Judith Flanders is the author of A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. She lives in London.
"Flanders is such a good writer and so acute a social analyst that
her journey from the cradle to the grave is as racy, as compelling,
and sometimes as scary as a good Victorian novel. I found
particularly enthralling Flanders' sense of threats the Victorian
home vainly tried to keep out: dirt, disease, unregulated desire,
and above all decline in class status."
"What makes Flanders's book compelling is not only her keen eye for
telling detail, her strong awareness of the importance of family
context (already apparent in her first book, A Circle of Sisters)
and her insights, but also her skill in handling literary sources
that illuminate her subject....By slicing the front facade of the
house and guiding the reader through a succession of rooms that
convery the often frightening complexity of lives passed in them,
Flanders brings the Victorian family into deft and vivid
focus."
"This book is filled with details that bring the Victorian London
home so vividly alive that you can smell it and feel it. Relying on
canny use of diaries, memoirs, novels, and a thousand other
revelatory sources, it moves and amuses and astonishes. I found
myself insisting on reading extraordinary passages out loud to
family and friends. Ms. Flanders is a shrewd, reliable historian
with a keen domestic eye, a sharp wit and a clear and appealing
style."
*Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts*
"Open this book anywhere, and you find yourself totally absorbed.
It's entertaining yet authoritative, accessible yet fascinatingly
detailed and thorough. It picks apart, in the most elegant way, a
great deal of our received wisdom about how the Victorians lived.
The descriptions of the demands of Victorian housekeeping are
exhausting just to read—I had to lie on the chaise for half an hour
after taking in the account of how to wash a floor. On the other
hand, as a member of a household who receives one post a day,
rarely before 2 pm, I long for the 'six to twelve' deliveries
enjoyed by our ancestors—almost as good as e-mail. A very wide
readership will enjoy this book, and I hope it brings Judith
Flanders all the success it merits."
*Hilary Mantel*
"Judith Flanders's new book is almost criminal in its
housebreaking, burglarizing, second-story genius. This massively
entertaining and just as informative book allows us to see the
Victorian house as never before, from the inside, room by room. We
tour (or sneak) around, missing nothing and thereby find ourselves
soaking up not only details about sleeping habits, chamber pots,
and cooking, but about the vision of a world ruled by the home that
is still so important. With wonderful dexterity and the quiet
assurance that only comes with deep and sophisticated scholarship,
Flanders invites us into a fully realized world. We'd be idiots to
refuse."
*James Kincaid, author of Annoying the Victorians*
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