Overview

Pinpointing how consumer culture transformed female beauty ideals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study documents the movement from traditional views about beauty in relation to nature, God, morality and character to a modern conception of beauty as produced in and through consumer culture. While beauty has often been approached in relation to aestheticism and the visual arts in this period, this monograph offers a new and significant focus on how beauty was reshaped in girls' and women's magazines, beauty manuals and fiction during the rise of consumer culture. These archival sources reveal important historical changes in how femininity was shaped and illuminate how contemporary ideas of female beauty, and the methods by which they are disseminated, originated in seismic shifts in nineteenth-century print culture.

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9781474470094

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In this innovative work, Michelle J. Smith sheds new light on the rise of the beauty industry in Great Britain from 1840 to 1914. To illuminate this rich history, she examines a wealth of hitherto overlooked sources, including advertisements, novels, women's magazines, juvenile periodicals and beauty manuals. The first study of its kind, Consuming Female Beauty promises to transform scholarly understanding of gender, beauty and print culture during the Victorian era and beyond. --Alexis Easley, University of St. Thomas

Author Information

Michelle Smith, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University.

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