Like much the feminist literary scholarship of the 1970s, The True History of The First Mrs Meredith bears an obvious debt to the critical work of Virginia Woolf, who, 50 years earlier, had asked pointed questions about what qualified as a “great” and thus write-able life, and what as an “obscure” and therefore ineligible one. In its jaunty generalisations about the 19th century, though, Johnson’s book claims clearest descent from Lytton Strachey’s satire Eminent Victorians (1918). In one striking passage Johnson wonders out loud whether Mary could really be bothered to commit adultery with Henry since it involved taking off so many layers of camisole, chemise, corset, petticoats, stockings and garters. But then, in one of her subversive self-cancelling footnotes, she informs us that all this biographical speculation about mid-Victorian women undressing for sex is probably beside the point when you remember that, at this point in history, nice women didn’t wear drawers.
