A review by christinel
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton: The First Domestic Goddess by Kathryn Hughes

3.0

I definitely picked up this book for its cover at a used book sale, with it's faux-antique cloth texture and worn out gilt. I am always strangely fascinated by what it felt like to live in the past - not just the ideas and joys and challenges, but what everyday stuff looked like and felt like and tasted like. So the biography of the woman who was sort of the Martha Stewart of the Victorian age is definitely in my wheelhouse. What the author is most interested in is all the retrospective glosses that people have put on Mrs. Beeton's image, as at different times people made her out to be a domestic goddess, a symbol of an idyllic agrarian past, a harlot, a plagiarising hack and a ruthless businesswoman.