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The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England
 
 
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The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Paperback)

by Amanda Vickery (Author) "THE PROVINCIAL WOMEN AT THE HEART of this study hailed from families headed by lesser landed gentlemen, attornies, doctors, clerics, merchants and manufacturers ..." (more)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 448 pages
  • Publisher: Yale University Press; New edition edition (6 May 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0300080026
  • ISBN-13: 978-0300080025
  • Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.6 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 509,599 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

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 Lebeau

Product Description

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, "The Gentleman's Daughter" challenges the view that the period witnessed a new division of the everyday worlds of privileged men and women into the separate spheres of home and work. Amanda Vickery invokes the women's own accounts of their lives to argue that in the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries the scope of female experience did not diminish - in fact, quite the reverse. 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, as Vickery demonstrates, their social and intellectual horizons rolled outward: in their writing no less than in their reading, genteel women embraced a world far beyond the boundaries of their parish, while an array of new public arenas emerged for the entertainment of the proper and the prosperous - assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, day-time lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens, as well as regular sporting fixtures and the assizes. This often humorous study offers an insight into the intimate and everyday lives of genteel women and aims to transform our understanding of the position of women in this period.
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THE PROVINCIAL WOMEN AT THE HEART of this study hailed from families headed by lesser landed gentlemen, attornies, doctors, clerics, merchants and manufacturers. Read the first page
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4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Women's Lives in Georgian England, 24 July 2007
By Mrs. D. J. Smith "eowyngreenleaf" (Luton, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene) (Paperback)
Many books can be found outlining Georgian political history and more than one biography has been written on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but the everyday lives of genteel women have had less attention. In this book, Vickery uses surviving letters, diaries, accounts and pocketbooks of a selection of Georgian women living genteel lives in Northern England. I found the book interesting, but fairly heavy going in places. Any modern woman reading the chapter on childbirth will be glad to live in the current age! This is a good insight into everyday life and the role and functions of women within society. However, the type in my copy I found to be quite small, and so a little hard on the eyes. Chapters are also quite long with few breaks in the text. Vickery has also devoted a significant proportion of the book to notes and appendices, where she lists senders and recipients of letters referred to in the main text and other information on the original source material. Interesting, but a fairly scholarly book.
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47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars All that a history book should be., 3 Mar 2000
This review is from: The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Hardcover)
I will admit that I was given this book by a dear friend, but the gift arrived at one of those amazingly serendipitous moments when everything in one's intellectual life seems to point in a single direction. During the past two years I have been rather single-minded in my pursuit of English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, and first on my list of "keepers" are the novels written by such figures as Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, and of course, Jane Austen. Thus, as you can imagine, Ms. Vickery's amazing feat of scholarship has been a more than welcome discovery. At turns both light-hearted and astoundingly detailed, it does just what a history book should do, in my estimation, and that is bring the past to life. Part of the fascination of history is, no doubt, that we can see how very strange and remote another time is, but how wonderful to find a work that so adroitly shows how very much we have in common with an earlier time, and in my case, brings the experiences known only through novels to full and meaningful life. I especially appreciate the fact that the author is at pains to point out just how at odds the evidence is with accepted feminist history; this somewhat contrary approach is altogether convincing. But the highest praise I can give from my perspective as a non-historian is that The Gentleman's Daughter (I cannot help but wonder if the title does not echo Elizabeth Bennet, but I may be, at present, too dazzled by Miss Austen to settle upon any other conclusion) is dazzling and entertaining, and I beg my more scholarly companions in reading to excuse the use of the suspect term.
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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Vital reading, 25 Oct 2000
By A Customer
If you are a scholar of the eighteenth century and you have not read this book, then make it your top priority. It is, quite simly, the most illuminating history book of some time, and fantastically repositions the role of women in this period. Social history for the academic and lay person alike, Brilliant!!
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