The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

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

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 has described this book as "the most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years". A reader 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 analysis 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 LebeauRead More

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  • Amazon

    Based on a close examination of letters, diaries and account books, this study offers an insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and transforms our understanding of the position of women in this period.

  • Foyles

    What was the life of an eighteenth-century British genteel woman like? In this lively and controversial book, Amanda Vickery invokes women's own accounts of their intimate and their public lives to argue that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the scope of female experience did not diminish-in fact, quite the reverse. Refuting the common understanding that in Georgian times the daughters of merchants, the wives of lawyers, and the sisters of gentlemen lost female freedoms and retreated into their homes, Vickery shows that these women experienced expanding social and intellectual horizons. As they embraced a world far beyond the boundaries of their own parishes through their tireless writing and ravenous reading, genteel women also enjoyed an array of emerging new public arenas-assembly rooms, concert series, theater seasons, circulating libraries, day-time lectures, urban walks, and pleasure gardens.Based on the letters, diaries, and account books of over one hundred women from commercial, professional, and gentry families, this book transforms our understanding of the position of women in Georgian England. In their own words, they tell of their sometimes humorous, sometimes moving experiences and desires, and of their many roles, including kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess, and member of polite society. By the nineteenth century, family duties continued to dominate women's lives, yet, Vickery contends, the public profile of privileged women had reached unprecedented heights.

  • TheBookPeople

    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 rigorous historical enquiry. Based on a close examination of letters, diaries and account books, this study offers an insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and transforms our understanding of the position of women in this period.

  • BookDepository

    The Gentleman's Daughter : Paperback : Yale University Press : 9780300102222 : 0300102224 : 11 Aug 2003 : Based on a close examination of letters, diaries and account books, this study offers an insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and transforms our understanding of the position of women in this period.

  • 0300102224
  • 9780300102222
  • A Vickery
  • 14 November 2003
  • Yale University Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 436
  • New edition
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