Professor Kathryn Hughes

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Life Writing in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and a long-term literary journalist. She has published extensively on Victorian literature and culture, including The Victorian Governess (1994) and George Eliot: the Last Victorian (1999), which won the James Tait Black award; and as editor, George Eliot: A Family History (2001). In 2005 she published The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Andre Simon Prize. Mrs Beeton and George Eliot were both subsequently filmed by the BBC. Her most recent book is the acclaimed Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (2017), which examines five iconic figures of the nineteenth century, including George Eliot and Charles Darwin, as they encounter the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their bodies. Victorians Undone also features an extensive examination of the tragic murder of Fanny Adams, an 8 year old working class girl from Hampshire who was beheaded and eviscerated by a 29 year old legal clerk called Frederick Baker who hung for his horrible crime in 1867.  The crime was the subject of sensational journalism and as Hughes demonstrates, it tells us much about the currents of desire and violence at large in the mid-Victorian countryside.

Praise for Victorians Undone:

“Hughes regularly surprises us by showing just how much her subjects’ physical selves impinged on their contributions to our culture, and sometimes on the very course of history.”

— The Times Literary Supplement

“The tales are entertaining, but Hughes’s real achievement is historical—amounting to a new understanding of, as she puts it, ‘what it meant to be a human animal in the nineteenth century.'”

— The New Yorker

 

* The Fanny Adams case: ‘The Barbarous Murder of a Child at Alton, Hampshire’, Illustrated Police News, 31st August 1867.