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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

Kathryn Hughes.  The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton.  
New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.  $29.95 hc.  ISBN 0307263738

Marylu Hill, Villanova University

The ideals of mother, home, and hearth are fraught with contradictions 
in western culture. In the abstract, they are praised unreservedly, but in  
practice they are often scorned and despised as unimportant, second-
rate, or trivial. With the exception of the Odyssey, all of the great epics 
of the world are about leaving home and hearth behind, and even to-
day, “woman’s work” is disdained by women and men alike.  Nothing 
important seems to happen in the drudgery of the kitchen, where, as 
Virginia Woolf reminds us in A Room of One’s Own, the same mundane 
tasks are repeated on a daily basis throughout one’s life with nothing 
ultimately to show for them.

And yet, as Woolf also famously remarks in the same book, “One 
cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Our 
food and homes shape us, perhaps even more than we care to acknowl-
edge, and one wonders if the paths of philosophy or science, for exam-
ple, might have been adversely affected due to an ill-prepared meal and 
the resulting dyspepsia in the stomach of a great thinker.  So it behoves 
us to examine carefully the claims made by Kathryn Hughes in her 
impressively researched book The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. 
Beeton. Through the lens of the life of Isabella Beeton, the iconic figure 
behind the most popular British cookbook of the nineteenth and early 
twentieth centuries, Hughes pinpoints the welter of contradictions at 
the heart of the cult of domesticity which the Book of Household Man-
agement helped to create, as well as demonstrates how the reassuring 
voice of “Mrs. Beeton” led a generation of young wives to navigate 
successfully the rapidly-changing social structure of mid-nineteenth 
century England. Furhermore, Hughes challenges her readers to look 
carefully at ourselves and consider what exactly we continue to want 
from our contemporary Mrs. Beetons, such as Martha Stewart, Rachel 
Ray, and others.  At its best, this book holds up a mirror to our inner-
most longing for “domestic goddesses” to guide us in how to live.



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And indeed, the most stimulating question that arises from Hugh-
es’ book is precisely the one that the humanities profess to examine, 
namely, “what is the good life?” Socrates may have had a difficult time 
answering this question, but, as Hughes shrewdly points out, Mrs. 
Beeton reveals no such hesitation. In the pages of the Book of House-
hold Management, Mrs. Beeton is more than happy to answer it, in a 
voice which remains worth reading: at once knowledgeable, reassuring, 
practical, and nostalgic. It does not matter that the real Isabella Beeton, 
the young wife and mother turned journalist, did not necessarily pos-
sess first-hand knowledge of all she wrote; the voice she projected was 
enough for the other young inexperienced wives and mothers to trust 
her advice.

The good life, for Mrs. Beeton, was tied up with the project of trans-
forming chaos into order wherever it appears—in the kitchen, the 
household budget, and even on a national level. “A nation,” says Mrs. 
Beeton, “which knows how to dine has learned the leading lesson of 
progress. It implies both the will and skill to reduce to order and sur-
round with idealisms and grace the more material conditions of hu-
man existence” (279–80). As Hughes adds, “dining well isn’t simply 
a pleasure, it is a civilizing duty, part of the obligation of those who 
have access to culture to take it to places where nature might other-
wise run amok” (280). No wonder, as Hughes aptly points out, the 
Book of Household Management became a beacon of culture for the 
upwardly-mobile, helping them assimilate into the middle class and 
beyond.  Hughes’ reading of the book as a means of indoctrinating 
the lower classes into middle class attitudes is revealing, especially as 
she notes Mrs. Beeton’s tendency to both idealize and demonize the 
natural world as a lost Eden now in serious need of controlling. For 
example, Mrs. Beeton’s comments on “the prolific power of the pig” 
which, if left unrestrained, would allow these animals to “degenerate 
into vermin” are mirrored by what Hughes calls “bourgeois anxieties” 
about the similarly prolific working class in need of restraint.

Hughes’ reminder that “Everyone in Mrs. Beeton’s imaginary house-
hold is rising, moving upwards, heading somewhere” (71) is another 
point well-taken; the Book of Household Management is all about transi-



Book Reviews 231

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

tions—from rural to urban, from local economy to mass market, from 
traditional class structures to a more fluid upwardly-mobile system.  
And in the midst of all this, home itself had become something in need 
of defining and safeguarding, even while it became detached from old-
er customs and traditions. As Hughes points out, Mrs. Beeton’s book 
replaces those customs and traditions, which had broken down as peo-
ple migrated from country to city and adopted new class ideals that in 
theory relegated cooking to the servants. The book also marks a criti-
cal change in attitudes towards women and women’s work—indeed, it 
may have caused the change—as Mrs. Beeton redefines the mistress of 
the house as no longer drudge but now “the Commander of an Army,” 
efficient, scientific, and capable of transforming the world one meal at 
a time.

But where The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton sometimes 
fails is in its own disinclination to thoroughly address the questions it 
searchingly raises. In some ways, Hughes would have done better to 
downplay the biographical angle and focus more on the relationship 
of the Book of Household Management and the perceived persona of 
“Mrs. Beeton” to the British public. The “short life” of Isabella Beeton 
(and indeed, she died sadly young at age 28 of puerperal fever) ends up 
filling the book with occasionally numbing details of courtship argu-
ments and unpaid bills, while the “long times” get undeserved short  
shrift. At times, the half-glimpsed and sometimes surmised details of 
Isabella’s and Sam Beeton’s lives are incapable of bearing the weight of 
significance that Hughes places on them, but the larger problem is the 
use to which Hughes sometimes puts the details. As much as she wants 
to give Mrs. Beeton her due, she occasionally relies on unsubstantiated 
anecdotes and theories to either discredit her or distract the reader 
from the genuine accomplishment of the Book of Household Manage-
ment.  If Mrs. Beeton strove for order in the pages of her book, Hughes 
seems determined to show the chaos underneath, even if she has to 
concoct or over-interpret it.

Hughes’ obsession with the possibility that Sam Beeton infected 
Isabella with syphilis early in their marriage reflects her attention to 
the seeming chaos beneath. Even though Hughes herself states in a 



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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

footnote that “of course we will never know for certain that Isabella 
and Sam had syphilis,” even warning the reader against the dangers 
of “retrospective diagnosis,” she maintains it as a fact for much of the 
book, speculating frequently on such questions as what sort of syphi-
litic fetuses Isabella may or may not have miscarried, and whether Sam 
went a little mad at the end. Were it an undisputed fact, this would be 
necessary knowledge; if it had direct bearing on how Isabella edited the 
Book of Household Management, it would likewise be useful; but as it is, 
it is unclear what purpose it serves, except to suggest a vague underly-
ing dark terrain in the Beetons’ lives.

This emphasis on unsubstantiated details highlights what seems to 
me to be a distracting tension in Hughes’ attitude towards her sub-
ject in general. She wants to celebrate Isabella Beeton as a sort of new 
woman—enterprising, sharp-eyed, modern, clever, and effective as a 
sort of Victorian spin-doctor—and yet she also wants to discredit her 
as a woman capable of creating the Book of Household Management.  
Her effort to prove that Mrs. Beeton did not test every recipe in the 
book, alongside her insistence that Mrs. Beeton did not simply plagia-
rize all her recipes, is indicative of this double-sided approach. Yet, to 
be fair, this is not entirely Hughes’ failing; rather, it reflects the ambiva-
lence which is alive and well in modern culture regarding our views 
of domesticity. Over a hundred years after her death, the enterprising 
and modern Mrs. Beeton can still be condemned for not really being 
a domestic goddess, and it is not just Kathryn Hughes leveling the 
charge. As a society, we remain uncertain about how domestic we want 
our women (or ourselves as women) to be, and Hughes helps to draw 
attention to that troubling fact. Isabella Beeton’s life and achievement 
was to begin the redefinition of women’s lives in and beyond the home, 
and Hughes reminds us that this task remains very far from complete.    


	Kathryn Hughes. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton.
	Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Tradition
	Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Philosophy From its Origin to the Present.

