Béatrice LAURENT is Professor of Victorian Studies at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. A Pre-Raphaelite scholar, Béatrice has edited a volume of essays on William Morris’s News from Nowhere (2004). She also authored La Peinture anglaise (2006), and edited Provence and the British Imagination (2013) and Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth (2015). Her broader field of research covers the zones of conceptual overlapping between art, literature, science and society, particularly in Victorian Britain.
Victorian cookbooks reveal the essentials of everyday life, betray attitudes and personalities, and reflect the evolution of the sense of national identity. As a gendered genre of minor writing, these volumes operate on the motherly or sisterly mode, prescribing the dos and don’ts of almost everything a young woman should know. Victorian values, convictions and prejudices suffuse the advice, recipes and illustrations contained in books of household management and cookbooks, contributing to the definition of a national set of references and preferences. By addressing a British as well as a colonial readership, the women authors of household manuals and cookbooks combined to naturalise and spread Victorian values and prejudices.
