title: Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners
author:  Therese Oneill 
description: "Hysterically funny and unsettlingly fascinating. <strong>This book is full of awesome</strong>."<b><i>Jenny Lawson, #1 <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Let's Pretend This Never Happened</i> and <i>Furiously Happy</i></i></b><br /><br />"<b>Oneill uncovers the filthy, untidy, licentious conditions of nineteenth-century women's lives that novelists of the period often glossed over</b>...brilliantly conveyed with fascinating illustrations."<b><i><em>Elle</em></i></b><br /><br /><i>"Unmentionable</i> transports us back to the world of middle-class 19th-century women, with special emphasis on the messy details that costume dramas airbrush out...<b>With a 4-year-old's scatological glee, Oneill details the logistics of old-time peeing, pooping, gestating, menstruating and mating</b>...For Oneill, Victorian time travel is a tour of horrors that makes us thankful to come home to tampons and toilets."<b><i><i>New York Times</i></i></b><br /><br />"Oh, did Constant Reader's heart lift after turning page the first. <b>It's hard to imagine a woman - or a teenage girl - who won't love this book</b>."<b><i><i>The Washington Post</i></i></b><br /><br />"Oneill has created a book<b> so excellently informative about the Victorian period, it should be shelved right next to Dickens for reference.</b> Your stomach will hurt so much from laughing, you'll be thankful you're not wearing a corset."<b><i><i>Bustle</i></i></b><br /><br />"If <i>Unmentionable </i>does not secure the Pulitzer Prize for Most Fascinating Book Ever, the whole gig is rigged. Hilarious, horrifying, shocking and revelatory, this book is for every girl who pictured herself running through a field of wildflowers in a silk dress and Little House on the Prairie boots, only to discover she has nits in her hair, her clothes have never been washed and she sleeps with her poop under her bed in a bowl. <strong>A miracle of a book and one of my favorite reads ever, </strong><i><b>Unmentionable </b></i><strong>will be my go-to gift this year.</strong> All hail Therese Oneill for uncovering all of that dirty, dirty laundry."<b><i>Laurie Notaro, #1 <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>It Looked Different on the Model </i>and <i>Housebroken</i></i></b><br /><br />"If you've ever felt like you should have been born in another time, <i>Unmentionable</i> will disabuse you of that sensibility, and it will do so charmingly."<b><i><i>Vice/Broadly</i></i></b><br /><br />"<b>Flat-out hysterical (and occasionally alarming)</b>...Read it and be very, very glad you're a woman of modern times."<b><i><em>Good Housekeeping</em></i></b><br /><br />"Oneill writes from the perspective of an all-knowing, slightly cheeky Victorian woman giving guidance to the contemporary woman. The result is a <b>thoroughly researched</b> but <b>hilarious</b> look into daily life of the Victorian woman." <br /> <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /> <!--[endif]--><b><i><i>The Millions</i></i></b><br /><br />"<strong>A fascinating look into the shocking pseudoscience of the 1800s, in which Oneill sheds new light on the origins of today's misogyny</strong>, double standards, and just plain mystery surrounding women that, maddeningly enough, persist."<b><i><em>Booklist</em></i></b>
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  The Lady's Proposal
  
  by Patricia Waddell
  
  One
  
  Sheridan Manor
  
  Coventry, England 1886
  
  Marriage.
  
  The word made her shiver. It made her stomach knot and her head ache. It made
  her feverish
  
  with excitement and cold with apprehension. Marriage was the ultimate
  sacrifice, to Clarissa
  
  Pomeroy's way of thinking. A woman was born, educated in the proper manner of
  dress and
  
  speech, taught to move gracefully when she walked into a room, tutored for
  hours in the arcane
  
  rules of etiquette and introduction. Then, without any explanation or regard,
  she was paraded
  
  through the ballrooms of London in the hopes of gaining a proposal of
  marriage.
  
  It was insulting.
  
  It was maddening.
  
  It was the way of things.
  
  Clarissa gazed out the window of the carriage. It was an unusually bright
  spring day, suitable for a
  
  ride in the country but not at all appropriate to the task at hand. She
  decided the day would be
  
  more reflective of her mood if the sky were a dingy gray and rain was ma