Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies by Helen King
In 1916 William Blair-Bell, co-founder of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, asked in The Sex Complex: “What is a woman, and why is she not a man?” The answer to the question remains fiercely contested today; Keir Starmer’s apparent inability to answer it has generated many column inches. Perhaps the Prime Minister should read Immaculate Forms by the classical studies professor Helen King, which reveals “what history has to say to the debates about women and bodies which rage today”.
Immaculate Forms is an impressively widely read study of four parts of the female anatomy often (and sometimes incorrectly) considered to be uniquely female, and the way our conception of them has changed throughout history, from medical treatises to agony aunt columns. It is lightened along the way with illuminating trivia – Mary Wollstonecraft breastfed puppies on her deathbed – and King’s gentle wit: “In 1905, Sigmund Freud famously argued that in order to grow up as a healthy woman it was necessary to transfer the seat of pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina, which is a problem when, for most people with vaginas, it is the clitoris which enables orgasm.”
By Pippa Bailey
Profile Books, 448pp, £25
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Cultural critic Lauren Elkin worked on her debut novel, Scaffolding, across 16 years and five Parisian addresses. Buildings in Paris must be refaced every decade or so: ravalement strips “the building’s enamel down to its nerves”. In an apartment building undergoing this work, listening to the rhythmic “flint flint flint”, is a resident who is as enervated as her home. Anna, a Lacanian psychotherapist, feels estranged from her husband after a miscarriage. Wondering why she seems “built to be unhappy” she looks out her window, and “looking at Paris, lose[s] track of time”.
We slip back 50 years, to the life of the couple who then occupied Anna’s flat. They were as troubled by womanhood, fidelity and desire as she is today. There is no closure: “We are always open… the whole city’s holding hands and the whole city’s sick… there is no resolution.” French feminism grew hopeful as Gisèle Halimi defended abortions, but five decades later a woman in France is still killed by a partner or ex every three days. Scaffolding poses a question France is now asking itself: “Is the country of the rights of men afraid of women’s rights?”
By George Monaghan
Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £16.99
Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco by Tim Blanning
With this study of Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, Tim Blanning, the pre-eminent historian of 18th-century Germany, follows his biography of Frederick the Great with an analysis of another ruler of oversized character. In the case of Augustus, however, his achievements failed to live up to his sobriquet. Augustus may have been bodily and sexually formidable (he could bend horseshoes with his hands and had as many as 380 children) but he was politically hapless. Caught up in a Europe riven by the conflict between Russia and Sweden and the War of Spanish Succession, Augustus, says Blanning, “bobbed about helplessly like a plastic duck, often submerged but never quite sunk”. He lost battle after battle and the Polish throne itself.
Augustus’s successes lay in the arts: he turned his Saxon capital, Dresden, into a city of magnificence, became a prodigious art collector (many of his acquisitions are still in situ at the Zwinger art gallery in the city), and drove the discovery of European porcelain which resulted in the Meissen factory. His deathbed words, reports Blanning, were: “God forgive me, my entire life was one sin” – not as a patron, however.
By Michael Prodger
Allen Lane, 413pp, £30
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout’s leafy New England cinematic universe has expanded once again. Over the past three decades Strout has introduced us to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton, a writer from New York, and Bob the attorney, among others. In 2022 these strands came together in a classic pandemic novel, and now Strout has reunited her typically taciturn and awkward characters for another spin round the block.
Olive is 90, living in a retirement home (and within the pages of a novel dated by its references to vaccinations). She invites Lucy Barton – locked in an emotional affair with Bob – to record a story about Olive’s mother, hoping it’ll appear in one of Lucy’s books one day. Bob, meanwhile, takes on a case defending a man accused of murdering his mother. Lucy trades almost exclusively in banal set pieces: “People are mysteries. We are all such mysteries,” she says, mistaking dullness for depth. Much of the discussion about Strout’s genius over the years refers to how she finds a thrilling beauty in the everyday. As the lives in Crosby, Maine, intertwine, this quality partially shines through. But most of the time the banal is just banal.
By Finn McRedmond
Viking, 336pp, £16.99
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history