Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum - Kathryn Hughes Audiobook

Written by Kathryn Hughes
Read by Jenny Funnell
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: W.F. Howes Ltd., 2017/Clipper Audio
Length: 13hrs 45min

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 this and similar stories are rich with anecdote and fit together into a fascinating journey through a much richer landscape than previously encountered in studies of the period, four out of the five essays also offer glimpses into the realities of women’s lives. The section in which Hughes imagines how the Fanny Adams murder trial would have been different if the child had lived–and the trial had been for her rape, instead–was particularly striking when viewed in light of our own culture’s reactions to #metoo accusers. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers with an interest in the literature and history of the Victorian period, as well as those interested in women’s or medical history.”