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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A triumph, 2 Nov 2005
By A Customer
Anyone reading Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management would imagine the author was a matronly lady of a certain age, fat, fair and forty and lightly dusted with flour.Kathryn Hughes shows in this gripping biography that the real Mrs Beeton was in fact a twenty-one year old suburbanite journalist who didn't know the first thing about cooking. The Book of Household Management, expertly deconstructed here. Using skilled historical sleuthing, Kathryn Hughes reconstructs Mrs Beeton's story, trawling the archives to research the story of her family. This was the first recognisably modern woman's magazine, a rag bag of features which, like today's publications, revolved around the central theme, what does it mean to be a woman. Isabella Beeton was a journalist to the tips of her inky fingers. She couldn't care less about baking Victoria sponge, but she itched to bring order to the Victorian middle-class household. As Hughes shows - and this is the brilliant bit - the Book of Household Management was a triumph. It worked because Isabella understood the predicament of her suburban middle-class readers; her book allowed them to negotiate the conflict between the ideal of the middle-class angel in the home, who was a lady of leisure, and the scrubbed-carbolic reality of lives devoted to full-time domestic work. By writing a manual Beeton elevated household management into a profession like any other. Mrs Beeton composed her Book of Household Management against a backcloth of domestic anguish, of dying babies and recurrent miscarriages. Hughes speculates that Isabella was infected with syphilis by her husband, which neatly accounts for her pathetic medical history. Not that Mrs Beeton herself aspired to be a domestic goddess. Far from it. She worked as a full-time lady editor on Sam's magazines, commuting each day by train to the office and travelling to Paris to research fashion. Her death aged 28 from puerperal fever contracted in childbirth is a poignant reminder that Victorian women just couldn't have it all.
Written like a novel and beautifully crafted with interludes analysing Mrs Beeton's text, this book succeeds at many different levels. Not only is it a compelling biography of a brief but remarkable life. But it gives new historical insights into Victorian England. This is a brilliant and original book
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by Isabella Beeton
