Reading in the Garden

Delightful and Sometimes Disgusting Reality Check Let Therese Oneill be your tour guide back to what you might once have considered to be romantic times of the Victorian age.   In this book, Oneill exposes the smoke and mirrors of beautiful women with their upswept hairdos, gliding around the room in their voluminous dresses with tiny waists, pumped up bosoms, and perfect complexions.   With a seriously funny narrative, we learn that there were probably lice lurking in women’s elegant chignons, their corsets were not the only apparatuses hiding under those stinky dresses which never got washed, and the "enameling" process which gave ladies that glowing skin was most likely eating away at their faces—the price of beauty in the 1800s. Oneill also leads you through the “unmentionable” mystique of feminine hygiene, childbirth, dangers of self-gratification, and general etiquette offering sage advice like: "Using the wrong fork can cause weeks of ...