Customer Reviews

The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

BUY IT!

This book is fabulous. Amanda Vickery delves into the subject of women's lives in Georgian in England to a depth and with a sensitivity I have not seen before.

The Gentlemen's daughters are the next level down from the aristocracy. This is the class to which Jane Austen belonged - the 'almost' leisured classes you might say. Through painstaking research of diaries, letters, cross references to other sources such as newspapers and even old store manifests Vickery has pieced together an intimate, interesting and entertaining look at their lives.

We see how they spent their days as well getting an overview of their life in general. Some of the situations draw laughter - one woman was forever fetching back one female servant but others show the level of helplessness that could occur in marriage. One of these women, Ellen Stock, was turned out on the street by her husband, another records the beatings which her husband gave her.

The book doesn't dwell with salacious pleasure on this sort of thing though - Vickery discusses it in the full range of marriage probabilities for women. She also documents happier marriages.

There are seven chapters in all and they cover the spectrum of social and home life for women - They are; Gentility, Love and duty, Fortitude and Resignation, Prudent Economy, Elegance, Civility and Vulgarity, and finally Propriety.

If there were one book you were going to buy to represent Georgian life in England then let it be this.

This book reminds me of reading someone's doctoral dissertation--but that isn't meant to be an insult, just a comment on the writing style (academic). We are introduced to real women and their real situations by way of their letters and diaries. It is full of very interesting stories of a few related women in 18th century England. My only wish would be that the book could have been written to include women from other areas in England--really just more women in general. I appreciate the author's work in this under-researched area and hope it inspires more research in the future.
I have long wished that I could have lived in Jane Austen's world (with epidurals). But after reading this I realize that I would rather keep my appliances and modern medicine and my legal rights. I appreciated this book because it broke me of my misconceptions about any kind of "romantic" life of the women of this "almost leisure" class, as another reviewer called it. They were at the mercy of their husbands, their social situation and fate. Very thought provoking for a Jane Austen fan like myself.

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.

This book contains a wealth of information, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. The author bases her findings on her study of the letters and diaries of a group of women in Northern England in the last half of the 18th century. From these sources, she attempts to draw conclusions about the women's attitudes and daily lives. I haven't read much straight history, other than textbooks, so what I'm about to say may not be worth much, but her conclusions made sense to me. She referenced other historians freely, and explained how her research either supported or contradicted common assumptions about the period.

I think that the sections that were most interesting to me personally were those where she talked about marriage and housekeeping. I had a vague idea that respectable women were expected to have certain skills, but the sheer scope of what these ladies did just to keep their house in working order is incredible to me. And of course, they did this while bearing and raising children, keeping up with their social contacts, and doing all of this with the appearance of ease. I have newfound respect for those ladies. These were no pretty, ornamental blushing violets. They knew the rules of the social world they were expected to abide by, and they used them for all they were worth. One of the things that I really liked about this book was the amount of actual text from the primary sources that was included. I found myself blinking in surprise, and laughed out loud more than once at some witty observation one of the correspondents made. These women were smart, funny, shrewd, human. That's one of the most valuable things for me about books like this. Besides giving me all sorts of interesting little details, it makes the people seem more like, well, people and less like dead names on a page.

I'm not sure whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars. The author presents a very academic overview of the life of rural Georgian women in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

A lot of original research has been done for this book and it shows in it's content. The author highlights the lack of real research that has been done on the lives of women in this period. However, despite a well timed re-assesment of the lives of these women, this is essentially an academic work.

It highlights the fact that things have never been as bad as many other (feminist) books make out - in essence Jane Austin shows us close to the real world as people lived it in her novels.

This book is dry to read, but full of many every day facts for those interested in the "real" lives of 18th century country women.

The content of this book is up to the author`s usual standard - excellent; so why the awful rating? This edition is almost unreadable. the type is almost smudged, the paper quality is of the cheapest imaginable. The binding makes it impossible to open the book to a comfortable position without cracking the spine. As a product it is not worth 10% of what I paid for it. By all means buy the book, just NOT this edition.

More scholarship than entertainment (read: dry), but definitely worth the effort of reading for the wealth of detail it provides. As an amateur Austen student (read: junkie), I know parts of this book will come back to me next time I bury my head in _Mansfield Park_.

Although "The Gentleman's Daughter" explored an interesting time in the life of women it was too general for me to feel completely absorbed in the book. I felt that I was looking at an interesting painting from across the room and I couldn't get close enough to really know the subject. In no way does the book compare to "The Aristocrats" which pulls you into the life of it's subjects. Overall it was a disappointment although I did learn a little more in general of life for women in the Georgian era.

Amanda Vickery's book is about the life of genteel (note that genteel does not equal aristocratic) women in the 18th and early part of the 19th century. It is divided into seven chapters that roughly coincide with major events and duties in a lady's life (courtship, marriage, motherhood, householding, shopping and entertainment). Vickery's thesis is that women were not marginalized in society during the 18th century, and did not operate in separate spheres leading up to the Victorian era. (She does not touch the Victorian era at all.) She proves this point well by sharing anecdotes from letters and books, newspapers and prints. But the book is also littered with jewels of information about all aspects of female life.

My favorite chapter was that on childbirth and motherhood. There is a really fascinating excerpt on how midwives were slowly replaced by "male midwives," and then by physicians. "Ladies of quality" in the 18th and 19th centuries are given the short end of the stick as mothers. The belief persists that they were rarely invested in their children's lives; this is based mainly on the fact that many did not breast feed and apparently were too busy leading very busy lives to bother with their children. (If that is the criteria, then God only knows how mothers today would rate.) Vickery proves this completely wrong, which is gratifying, to say the least.

Vickery's book can be slow-going at times due to the large number of citations that she makes in it, but that is the nature of an academic work. It is also full of interesting tidbits; for example, there was a ladies' debating society in the late 1700s which, among other things, debated whether a woman pledging obedience to her husband in her wedding vows required her to always follow his orders. It is definitely more in-depth in its material than many other books, so if you enjoy delving into history, this is for you.