A very dry book about what it meant to be a British lady in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's a very broad subject, but for some reason Vickery only uses two women's journals and a handful of newspaper comics as her evidence. Eventually, I gave up. ( )

A little on the academic side, but full of lively anecdotes and solid information. Great for the researcher and/or hardcore Jane Austen fan. ( )

It looks like an interesting in-depth account of Women's lives in Upper-class Georgian England; however I'm not in the mindset to dig through this book. If I was going to write fiction based in this era this would be an invaluable resource and with the extensive index, citations and bibliography this would be a very useful resource.

I didn't read it through, so I'm not going to give it any stars. What little I did read would probably merit at least 4/5 *

http://aartichapati.blogspot.com/2009/03/gentlemans-daughter-womens-lives-in.htm... ( )

"The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years." Roy Porter; "The Gentleman's Daughter is the most important work of social history since Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage. From now on, any historian writing about 18th-century women will have to address the arguments in Vickery's book... It is the first book to bring out into the open the debate about separate spheres. It succeeds on two levels, first as an academic argument of the highest order, and second as a fascinating and enjoyable read. Serious history is rarely this fun." Amanda Foreman, The Times; "Innovative, expertly researched and luminous in style." Linda Colley, London Review of Books; "Amanda Vickery's new history of women in Georgian England offers a revolutionary reinterpretation of the accepted script, both an academic triumph and a spell-binding read