Just as Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart have turned us into rabid consumers of cooking and lifestyle advice, the Victorians had their own evangelist in the shape of one Mrs. Isabella Beeton. How did a woman who couldn’t cook produce the world’s most famous recipe book?
Dead at the age of 28, this cultural icon was not the sturdy matron one might imagine, but a sassy, feisty and talented journalist and editor with an equally entrepreneurial husband, Sam. Theirs was an extraordinary marriage — the meeting of two creative minds to the enhancement of both. But it was the marriage that led to Isabella’s untimely death, and the revelation of a dark secret.
Anna Madeley (Inspector Lewis: Whom the Gods Would Destroy) stars as Isabella and JJ Feild (To the Ends of the Earth) as her husband Samuel Beeton.
Shown on PBS Masterpiece Theatre.
Note: This one is a bit odd, nearly a docudrama, but is an interesting, if partly based on speculation, account of the difficult life of the real Isabella Beeton, author of he Book of Household Management. “The most famous English domestic manual ever published, it was essentially a guide to running a Victorian household. But it was also a nineteenth century runaway success, selling more than 60,000 copies in its first year of publication, and almost two million by 1868. Mrs. Beeton’ step(ped) in to become a kind of universal mother. – PBS