The Short Life and Long Times Of Mrs. Beeton by Kathryn Hughes (2006) ( )

This was fascinating as it added to my sparse knowledge of the time, people and places and upended my assumptions about Mrs Beeton - A well written, detailed, readable biography. ( )

This is a biography that I picked up because of a group read happening here on LT. I had never heard of Mrs. Beeton - I'd be curious to know if any of you (especially the Brits!) have. Isabella Beeton was a Victorian woman who is known for her "Book of Household Management". Isabella's husband was a publisher and she wrote for his magazines and wrote this book as well which has been edited and republished countless times and is in fact still in print. Isabella Beeton's name may be long-lived, but as the title states, she had an all to short life, dying in her late 20s most likely of syphilis contracted from her husband.

There has been much controversy about Beeton's life and writing. The Book of Household Management is often blamed for the much-maligned state of British cooking (i.e. boiling vegetables for hours at a time) and there is also the fact that people think of "Mrs. Beeton" as a middle age mother of many and expert at running a house and cooking, when in fact, Isabella Beeton was in her early 20s, had no living children and probably never cooked the majority of the included recipes. To write the book, she rewrote or sometimes directly plagiarized from other cookbooks and housekeeping books.

The most interesting part of this book for me was the exploration of Victorian middle class life through Isabella's life. Everything from rising and falling through the middle classes, courtship, marriage, home life, food eaten, clothes worn, and the ravages of syphilis is explored. As well, publishing and copyrights are integral to this book which I found very interesting.

Reading this book came at a good time for me since I was reading Dickens' Bleak House at the same time. It was entertaining and easy to read. ( )

This sounded really very nteresting - a biography of te original Mrs Beeton (she of cookery book fame) and a discourse on how the book has had a life of its own without her. Unfortunately, it didn't work out like that. It was interesting, but the information was not well presented and seemed to be lacking a sense of completeness. I'm still not entirely sure what happened to one of the sons. Mayson gets lots of coverage, having appointed himself as guardian of his parents' memory. Orchart is married, but then seems to vanish - if what became of him is mentioned, I don't recall it.
I also found the style to be somewhat circular. The first part of the book kept hinting a a tragic death, later in the book there was a lot of wringing of hands about her tragic death. I know it is hard to ratchet up the tension when you know the subject is deceased, but this circular referencing seemed to be superfluous. The whole bok had the feeling of a being padded out - almost like trying to write an essay with a minimum word count - and you've 1/3 short. There were several sections that seemed completely pointless - the fictional day in the life of a middle class woman being the most noticeable example. The author makes clear that none of the preceding 3 examples of a biography of Mrs Beeton can be considered unbiased - but I cant recommend this as being well constructed, even if there has been increased access to available material. ( )

I first heard of Mrs. Beeton when I was in my early 20s and living in England. Her Book of Household Management was still in print, and I bought a reprint as a gift for my mother. I assumed then that Mrs. Beeton was at least middle age and wrote from decades of experience. At some point I learned that she was a young woman, in her 20s and newly married, when she wrote the book that made her a household name. That's about all I knew of her before I read Kathryn Hughes' book.

A careful parsing of the title reveals that this is a biography, not just of Isabella Beeton, but also of her Book of Household Management, which is sometimes referred to as Mrs. Beeton. Hughes studies several generations of Isabella's family, as well as her husband, Sam Beeton's family, in order to put Isabella's life in context. The book also serves as a social history of the mid-Victorian era, and a history of book and magazine publishing during that era.

Ever since I learned that Mrs. Beeton was a young woman when she wrote her famous book, I had wondered how she had acquired enough experience to write the book. What I learned from Hughes is that Mrs. Beeton was a compiler rather than an author. She borrowed from multiple sources, largely without attribution. Hughes has tracked down many, if not most, of her sources and provides numerous examples of the content that each source “contributed” to Mrs. Beeton's book. She credits Mrs. Beeton with reformatting her borrowed content into a more useful sequence; for instance, she was among the first to employ the now-familiar recipe pattern of first listing ingredients followed by the cooking instructions.

There was a rift between Isabella's Mayson and Dorling relatives and Sam's Beeton relatives for several generations. Earlier biographies slanted toward one side or the other, depending on which side of the family provided their source material. Hughes had access to sources representing both perspectives, and consequently her book is probably the definitive biography of Isabella Beeton, at least for now. ( )