In Victorian Britain, across age and class divides, men and women differed in their access to and use of power, in their perceptions of power and powerlessness, and in the behaviours they thought proper to power. The ambiguities show starkly in the life of Lady Caroline Agnes Horsley Beresford (1818-94). Her first husband was a Duke, her second a wealthy horse racing aficionado, and her third forty years younger than she.

At first her peers and those in the racing fraternity and the press responded to her idiosyncrasies with little surprise. In the end, overbearing and overweight, she suffered ridicule as a cougar - not that they used the term in those days...