A fascinating account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from best-selling historian and critic Kathryn Hughes. She follows five iconic figures 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. Is she or is he not "with child"? Charles Darwin's iconic beard which some said made him resemble a monkey provides important new clues to the roles that men and women play in the great dance of natural selection. The discussion evolves into how in the mid-1850's, upper and middle class Victorian men began to grow full beards again. In addition to Darwin, 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, (well illustrated in several of the fine colour prints in the volume) is the foundation for discussing Victorian prostitution. 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 wilfully 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. Colour illus, Paperback, 432 pages.
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