mak506 's review for:

Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners by Therese Oneill

DID NOT FINISH

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Unreadable. Nearly. (I read about 1/3.) Thought this might be a fun whirl through another era's underthings, but the ceaseless "aren't they just so backwards, aren't we just so much more enlightened, darlings?" tone got old and condescending fast. In fact, I'm pretty sure the author is wrong about a number of her conjectures, because she appears to have not have done or sought any empirical research. I haven't read Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Victorian yet, but based on her How to Be a Tudor, which was excellent, I have no doubt HTBAV is the better work. Goodman, in addition to academic qualifications, is a practiced living historian and far better informed about whether people of the past were actually as stinky as Oneill restates over and over and over.