The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton: The First Domestic Goddess

In Victorian England there was only one fail-safe authority on matters ranging from fashion to puddings to scullery maids: Beeton’s Book of Household Management. In this delightful, superbly researched biography, award-winning historian Kathryn Hughes pulls back the lace curtains to reveal the woman behind the book—Mrs. Beeton, the first domestic diva of the modern age—and explores the life of the book itself.

Isabella Beeton was a twenty-one-year-old newlywed with only six months’ experienc...