Girl Who Lived on Air, The

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Cymru wledig yn 1869: Ymddengys bod Sarah Jacob yn llwyddo i fyw heb fwyta, gan synnu meddygon, yr eglwys a'r gymdeithas sy'n farus am stori ryfeddol. Beth yw'r gwirionedd y tu ôl i'w stori? Plethir gwyddoniaeth a chrefydd, llên gwerin a'r natur ddynol mewn hanesyn sy'n troi o gwmpas marwolaeth merch ifanc ddiniwed.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Rural Wales, 1869: Sarah Jacob is a girl who seems to live without food, astounding doctors, the church and a news-hungyr society. What is the truth behind her moving story? Science, religion, folklore and human nature are woven around an innocent's death.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

In-stock items will be dispatched within 3 business days, usually by Royal Mail Tracked 48. For pre-orders, we’ll dispatch within 3 business days of receiving the item from our supplier.

Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Stephen wade is the author of twenty books on crime and law in history, with a special interest in regional crime stories. He is a graduate of UCW Aberystwyth, where he also completed a PhD in literature under the supervision of Ned Thomas. He works regularly in Wales on short courses in creative writing and history and teaches history part-time at the University of Hull. He also writes for several family history magazines.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Sarah Jacob was the Carmarthenshire farm girl who dominated the national and regional press for almost all of 1869. In the popular imagination she was ‘the Welsh fasting girl’ and although she was not the first anorexic, she was arguably the first to cause a national furore, and become something of a celebrity. She died despite a team of nurses from Guy’s Hospital stationed at her home in Lletherneuadd, and after the best minds in British medicine had set theorised about the cause of her apparently supernatural existence – living in spite of starvation, losing no weight yet clearly suffering in all kinds of ways. Sarah’s was not the only story here. Her parents were charged with murder and eventually convicted of manslaughter. The Girl Who Lived on Air retells this human story of an anorexic made to be the centre of a lucrative and also media-hungry ‘spin’ on the nineteenth century nexus of knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and religious asceticism. Stephen Wade covers new ground in examining the medical issues surrounding the case, the legal complexities (including the use of Welsh in court) and the interpretation on a newly enacted law which reformulated serious crime, the prison life of Sarah’s parents, and the significance of folklore and superstition in an unusual and yet all too familiar story.