The Gentleman's Daughter

The Gentleman's Daughter

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Cassandra Austen burned a selection of her sister Jane's letters, she deprived posterity of a unique insight into a woman's life in Georgian England. In The Gentleman's Daughter, Amanda Vickery triumphantly redresses the balance: drawing on a goldmine of letters, diaries and pocketbooks, kept by over a hundred women between 1730 and 1825. In a gloriously intimate portrait, Vickery reveals that while marriage and family may have been the focus of their lives, Georgian women were not the 'idle drones, cramped by custom, corset and crinoline', of popular belief.

The stilted conventions and financial negotiations that accompanied marriage are explored, but so too is its pillow talk ('mine Madam is a saucy Hussy'). We read the letters of Elizabeth Parker, who defiantly married for love not once but twice - the first time happily, the second not so ('Never saw him so rude, vulgar nor so drunk. He took his horse Whip to me'). Behind the gossip about fashion ('Miss Wall [had] such an enormous Quantity of Wool False Hair &c upon her Head that I Could not help thinking if it was cut off t'woud Serve instead of a Wool Pack in the House of Peers') lie the responsibilities and concerns of everyday life - household accounts to be kept, estates to be managed, the ups and downs of courtship, the dangers of childbirth, the lamentable behaviour of one's offspring. Into a world of phaetons, feathers, assemblies and promenades, Vickery brings the spirited voices of real people, giving those invaluable glimpses behind closed doors that make history come alive.