Geoffrey Wall
Before They Were Famous
A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt
By Anthony Sattin
Hutchinson 291pp £20 order from our bookshop
The best biographies, like some of the best novels, are packed with subjunctives. They are alive with a persistent, muted sense of what might have been.
The lives of educated, imaginative, middle-class, mid-nineteenth century women were often tragically packed with subjunctives. Excluded from the public sphere, these women were further constrained by a scarcely figurative matrimonial corset, that patriarchal contraption so lovingly tightened of late. Subject to such chronic restriction, a young woman might take refuge in illness and romantic fiction or, more audaciously, adultery and suicide. Emma Bovary, that small-town extremist, exhausts both possibilities. For those more fortunate than her, there might be a carefully chaperoned excursion to somewhere far away – to Egypt, for example.
Anthony Sattin’s A Winter on the Nile contains the story of one such exceptional nineteenth-century journey. The book is one part travel writing, one part cultural history, and one part biography. It’s a delicious mix, skilfully blended. There are two travellers, an English woman and a French man,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk