The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene)

Winner of the Longman History Today Prize in 1998, Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England is an outstanding study of a crucial period in modern women's history. Roy Porter described this book as "the most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years." Readers familiar with the feminist analysis of women's lives in the late 18th to mid-19th century will find some of the commonplaces of that viewpoint called into question: the rise of "separate spheres" of male and female experience, for example, or the social construction of motherhood in the 18th century. At once scholarly and readable, The Gentleman's Daughter takes its readers on a vivid and well-illustrated tour of "genteel" Georgian society, bringing that world to life through what Vickery identifies as the "terms set out in their own letters by genteel women." Those terms structure the seven sections of the book: "Gentility", "Love and Duty', "Fortitude and Resignation" (which includes a notable discussion of the experience of pregnancy), "Prudent Economy", "Elegance", "Civility and Vulgarity", and "Propriety". "Our battles were not necessarily theirs," Vickery reminds us, striking her convincing balance between a feminist interest in the restriction and rebellion of women's lives and their own ways of finding meaning and pleasure in the gender distinctions of Georgian culture. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk