A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.
Thoroughly researched, sympathetic and highly readable biography of the Victorian housewife who wrote the iconic Book of Household Management.
Hughes (George Eliot, 1999, etc.) delves into the lives of two generations of Isabella Mayson Beeton’s ancestors to reconstruct the world into which she was born. She shows us Isabella as a child making herself useful in a household containing a multitude of children; as a bride-to-be preparing to set up housekeeping; and as the young wife of a struggling book and magazine publisher. Sam Beeton launched The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852, four years before their marriage, and by 1857, Isabella was writing for it. The Book of Household Management soon followed, appearing in 48-page installments beginning in 1859, with Isabella serving as compiler and editor. She may not have originated the recipes in it, but she excelled as a journalist and organizer. Under her direction, it came to be the source on which middle-class Victorians relied for guidance in all matters domestic: not just the preparation and presentation of food, but coping with servants, managing money, cleaning, stocking a pantry, entertaining, raising healthy children. To capture its flavor, Hughes inserts between the chapters on Isabella’s life brief sections she calls Interludes, which consider the Book of Household Management’s various aspects: its moral tone, its assumption that readers aspired to a higher style of living, prejudices against the servant class, an obsession with the purity of food and a nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian world. Acolytes assumed that the advice was coming from an experienced matron, but Isabella never even achieved middle age. After her death at 29, apparently of syphilis contracted from Sam on their honeymoon, her husband’s firm foundered. The book was acquired by another publisher, but the Beeton name remained firmly attached to it. Hughes follows the reception of its various incarnations through the centennial edition of 1960.
A rich portrait of Beeton’s home life and the world of publishing in Victorian England.Pub Date: May 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26373-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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