ABSTRACT
In 1896, an art critic named Elizabeth Robins Pennell published one of the strangest books to appear during what was admittedly a decade of unusual publications. The Feasts of Autolycus was a compilation of articles on food and cookery that Pennell had previously published in the Pall Mall Gazette. 1 In these articles, Pennell aimed to reconfigure meals as high art, turning eating into an act of intellectual appreciation. She wanted to contest the prevailing assumption that an interest in food denoted a debased bodily greed. At the same time, however, Pennell hoped to reclaim women's appetite as a natural and valid bodily response. Feasts therefore tries both to transcend hunger and to justify it. The language that allowed Pennell to work both sides of this divide was aestheticism. By treating food as art, Pennell exalted its status; by constructing herself as a sophisticated connoisseur, she excused her love of eating. Indeed Pennell's artful language makes her book an exemplary text for elucidating just how well aesthetic discourse served women writers in the late nineteenth century.
