The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England

A very dry book about what it meant to be a British lady in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's a very broad subject, but for some reason Vickery only uses two women's journals and a handful of newspaper comics as her evidence. Eventually, I gave up.

A little on the academic side, but full of lively anecdotes and solid information. Great for the researcher and/or hardcore Jane Austen fan.

It looks like an interesting in-depth account of Women's lives in Upper-class Georgian England; however I'm not in the mindset to dig through this book. If I was going to write fiction based in this era this would be an invaluable resource and with the extensive index, citations and bibliography this would be a very useful resource.

I didn't read it through, so I'm not going to give it any stars. What little I did read would probably merit at least 4/5 *

Library Journal Review
"This meticulously researched social history should be welcomed by specialists in British and European women's history. Vickery (British women's history, Univ. of London) challenges the standard argument that once the industrial revolution took production out of the home, women's lives were marginalized in the domestic sphere. Using the letters, diaries, and account books of more than 100 women from the "genteel" classes, she theorizes that women's activities actually expanded as they involved themselves in new areas of community life. Indeed, she concludes that the struggles of the Victorian suffragettes may have stemmed not from a sense of oppression but from a desire to expand the gains of their Georgian show more predecessors. Unfortunately, Vickery's insistence on proving her provocative thesis overwhelms the richness of the descriptive material she presents: there is good information here on household management, servants, material culture, shopping and consumption, and female attitudes on courtship, pregnancy, motherhood, and child rearing." show less

"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 show more England offers a revolutionary reinterpretation of the accepted script, both an academic triumph and a spell-binding read show less