Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her books include Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. (December 2018)
Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
by Claudia Renton
In February 1899 John Singer Sargent was invited to the Belgravia home of the wealthy Wiltshire landowner Percy Wyndham to meet his three married daughters. Wyndham had commissioned a group portrait of the women as a way of marking a recent advance in the family’s fortunes. For while the sixty-four-year-old …
One day in 1848 Edward Lear, professional traveler, artist, and purveyor of nonsense, entered a small Albanian village and, spotting a stream full of watercress, pulled up a clump to have with his bread and cheese. Excited by the sight of a tubby foreigner eating weeds, local children proceeded to …
