User:Urve/Telling Complexions

Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush is a book by Mary Ann O'Farrell, published by Duke University Press in 1997. It discusses the popular representation of blushing, particularly but not exclusively in nineteenth-century literature. It received a mixed critical reception.

Contents

 * Chapters 1 and 2: Blushing in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Persuasion (1817)
 * Chapter 3: Blushing in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854–1855)
 * Chapter 4: Historical scientific understandings of blushing, including by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872); blushing in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850)
 * Chapter 5: Blushing and other physical signs of internal confusion, including works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret, 1862), Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds, 1871), and George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871–1872)
 * Conclusion: Modern understandings and representations of blushing

Reception
In a mixed review, Gil Haroian-Guerin writes that while O'Farrell's analyses of nineteenth-century representations of blushing are "worth reading for their fresh perspectives", her investigation of more contemporary representations (like a 1995 advertisement) "undermines her more thoughtful criticism" by failing to "trac[e] lineages". Similarly, reviewer Beth Newman writes that O'Farrell's analysis of Jane Austen's characters are "rich, subtle, and suggestive", but the book's "exhaustive" treatment ultimately becomes "exhausting". A review by Kelly Hager similarly finds fault with O'Farrell's expansive treatment of blushing in literature than confined only to nineteenth-century English literature, and Linda K. Hughes understands the book's theoretical basis as ultimately "arbitrary" for such a "short book (the argument of which concludes at page 143)". Reviewer Pamela K. Gilbert writes that O'Farrell "does not engage any of the history of blushing in medical or scientific" publications of the time, leading to an anachronistic and incomplete reading, although her chapters on Austen are the "richest".