Family Secrets

Product Description

Deborah Cohens Family Secrets" is a gripping book about what families
- Victorian & modern
- try to hide & why. In an Edinburgh town house a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their nieces downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girls Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit & cap. In a town in the Cotswolds a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary
- sewed up in calico wrapped in parchment
- that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping & often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets & of how they were revealed this book journeys from the frontier of empire where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal apparently idiosyncratic decisions: hiding an adopted daughters origins taking a disabled son to a garden party talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle. In delving into the familial dynamics of shame & guilt " Family Secrets" investigates the part that families so often regarded as the agents of repression have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion & keen insight this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. Praise for " Family Secrets": " Absorbing. It challenges many of our prejudices about how our immediate ancestors thought & invites us to enquire more closely into how & when & why families keep secrets". (Hilary Mantel). Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky & educated at Harvard & Berkeley. She teaches at Northwestern University where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities. Her last book was the award-winning " Household Gods" a history of the British love-affair with the home."