Dimensions
162 x 240 x 36mm
Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries.
Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later.It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions:hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle.Cohen excavates the tangled history of privacy and secrecy to explain why privacy is now viewed as a hallowed right while secrets are condemned as destructive.
In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day.Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors.
