Description

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. ‘The Girl Who Lived on Air’ retells this human story of an anorexic made to be the centre of a lucrative and media-hungry spin on the 19th century nexus of knowledge between science and superstition, folk-belief and religious asceticism.