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Kathryn Hughes

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Kathryn Hughes FRHS FRSL (born 1959) is an English biographer, historian, journalist, and professor emerita in the School of Literature, Drama and Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her book George Eliot: The Last Victorian was awarded the 1999 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. Hughes, an expert on the Victorian era, has contributed articles to The Guardian, Prospect, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist.

Quotes

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  • The figure of the governess must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her best in the form of the scandalous Becky Sharp of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the plain orphan who eventually marries her employer, the mysterious Mr Rochester. In addition, she appears in scores of other novels from high literature to sensationalist shockers and from Emma to The Turn of the Screw. Yet it is one of the great ironies of Victorian history that we know virtually nothing about the 25,000 women who actually worked as governesses during the middle years of the century. Indeed, it is the very power of these fictional representations which has blunted our curiosity about the practice of educating girls at home during the Victorian period.
  • By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — Mrs Beeton has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a handbook to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned.
    So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother.
  • I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an editor had mentioned that he thought that the time was right for a new biography of George Eliot. The moment I started writing a biography I realised that the genre was made for me – or perhaps, more modestly, that I was made for the genre. Biography involves detailed archive research with the ability to tell a jolly good story. And those are the two things I like best in the world.
  • It's a cliché, but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories.
    • (December 19, 2014)"The Middle Classes". British Library, YouTube. (quote at 1:49 of 7:59)
  • In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up Highgate Hill to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, The Grove. Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'.
  • … nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like Branwell Brontë, though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from Haworth at Heptonstall. The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry Heathcliff in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, Ted Hughes. Together the newlyweds tramped up to Top Withins and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory Birthday Letters. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame.
  • In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of Springfield Mental Hospital in south London. He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats':
        'Good Lord, man, you draw like Louis Wain.'
        'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient.
        'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed.
        'But I am,' said the artist, and he was.
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