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Oct. 14th, 2019 09:45 amUnmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners was a book club pick and not an ... entirely un-useful one? I'm not an expert by any means, but the information presented was (so far as I could tell) well-researched and solid and contained several tidbits of which I had not been previously aware! The prose style, on the other hand was ... well, could be a feature or a bug, really, depending on preference.
Okay, so the premise: you, the reader, are a hapless romantic who dreams of time-travelling to the Victorian era. Therese Oneill, the author, has been tasked with gently disabusing you of the notion that the Victorian era is a pleasant time in which live by taking you on a tour of unpleasant facts about hygiene, grooming habits, gender roles, etc.
As a person who in no way needed to be convinced of the fact that the Victorian era was not a pleasant time in which to live, I found this ... occasionally grating. "I KNOW!" I found myself shouting at the book (but, like, silently, and metaphorically, not in public.) "CHAMBER POTS ARE GROSS! I'M AWARE! - oh hey, people used corn husks as toilet paper sometimes? interesting factoid, thanks! - OKAY PLEASE STOP ACTING LIKE I DON'T KNOW WOMEN'S SEXUALITY WAS STRICTLY POLICED BECAUSE I DO IN FACT KNOW!"
(Sidenote: I say 'Victorian' but the book actually hops blithely back and forth between British and American social mores and historical factoids without much differentiation, which bugs me a little -- different things were happening in the Victorian era and the antebellum/Civil War/Gilded Age across the Atlantic! English-speaking social history is not a monolith! -- but, to be fair, is a thing Oneill announces she's going to do in the introduction so I can't say I wasn't warned.)
At one point![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti asked how the book was, so I read her a little bit out loud. "Oh," she said, "it's like BUCKLE UP TWITTER in book form!" Which I think is a helpful analogy -- if that style of LET ME EXPLAIN YOU A THING prose works for you, you may enjoy this; if it's not your thing, this book probably will not be either.
Okay, so the premise: you, the reader, are a hapless romantic who dreams of time-travelling to the Victorian era. Therese Oneill, the author, has been tasked with gently disabusing you of the notion that the Victorian era is a pleasant time in which live by taking you on a tour of unpleasant facts about hygiene, grooming habits, gender roles, etc.
As a person who in no way needed to be convinced of the fact that the Victorian era was not a pleasant time in which to live, I found this ... occasionally grating. "I KNOW!" I found myself shouting at the book (but, like, silently, and metaphorically, not in public.) "CHAMBER POTS ARE GROSS! I'M AWARE! - oh hey, people used corn husks as toilet paper sometimes? interesting factoid, thanks! - OKAY PLEASE STOP ACTING LIKE I DON'T KNOW WOMEN'S SEXUALITY WAS STRICTLY POLICED BECAUSE I DO IN FACT KNOW!"
(Sidenote: I say 'Victorian' but the book actually hops blithely back and forth between British and American social mores and historical factoids without much differentiation, which bugs me a little -- different things were happening in the Victorian era and the antebellum/Civil War/Gilded Age across the Atlantic! English-speaking social history is not a monolith! -- but, to be fair, is a thing Oneill announces she's going to do in the introduction so I can't say I wasn't warned.)
At one point
genarti asked how the book was, so I read her a little bit out loud. "Oh," she said, "it's like BUCKLE UP TWITTER in book form!" Which I think is a helpful analogy -- if that style of LET ME EXPLAIN YOU A THING prose works for you, you may enjoy this; if it's not your thing, this book probably will not be either.
