind romance with a local doctor, who falls head-over-heels for her. She discovers she is pregnant again by Harry, so ropes this wealthy doctor into marrying her so the second child will be “legitimate”. Once the child is born, the Doctor pretty much figures out that the child isn’t his, so Beatrice works on ruining him, too.

Finally, the estate is ruined by Harry’s newfangled ideas of farming, the estate is mortgaged to the hilt, and their mother discovers Beatrice and Harry in their incestuous relationship, so Beatrice kills her too.

By the end of this novel, which I skimmed through to the end, everything and nearly everyone is destroyed. Beatrice does get her just desserts, and that was the only good thing about it.

I wondered how an author could dream up such a villainous, depraved protagonist, with murder, incest, ruination, lies, and deception to her credit. I wonder if other readers had the same reactions that I did. I really can’t think of another female villain as horrible as this one. I still haven’t decided whether to read the next novel in the series.