I’m warming to A Gentleman’s Daughter

What I’m reading

Don’t get me wrong, A Gentleman’s Daughter is still one of those books that can be used as a deadly weapon. In fact I accidentally used it as a weapon when I playfully dropped it on my husband’s stomach and his cry of pain made me realize I’d missed his stomach. It is a dense book and as I stated earlier very academic in tone, but it is growing on me.

I quite enjoyed the chapter Prudent Economy, which examines the woman’s role as keeper of the household, a duty most genteel woman undertook because their homes were not so grand as to have a servant in that role. I am reminded of my friend Lee who dismisses a lot of Regency fiction because she felt the lives of the women were so divorced from any need to work. Let’s face it, we don’t imagine Mrs. Bennet being of much use.

But Ms. Vickery’s book points out that in many genteel homes, the wife actively supervised everything that went on in the house, and that it would be difficult to point out to a servant the right way to clean silver unless you’d actually cleaned silver yourself. So you had to get your hands dirty. And wives still did a lot of handwork, sometimes even creating things for their servants. This all gives a lie to the impression that by the late 18th century genteel women were removed from active involvement in the operation of the house.

I was especially impressed by the notebooks women kept of everything they bought, sold, repaired, laundered, watered, hoed and harvested. Apparently if a woman ended up with a spare piece of fabric they could see in their notebook where it was stored. What a boon these notebooks must be to historians.

This information also makes me reassess the thought that women had no power in Austen’s time. Yes, their husband claimed their property upon marriage and they couldn’t vote and they couldn’t easily obtain a divorce and they were pregnant all the time, but it was also apparent from Ms. Vickery’s numerous citations that most husbands understood the power and importance of their wives in the smooth running of their households.

After all, today a housekeeper can contract out a lot of the infrastructure that maintains a house: from electricity and water to sewage and cable, but in the Georgian period we’re still seeing households that are largely self-sufficient, especially in the country. So a wife supervises it all.

I also found a nice parallel in the book to the series Downton Abbey, where Lord Grantham makes it clear his paramount duty is seeing that the estate is delivered intact and prospering to his heir, and I found this a very male attitude. But in the chapter Elegance I see a woman fully prepared for the fact that she leaves her home to her son and his wife; that is it her duty to leave her comfortable world and move into a smaller home.

But it’s still a dense book. I swear the pages are made out of lead.