Rupert Christiansen
The High Notes Of Love
Susanna, The Captain & The Castrato: Scenes From The Burney Salon, 1779-80
By Linda Kelly
Starhaven 140pp £9 order from our bookshop
THIS IS AN enchanting little monograph, neither dramatic nor important, but in its way perfectly focused and beautifully composed. Its author, Linda Kelly, is an accomplished cultural historian of the late eighteenth century and its principal subject is the romantic friendship between Fanny Burney's younger sister Susanna and the legendary Italian castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti.
Kelly is fortunate in her primary source - Susanna's unpublished journals, lodged in the British Library but to date largely ignored by scholars. Judging by the extracts presented here, these are every bit as vivid and spontaneous as Fanny's more celebrated diaries, presenting marvellously evocative vignettes of smart metropolitan conversation
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
'He is persuaded by the idea that coffee, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, changed 18th-century European minds, catalysing a new material rationalism.'
@ajlees on Michael Pollan's new book, 'This is Your Mind on Plants'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-mind-the-neurobollocks
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo