The Gentleman's Daughter

Eighteenth-century women have long been presented as the heroines of traditional biographies, or as the faceless victims of vast historical processes, but rarely have they been deemed worthy of historical enquiry. The Gentleman's Daughter provides an account of the lives of genteel women - the daughters of merchants, the wives of lawyers and the sisters of gentlemen. Based on a study of the letters, diaries and account books of over 100 women from commercial, professional and gentry families, mainly in provincial England, this book provides an account of the lives of genteel women in Georgian times. It challenges the currently influential view that the period witnessed a new division of the everyday worlds of priviledged men and women into the seperate sheres of home and work. Contrary to orthodoxy, in the 18th century there was neither a loss of female freedoms, nor a novel retreat into the home.^

In their own writing, genteel women throughout the Georgian era singled out their social and their emotional roles: kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess and member of polite society. To make sense of their existence, they invoked notions of family destiny, love and duty, regularity and economy, gentility and propriety, fortitude, resignation and fate. At the same time, their social and intellectual horizons rolled majestically outward: in their tireless writing no less than in their ravenous reading, genteel women embraced a world far beyond the boundaries of their parish; while an array of new pubic arenas emerged for the entertainment of the proper and the prosperous- assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating librarires, day-time lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens, as well as regular sporting fixtures and the assizes.^ This lively, often humorous study offers an unprecedented insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and will transform our understanding of the postion of women in this period. -- Publish