The Short Life & Long Times of
Mrs. Beeton
Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Winner of an André Simon Award
Filmed as the BBC drama ‘The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton’ starring Anna Chancellor and Jim Carter.
Isabella Beeton was a twenty-one-year-old newlywed with only six months’ experience of running her own home when–coaxed by her husband, a struggling publisher–she began compiling her book of recipes and domestic advice. Inside her famous Book of Household Management you will find 2,000 carefully costed recipes together with advice for treating a child’s cough and the importance of keeping your hat on in someone else’s house. Readers turned to Beeton’s domestic Bible to discover the recipe for achieving Victorian domestic bliss.
Isabella would die in childbirth at the age of twenty-eight, shortly after the book’s publication. As her survivors faced bankruptcy, sexual scandal and an enduring family feud, ‘Mrs. Beeton’ went from strength to strength. For an exploding and newly affluent population, her Book of Household Management served as an invaluable guide to the new consumer culture. Here was everything you needed to know about planning a party for ten, whipping up a hair pomade or hiring a footman. By the dawn of the twentieth century, ‘Mrs. Beeton’ had become a global household name, as famous in Australia, India and Canada as she was in the home country. Yet by the inter-war period ‘Mrs Beeton’ would come to be accused of plagiarism and blamed for the dire state of British cookery, an unappetizing dollop of over-cooked vegetables and stodgy puddings.
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is much more than a revelatory biography of the woman behind the famous book. It also offers a vivid picture of mid-Victorian domesticity and its attendant anxieties, nostalgia, and aspirations–not so different from the way we live today.
PRAISE FOR THE SHORT LIFE AND LONG
TIMES OF MRS BEETON
Times Book of the Year, Evening Standard Book of the Year, Daily Telegraph Book of the Year, Sunday Times Book of the Year, New Statesman Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Year, Observer Book of the Year, Spectator Book of the Year, Daily Mail Book of the Year, Financial Times Book of the Year, The Scotsman Book of the Year.
‘Splendid . . . A brilliant biography, which tells the absorbing, strange and sad story with great aplomb’
– Spectator
‘This great gift of a book . . . makes us savour aspects of 19th-century life in order to sharpen our awareness of how we live now’
– Independent
‘A wonderful book, so masterful and scholarly, so detailed and wise, there will never need to be another’
– The Observer
‘Brilliant . . . Excellent . . . A fascinating reconstruction’
– Guardian
‘Altogether fascinating . . . Leaves very few corners of the mid-Victorian domestic interior unswept’
– Independent on Sunday
‘Magnificent’
– New Yorker
‘A triumph’
– New York Times Book Review
‘Enthralling’
– Wall Street Journal
‘This is a terrific book, filled with astute observation and telling details’
– Boston Globe