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Amanda Vickery. The Gentleman's Daughter. Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale, 1998. Pp. ix + 436. $45; $18 (paper).
Ms. Vickery's informative and rewarding The Gentleman's Daughter is a bracing breath of fresh air in the sourish sickroom of much contemporary women's history. Examining the correspondence and diaries of over one hundred women from gentry, professional, and commercial families on the fringes of Bronte country, she shows - astonishingly - that polite and genteel women were not always miserable, negligible, and frustrated human beings, that their experience was not of narrowing but of widening possibilities, and that they lived lives we would not envy but should respect. Her account of eighteenth-century women explains why their daughters went off to Africa, entered medical school, taught their children, and started the suffrage movement.
Beautifully illustrated and founded on massive archival research, Ms. Vickery's book portrays the varied texture of women's daily lives. Visiting neighbors, sewing shirts, carrying...