A fascinating account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body
from best-selling historian and critic Kathryn Hughes.
In Victorians Undone, renowned British historian Kathryn Hughes
follows five iconic figures of the nineteenth century as they encounter
the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their
bodies. Or rather, through their body parts. Using the vivid language of
admiring glances, cruel sniggers, and implacably turned backs, Hughes
crafts a narrative of cinematic quality by combining a series of truly
eye-opening and deeply intelligent accounts of life in Victorian
England.
Lady Flora Hastings is an unmarried lady-in-waiting at young Queen
Victoria's court whose swollen stomach ignites a scandal that almost
brings the new reign crashing down. Darwin's iconic beard provides
important new clues to the roles that men and women play in the great
dance of natural selection. George Eliot brags that her right hand is
larger than her left, but her descendants are strangely desperate to
keep the information secret. The poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
meanwhile, takes his art and his personal life in a new direction thanks
to the bee-stung lips of his secret mistress, Fanny Cornforth. Finally,
we meet Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old working-class girl whose tragic
evisceration tells us much about the currents of desire and violence at
large in the mid-Victorian countryside.
While 'bio-graphy' parses as 'the writing of a life, ' the genre itself
has often seemed willfully indifferent to the vital signs of that
life--to breath, movement, touch, and taste. Nowhere is this truer than
when writing about the Victorians, who often figure in their own life
stories as curiously disembodied. In lively, accessible prose,
Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be,
proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth
century.
