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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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years." Roy Porter; "The Gentleman's Daughter is the most important work of social history since Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage. From now on, any historian writing about 18th-century women will have to address the arguments in Vickery's book... It is the first book to bring out into the open the debate about separate spheres. It succeeds on two levels, first as an academic argument of the highest order, and second as a fascinating and enjoyable read. Serious history is rarely this fun." Amanda Foreman, The Times; "Innovative, expertly researched and luminous in style." Linda Colley, London Review of Books; "Amanda Vickery's new history of women in Georgian England offers a revolutionary reinterpretation of the accepted script, both an academic triumph and a spell-binding read" Julie Wheelwright, The Independent
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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
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
54 of 58 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book after watching the author's TV series, screened at the end of 2010. I found that the pleasure that I experienced from her TV series was not matched by this book.
Much of my reading in retirement has been of history books which clearly have been written and published for a general audience, and I believe that this book would have been more enjoyable if it had been more clearly aimed at the general reader.
The focus of the content on the lives of gentlewomen in East Lancashire did not work for me. I felt at the end of the book that I should have felt an attachmnet to the principal characters, but, in part because of the way in which the narrative was structured,this was not there when I finished the book.
Other reviewers have already commented on the small font size and the chapter lengths which make this book a difficult read. I would also add that the quality of the images printed within the text was very poor in my copy.They were so dark that as I read the text I tended to ignore them.
Having said what I did not like about this book, I should say that at the end I did feel that I had an understanding of the way in which this particular group of women lived their lives and understood more about the very active part that they played in society.
Much of my reading in retirement has been of history books which clearly have been written and published for a general audience, and I believe that this book would have been more enjoyable if it had been more clearly aimed at the general reader.
The focus of the content on the lives of gentlewomen in East Lancashire did not work for me. I felt at the end of the book that I should have felt an attachmnet to the principal characters, but, in part because of the way in which the narrative was structured,this was not there when I finished the book.
Other reviewers have already commented on the small font size and the chapter lengths which make this book a difficult read. I would also add that the quality of the images printed within the text was very poor in my copy.They were so dark that as I read the text I tended to ignore them.
Having said what I did not like about this book, I should say that at the end I did feel that I had an understanding of the way in which this particular group of women lived their lives and understood more about the very active part that they played in society.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Hard Work
I like the author's TV a lot - the various series I have seen have been highly enjoyable romps through history seen through the records of real people. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Bingibongi
Stimulating
I had listened to Amanda Vickery's Radio Four Series on the Georgians, 'Behind Closed Doors', with great pleasure. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley
Vital reading
If you are a scholar of the eighteenth century and you have not read this book, then make it your top priority. Read more
Published on 25 Oct 2000
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