Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House

(Hardback)

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Description

Wives and Daughters is a portrait of the world of women inside the country houses that symbolised the power and taste of eighteenth-century Britain. If men dominated public life, their wives were responsible for the household, bringing up children, entertaining, employing servants, nursing and dispensing charity. They also kept closely in touch by letter with news of family, comments on books, remedies and gardening tips, as well as the latest gossip. The women of the powerful Fox family, headed by the Whig Earls of Ilchester, have left an exceptional record of their lives in the great Wessex houses, including Redlynch, Melbury, Bowood and Lacock, into which the girls of the family married over several generations. Wives and Daughters traces the lives of individual women. Courtship, marriage and childbirth, education, houses and gardens, reading, hobbies, travel and health were only some of the women's many interests and preoccupations.

Reviews

'Wives and Daughters covers a wide range of domestic subjects, quoting the women's correspondance and journals...Martin discusses in depth country life, servants, households...provid[ing] a gloss on life at Pemberley, Mansfield Park and Kellynch' JASNA News, vol 22 No. 2, Summer 2006 -- MArsha Huff

Author Bio

Joanna Martin is the author of William Fox-Talbot at Penrice and the editor of A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen. She was brought up in a country house (Penrice Castle in Wales) and is a professional genealogical historian.