Dark secrets of the British housewife
Women and their guilty secrets; women and their innocent secrets; women and men’s secrets; women and state secrets; DNA tests busting women’s secrets – in her enticingly titled The Book of Revelations: Women and their Secrets, Juliet Nicolson comes at her subject from all possible angles. There is also a strongly feminist emphasis on wronged women across generations (Nicolson’s family included) who have somehow been coerced into keeping dark secrets by abusive men – or sometimes by abusive women. One such abusive woman was Phyllis Eliot, the headmistress of West Heath School, near Sevenoaks in Kent, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known as ‘P’, she used to kiss
