Neo-Victorian Voices: The Champagne Letters, Kate MacIntosh (2024)

Welcome back to my Neo-Victorian Voices series, where I review books set in the nineteenth century but written in the twenty-first!

Today’s novel is a dual timeline historical that alternates between the perspectives of a present-day American divorcee, who finds herself in Paris after unexpectedly becoming single in her fifties, and the widow behind the Veuve Clicquot champagne house, who writes letters to her great-granddaughter about how she navigated the Napoleonic era as a businesswoman, in a time when the wine industry was almost entirely controlled by men.

MacIntosh’s research into the fascinating life of Barbe Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot is clear. She does a great job fictionalizing Clicquot’s biography and turning it into a digestible story that maintains human interest, even as it covers complex swathes of French history. 

The modern-day storyline, following Natalie, is lighter and even easier to read. Natalie is the quintessential American in Paris, charmed by French fashion, food, and wine, and stumbling through the capital asking everyone she encounters if they speak English. She’s swept up in a romance with a dashing man named Gabriel and connecting with the famous champagne widow, via a book of her letters, within what seems like seconds of stepping off her plane from Chicago, but some fun plot twists keep the story fresh and entertaining. 

Overall, the book left me with the impression that MacIntosh wrote it for readers like Natalie–those in love with the idea of Paris and excited by the effervescence of champagne, even if their grasp of French history and wine is a little loose. We often talk about beach reads, but this is a city break read: I’d recommend it if you’re dreaming of a trip to Paris…or if you’re looking for a summer book club pick that gives you the excuse to break open the bubbles.

What book should I review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want my blog posts delivered straight to your inbox monthly? Sign up to my email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee (2016)

In his sweeping epic story about the fictional Lillet Berne, an American orphan, international circus performer, Parisian courtesan, Empress’ maid and lauded operatic diva, Alexander Chee comes close to capturing the feelings of opera in novel form. For better and for worse.

The Queen of the Night (2016) begins in 1882. A star soprano is offered a role in an original opera, only to find that the libretto is based on the secrets of her own early life. Who has betrayed her? Is it a trap? How can she escape her fate?

The novel is dramatic and sumptuously costumed. The fates of its characters play out against a backdrop of war and political intrigue, as the plot cycles through victories and tragedies, farfetched as they are entertaining.

Alexander Chee (1967- )

On the flipside, the bad bits (whisper it!) of opera are there too—the thought that the work could have done with a good edit, the emotional detachment you can feel from characters larger than life who make questionable choices, even if their music brings you to tears.

One of the strangest things about the experience of reading the novel was that I wasn’t sure whom it was really for. Opera buffs may delight in the cameos of characters such as Giuseppe and Giuseppina Verdi and Pauline Viardot, but Chee also spends pages rehashing the plots of some of the world’s most famous operas for the uninitiated. I wanted more of Lillet’s emotions while she was singing (something that was frequently skipped over) and less dispassionate reporting of information. A small mistake about ballet positions also made me questions some of the facts I was getting.

As a heroine, Lillet is smart and strong, physically and emotionally, but the theme of fate can make her appear passive. She’s passed from master to master, and often used as a pawn. Adding to this is the one-note approach to sex scenes in the novel. Lovemaking is always rushed and brutal in the world Chee has imagined, one reason it’s hard to fathom why Lillet falls for the man she loves, who doesn’t seem markedly different from all the others.

On the other hand, Chee’s descriptions of jewels, gowns and settings are glittering. Every page had a detail I enjoyed, even if, if this had been an opera, I’d have been flicking to my programme to check the running time.

Which novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Top 10 Victorian/Nineteenth-Century Halloween Costume Ideas

Halloween is nearly upon us and every self-respecting Victorianist is contemplating stepping back in time and into the breeches of our favourite historical characters—real and imagined.

Below is a list of the Secret Victorianist’s top picks of nineteenth-century-inspired costumes for you to consider.

1. Miss Havisham

The perennial bride in Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 Great Expectations is a killer Halloween choice. White dress? Check. Veil? Check? Grey hair and cobwebs? For extra Gothic flare consider singeing your gown and adding dramatic flames. Who says a wedding dress need only be worn once?

2. Queen Victoria

That’s right—go as the monarch of the era herself, with Prince Albert in tow if you’re after a couples’ costume. Otherwise, embrace widowhood and dress head to toe in black.

3. A character from Pride and Prejudice (zombies optional)

Who doesn’t want to an excuse to unleash their inner Lizzie Bennet? Grab some friends and argue about who is each sister if you’re not lucky enough to have found your Darcy. The Pride and Prejudice with Zombies movie is recommended Halloween viewing and could also provide a fun twist on the costume idea.

4. Long John Silver

Before Captain Jack Sparrow lit up our screens it was Long John Silver, the villain from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1882 Treasure Island, who was the world’s most famous fictional pirate. This costume is all in the accessories: strap on a wooden leg, perch a parrot on your shoulder and grab a map marking the way to those elusive pieces of eight.

5. Abraham Lincoln

The United States’ most-distinctive nineteenth-century president is a great costume choice. The top hat and facial hair will make you instantly recognisable, even if you don’t want to shell out on realistic historical garb.

6. Florence Nightingale

While others are donning their ‘sexy nurse’ outfits, dress up as the lady with the lamp, who tended to British soldiers during the Crimean War.

7. Napoleon

The French emperor shares the laurel with Queen Victoria for the most famous nineteenth-century look. Don’t forget the hat, the epaulettes, or, our course, the pose.

8. The Statue of Liberty

This famous gift from the French to the American republic was dedicated in 1886. Dress in copper tones, rather than green, for a true nineteenth-century feel.

9. Dracula

What could be more classic for Halloween than to dress as the count from Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic. Many won’t know the story’s Victorian provenance though, so try to read the novel before you go to your party!

10. The Nutcracker and Sugar Plum Fairy

If you’re itching for Halloween to be over, Christmas can come early with your costume choice. The ballet was first performed in 1892 and is great Halloween inspiration. Don your tutu to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, look distinguished in your red coat as the nutcracker himself, or maybe even go for a giant rat costume.

Do you have any other Victorian/nineteenth-century costume ideas (or pics!) to share? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Exhibition Review: Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Whether it’s because of their waspish waists, their uncomfortably large bustles and crinolines, or their much-mentioned prudishness, we have a continued fascination with what Victorians were like under their clothes.

So, finding myself in London unexpectedly this week, the Secret Victorianist paid a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum for the Undressed exhibition, a brief history of fashionable unmentionables, which is now entering its last month on display to the public.

The exhibition covers three centuries and includes a huge array of pieces, from an eighteen-century working woman’s stays to David Beckham’s tighty whities for H&M. But of course it was the Victorian items I was here to see. Here were some of my highlights:

The Duchess of Kent’s drawers: The exhibition didn’t quite allow you to peak under Queen Vic’s petticoats, but you did get to gawk at a pair of her mother’s drawers. These were cumbersome and knee-length and could have provided enough material for 20+ modern day thongs, but the waist was incredibly small, especially given their cut suggests they might have been used for maternity-wear.

A cartoon on the dangers of lacing: I’ve written before (here) about the internal damage that could be done by corsetry. And the V and A displayed this cartoon showing the grim reaper promoting the trend of tight lacing:

Summer corsets: This was something I knew less about previously. The exhibition included several lighter corsets for summer months, which were used by naturally slim women and ladies living in the colonies. In these, whalebone was replaced by strips of ribbon or by netting, making them marginally more comfortable, although I still won’t be racing to try them out in hot weather (especially minus air conditioning…).

David’s fig leaf: Queen Victoria was so horrified when she saw Michelangelo’s David that a fig leaf was commissioned to protect his modesty, or, at least, attendees’ sensibilities. Seeing it here, divided from the statue, made me think about how easy it is to find an exhibition on underwear solely intellectually stimulating, devoid of the ability to shock, shame or titillate.

The exhibition does a wonderful job of exposing the bizarreness of our continued fascination with undergarments (think waist trainers, fetish-wear, underwear as outwear) by divorcing the items on display from the body. What’s left is an enlightening lens through which to examine culture – the Victorians’ and our own.

Do you know of any NYC exhibitions you think the Secret Victorianist should see? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

The Secret Victorianist at the Met: Madame Cézanne and Death Becomes Her

Yesterday, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York to see two very different exhibitions of a nineteenth-century flavour.

Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891)

Madame Cézanne, which runs until 15^th March 2015, brings together 24 of the 29 known paintings by Paul Cézanne of his wife Hortense Fiquet, along with additional sketches and watercolours. The paintings cover more than 20 years (from the 1870s-1890s) and simultaneously give a wonderful glimpse into the artist’s techniques and his private life.

Cézanne’s ready access to his subject meant he had an opportunity for many variations on a theme – most obviously the four ‘red dress’ portraits, including one from the Met’s permanent collection, (which date from 1888-1890) which see Hortense in the same garment, but posed slightly differently against varying backgrounds, as the painter experiments with different combinations of colour and compositions. The sitter can at times appear as formal an element as a tree branch or pot plant, her expressions enigmatic, at times even indistinct.

Yet the sketches suggest a very different story – one of an intimate and happy family life. Here is Hortense bent over her needlework, her sleeping head upon a pillow, their baby Paul fils feeding from her breast.

Madame Cézanne Sewing (c.1880)

This is hard to reconcile with what we know of Cézanne’s marriage – the hostility of his friends towards Hortense, the secrecy of the relationship for 17 years, as the artist feared his family’s disapproval, their late marriage (in 1886). You need only read the Wikipedia entry dedicated to her to see how Hortense’s failures as a wife and negative impact on her husband’s art have passed into the commonly accepted history of the artist’s life.

Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c.1877)

What this exhibition offers, if not exactly a rehabilitation of Hortense’s public image, is an opportunity to re-examine this relationship (one marked by the social and financial inequality common to many marriages in the period), along with some of Cézanne’s most wonderful paintings. Visit if you can!

Death Becomes Her, on the other hand, which runs until 1^st February 2015 in the Anna Wintour Costume Institute at the museum, is an exhibition of nineteenth-century American and European mourning (largely women’s) fashion. Having visited, and blogged about, The Art of Mourning exhibition at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum a few months ago, which included examples of Victorian post-mortem photography and portraiture and hair-work, it was wonderful to see such fine examples of the clothes which would have been worn by the mourners in the period, who were participating in these other acts of memorialisation.

The Secret Victorianist at the Met

Spanning the entire century, and the very early 1900s, the dresses on display here ranged from the simple, to the extravagant – from afternoon and walking dresses, to those suitable for a ball or even a wedding. The exhibition does a good job of explaining the etiquette around mourning in the period, the influence of fashion plates (some of which are on display here and the criticism women could be subjected to for failing to display an ‘appropriate’ level of grief.

It also touches – briefly – on the highly interesting subject of the position of the widow in nineteenth-century culture. Available for marriage, but, unlike most girls, financially independent and sexually experienced, the widow, despite being subjected to the most demanding strictures around the displays of mourning, cuts a socially disruptive figure. A side room at the exhibition houses a series of satirical drawings, entitled ‘A Widow and Her Friends’, by Charles Dana Gibson which ran in LIFE magazine in 1900, which takes a humorous look at this very issue.

As ever, with displays of nineteenth-century fashion, the diminutive proportions of the clothes and, especially, the miniscule waistlines are particularly striking, with a dress worn by Queen Victoria herself being a notable exception! Steer clear if the sound of a darkened room with requiems blasting from the speakers isn’t your idea of fun, but otherwise this is a beautiful, fascinating, and well-curated exhibition.

The Met has a recommended (i.e. optional!) admission of fee of $25 – entrance to special exhibitions is at no additional cost. Find out more about visiting here.

Do you know of any other New York exhibitions with a nineteenth-century focus the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: The Art of Mourning, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, New York

To round off the Halloween weekend, I paid a visit to one of New York’s spookiest spots and lesser-known museums – a building stocked with taxidermied animals, human skulls and dead things in jars – the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn.

While the museum houses objects from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, its current exhibition (running until January 2015) is centred on the ‘art’ of mourning and is, subsequently, quite nineteenth century in focus. As any lover of Victorian literature will know from the many, many deathbed scenes to be encountered in the period’s novels, high infant mortality, famous mourners (e.g. Queen Victoria herself) and an obsession with sickness, led to something of a cult surrounding death and remembrance. The objects this exhibition celebrates were the physical manifestations of this and originated in both America and Europe in the period.

L'Inconnue de la Seine

The exhibition is small but varied. There are portraits, painted post-mortem (see my discussion of a fictional example of one of these in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh here). Many of these are of children and infants, made more cherubic by being painted surrounded by clouds, although their faces all bear the hallmarks of death. There are many photographs of corpses – sometimes in coffins, sometimes in bed and often posed alongside living family members. And there are the mourning clothes – veils and bonnets – which point to the formalised strictures and social conventions surrounding mourning at the time.

But there are many items stranger than this… Here too are death masks, including an example of one of the most famous, L’Inconnue de la Seine – a mask taken from an unknown woman with a mysterious smile who drowned herself in the Seine in the 1880s. There is a lot of hair work – with the deceased’s hair being braided into rosaries and intricate decorations or incorporated into mourning scenes displayed in shadow boxes.

What seems so strange to modern viewers looking at all of this is that these items are very much made for display. Now, death is hidden away, sanitised and dealt with away from the home. The exhibition curators make an interesting point when they reference how the growth in popularity of professional funeral parlours meant the removal of death from the family parlour, and even the renaming of the room as a living room.

The Secret Victorianist visits the Morbid Anatomy Museum

Importantly though, despite how strange some of these mourning rituals might seem today, this isn’t a freak show. It’s a bit like looking like an old graveyard – beautiful, curious, with an occasional tinge of sadness. If you’re in the area, I’d definitely recommend visiting the exhibition, but not as a replacement for a haunted house. The museum is a quiet place to walk around and is also home to a library where visitors were reflectively leafing through books on medical history and anatomical art. One of them was wearing a top hat and, somehow, he seemed the most at home.

Do you know of any other nineteenth-century attractions in New York the Secret Victorianist should visit? If you do, then let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Measuring up Victorian Heroines

Mrs Winstanley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1879) is a very foolish woman. She gives up her independence as a wealthy widow to wed a cruel and controlling adventurer and fails to protect her only daughter (Violet, the vixen of the title) from his machinations. She cares only for company and ostentatious display, racking up large debts with dressmakers and milliners, and is viewed as childlike and frivolous by all who surround her.

One of Mrs Winstanley’s greatest griefs is her daughter’s size. She and her likeminded friends agree that ‘[Violet’s] figure is quite splendid; but she's on such a very large scale’ and is so fit to be painted ‘as Autumn, or Plenty, or Ceres, or something of that kind, carrying a cornucopia. But in a drawing-room she looks so very massive’. When you finally read what Violet’s measurements are however, you may be surprised.

Braddon writes: ‘Lest it should be supposed…that Vixen was a giantess, it may be as well to state that her height was five feet six, her waist twenty-two inches at most’.

With the average woman’s waistline in the UK now coming in at 34 inches, how are we to read this information? Braddon certainly doesn’t think Violet is a giantess – does this mean the figure of 22 inches is a gross exaggeration, part of the satire she directs at women like Mrs Winstanley? Yet Vixen is one of Braddon’s most true-to-life novels, filled with realistic domestic details. And it is not the only period novel to be populated by women with 18 inch waists like Violet’s rival for the love of Roderick, Lady Mabel, the picture of ‘ethereal loveliness’.

Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind

The most famously thin heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone with the Wind (published 1936, but set in the nineteenth century) gets down to 17 inches with the help of some corsetry, yet this is described as unusual –‘the smallest in three counties’ – especially when combined with ‘breasts well matured for her sixteen years’. 

While the internet seems obsessed with these incredible Victorian waistlines however, some academic investigation suggests that they belong entirely in fiction. A survey of a thousand Victorian dresses at the Museum of Costume in Bath found the smallest to be 21.5 inches – a size which could be achieved by a modern UK size 6 or 8 woman with the help of a heavy duty corset.

A miniscule waist is just one of the long list of attributes and virtues possessed by the idealised nineteenth-century heroine and Braddon’s description of Violet could be read as ironic commentary on other writers’ lack of realism, similar to George Eliot’s complaints in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, where she describes the stereotypical female protagonist: ‘Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues’.

One last point to consider is that being sylphlike is not the only standard of beauty. In Charlotte Bronte’s novels, for instance, skinniness is the attribute of the plain and overlooked woman, while beauties are fleshy. Jane Eyre contrasts the ‘harsh lines’ of her face and figure with ‘harmonious lineaments’ and ‘dazzling and round arm’ of Blanche Ingram, Lucy Snowe in Villette mocks the apparently unrealistically large object of male fantasy in the ‘Cleopatra’ portrait whose ‘commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone’.

Braddon mocks the unnaturalness of sylphlike beauty, Bronte the implausibility of voluptuous femme fatales, but, while the exact measurements may seem unfamiliar, both are commenting on the difficulties of conforming to standardised versions of beauty in a way which seems alarmingly and recognisably modern.

Charlotte Bronte

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Have you read a nineteenth-century novel which includes a heroine’s measurements? Let me know in the comment section below or on Twitter, by tweeting @SVictorianist.