pAn Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking.ppbrppHelen Ivory's new collection emThe Anatomical Venusem examines how women have been portrayed as 'other' as witches as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the emMalleus Maleficarum, em a woman diagnosed with 'Housewife Psychosis' recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. emThe Anatomical Venusem imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.