LADY FANSHAWE’S RECEIPT BOOK
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A CIVIL WAR HEROINE
Atlantic, 432pp, £20, Oldie price £11.57 inc p&p The life of Ann Fanshawe offers a glimpse, Linda Porter wrote in the
Literary Review, of what it was like ‘to be a Royalist lady during the English Revolution’. Lucy Moore’s emphasis is not just on Ann’s relatively well-known memoirs but also on the miscellaneous contents of her ‘receipt-book’, of whose effectiveness Porter was sceptical: ‘a wide variety of herbal solutions, and very dubious most of them sound’. While finding Moore’s underlying message conventional in its romantic Cavalier sympathies, Porter concluded that ‘if Moore’s book succeeds in bringing the Civil War back into mainstream popular history, it will serve a very useful purpose’.
In the Times Philippa Gregory displayed more admiration for the merits of Ann’s recipes themselves: ‘Lady Fanshawe was using the right ingredients: “scurvy-grass” is watercress, which, like horseradish and oranges, contains vitamin C.’ She noted ‘how desperately’ women in Ann’s position ‘fought infection, illness and accident, using nothing but skills learnt from their mothers, the herbs that they grew and expensive gimmicks from pharmacies’. Gregory hailed the ‘indomitable courage’ of a wife and mother who ‘followed her husband faithfully…guarded the family fortune, buried her babies in graveyards all over Europe, and never lost her recipe book’. Jessie Childs in the Daily
Telegraph contemplated the novelty of how we come to be reading the receipt book at all: ‘If women wanted their writing to endure, they had to be careful about what they wrote.’ Lady Fanshawe’s official memoirs ‘give us her best face: Instagram Ann’; by contrast the recipes have a relatively ‘unpolished’ texture. As for Moore’s own study, it was ‘an enchanting, idiosyncratic Tardis of a book, peppered with good humour’. Childs enjoyed the match of an idiosyncratic subject with an unstuffy biographer, and despite reservations about a bewilderingly huge cast and an occasionally anachronistic tone she welcomed ‘something refreshing about Moore’s identification with her subject and her honesty about the frustrations in trying to capture Ann’s essence from the largely retrospective record’.