The Gentleman’s Daughter

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, this book provides an account of the lives of genteel women in Georgian times. It challenges the currently influential view that the period witnessed a new division of the everyday worlds of priviledged men and women into the seperate sheres of home and work. 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.

Prize history

• Wolfson History Prize

  1999

  Winner