The Gentleman's Daughter

This social history reconstructs the lives of genteel women in provincial England across the eighteenth century from letters, diaries, and household accounts. Vickery follows courtship, marriage settlements, childbirth, the management of servants and spending, polite visiting, and the work that kept a household respectable. Particular women of the Lancashire and Yorkshire gentry, among them Elizabeth Shackleton, supply the day-to-day evidence. The argument is that these daughters and wives exercised authority inside family and neighbourhood even without public office. The book is an archive-based study of gender and class, not a novel and not a biography of one heroine.

Bound in gold metallic cloth, blocked with a design based on an 18th-century tea caddy, redrawn by Frances Button. Brown slipcase with colour pictorial front. Brown endleaves.