No Bottom to Them
Freya Johnston: Pockets, like Novels, 5 December 2019
The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900
by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux.
Yale, 264 pp., £35, May 2019,978 0 300 23907 2 Show More
by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux.
Yale, 264 pp., £35, May 2019,
“... Like the novel
, with whose origins it is contemporary, the pocket is a repository that promises to contain and disburse secrets. Pockets, like novels, can enclose a story about the lost and found. Just as characters in 18th-century fiction are often begged to provide the histories of their lives and adventures, so too they may be talked out of their possessions ... ”