Story of a 19th-century Martha Stewart

"The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton: the First Domestic Goddess"
by Kathryn Hughes
Knopf, 480 pp., $29.95

Before Martha Stewart, before Betty Crocker put her dip-level-pour stamp on 20th-century femininity, there was a Victorian domestic diva who held iron sway: Isabella Beeton, author of "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management."

Despite never having had the means to run a full complement of servants, despite dying at age 28 after a bad childbirth, Mrs. Beeton emerged as a Victorian watchword and the subject of Kathryn Hughes' charming biography: "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton."

Like Martha Stewart, Beeton's fame went hand in hand with controversy. Where did she get her recipes and advice? (Answer: She copied tips and recipes, sometimes verbatim, from other books.) It earned her adoration — Victorians loved rules and Beeton not only created a system, she also clearly organized it with an index at the back, uncommon for that time.

Like Martha, Beeton preached that through order and attention to detail, one could appear far higher up the social scale. Economizing at home while creating beauty were the Victorian woman's chief goals.

And like Martha, Mrs. Beeton was more than a mere woman, she was a franchise. Her seminal book spawned multiple popular titles under her name after she died, and the original was updated years later to include such newfangled projects as making ice cream.

What readers may find the most striking, however, are the parallels between newly industrial England and today — concern over food quality and contamination, consumer choice that bred anxieties over presentation, and societal expectations that pressured women to be originators of beauty when in reality, they had to be domestic servants as well, or nothing would get clean.

Whether you buy into the domestic-diva aesthetic or want to figure out why movements like this take hold, "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton" makes for an engrossing read.