The problem was that I don't find the subject of food vexing or transfixing and I am kind of sick of it being something that is made into an aspect of women's personalities. Whether we admit it or not, we all have to eat. I used to have a flatmate who used to keep detailed notes on what I ate and when I ate it and it honestly let me feeling on edge and creeped out. This book reminded me of that feeling. The idea that we are dissecting the food habits of women decades or even centuries after their death sickens me. These kinds of books do not get written about men. It wasn't so much that the writing was bad or anything as it was that the whole concept made me feel depressed.

I unfortunately couldn't get through this one. I found that something about the writing style just didn't hook me in.

What should've been an interesting premise not executed at all well. The choice of women seemed very random and the food aspect forced into the biographies. A lot of the writing went off topic and was too dry for me.

Ah this book is such a gem! I was pulled in to the women's lives and found them interesting despite knowing little about them and having little desire to! But the author weaves in such fascinating detail into their lives that I was compelled- I want more! Eva Braun especially was darkly fascinating, I am sure this could be expanded on as a sequel...?

This book really appealed to me as I do like a good non-fiction book, especially biographies, and I liked the twist with this focusing on what relationship the women had with food.

My favourite parts were the ones which focused on Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Gurley Brown and the author’s own comments about her experiences with food. It was interesting to read about Dorothy possibly suffering from colitis as I suffer from Crohns. To think of someone suffering back then without the kinds of medical interventions we have now is pretty horrible, they must have gone through hell. Helen Gurley Brown’s story was also interesting as it appears she may have suffered an eating disorder or been very close to it. I also enjoyed learning about Rosa Lewis, someone I had never come across before. The similarities to the story of Eliza in Pygmalion were very true.

I was most disappointed with the Eva Braun section as I felt it focused more on Hitler and the Nazi’s in general rather than her. It was still interesting but I was hoping to learn more about her.

For anyone interested in history and biographies like me I would definitely give this one a go, it wasn’t very long but had some great information from a different angle than many of the things you read about these women.

I really couldn't get into this one- it seems to read more like an academic text rather than something interesting. I feel as though, were there a wider scope of women discussed, or perhaps more up to date explorations of women and food, my interest would have been piqued, but unfortunately that was not the case.

“If I eat I feel guilty. And I’d rather feel hungry.”

The above is a quote from one of the six women featured in this book – Helen Gurley Brown, editor of “Cosmopolitan,” for over thirty years. It helps highlight the difficult, complicated relationship, that so many women have with food. Author, Laura Shapiro, takes six women and gives us a potted biography of each, with a particular slant towards their attitudes, and relationship, to eating.

Those featured are Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym and Helen Gurley Brown. There are those who enjoy a fairly uncomplicated love of comfort food – such as Barbara Pym. Those who equate cooking, or providing over meals, as a way of pleasing the men in their life, such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Eva Braun. Rosa Lewis, who apparently inspired, “The Duchess of Duke Street,” used her skills as a cook to rise from a scullery maid (born in the ‘village’ of Leyton – well, I expect it was a village at the time!) to the owner of the Cavendish Hotel and a famous chef, who prepared food for King Edward VII, among other famous clients.

The two women whose food stories were, to me, the most interesting were Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Gurley Brown. Eleanor Roosevelt apparently employed the ‘most reviled cook in Presidential history,’ in Mrs Nesbitt; who continually provided meals that her husband found repugnant. Helen Gurley Brown, as I mentioned in the beginning of this review, spent her life eternally dieting measured success in her marriage to David, gloating that he was a “motion picture producer, forty-four, brains, charming and sexy. And I got him!”

This is very much a book of social history and biography and there is little analysis about why these women acted the way they did, or had such troubled, or happy, relationships with food. That aside, it is an enjoyable read, which may well lead you on to read full biographies of the women included. I have read biographies about some of them, such as Eva Braun, which is why, perhaps, this work added little that was new to me. However, it does look at such an important part of all our lives – eating and preparing food – and is a fascinating read. I received a copy of the book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

In this vastly entertaining book, Shapiro uncovers the 'food stories' of six women: from Dorothy Wordsworth who cooked for her brother as if she were his wife, to Helen Gurley Brown who might gush about food but who never ate much more than protein powder and sugar-free jelly (yeurch!)

Shapiro has done her research rustling around in the archives but this is determinedly 'popular' culinary history - she disses academic researchers at the start, but it's noticeable that there's no theoretical scaffolding to her work - this is just a collection of stories: amusing, sad, illuminating, for sure, but it would have been nice to have seen some analysis added to the wealth of material collected here.

That said, Shapiro tells her mini-biographies with a lively fluency, whether we're with Eva Braun eating with Hitler, or Eleanor Roosevelt superintending menus in the White House. Not all the women are necessarily interesting: I admit to skimming the section on the Edwardian caterer, Rosa Lewis; and the novelist Barbara Pym who wrote about 'nice' food in 1970s England.

This is a quick read as about 25-30% is notes: interesting, undoubtedly, and enjoyably entertaining but a bit more intellectual depth would have been helpful.