Just a heads-up on this book to be released October 12, 2009:
Behind Closed Doors: at Home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery. Yale University Press, 2009. [can be pre-ordered for $45.00]
Here is what the Yale University Press website has to say:
In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own.
Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer’s ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century. Through the spread of formal visiting, the proliferation of affordable ornamental furnishings, the commercial celebration of feminine artistry at home, and the currency of the language of taste, even modest homes turned into arenas of social campaign and exhibition.
Amanda Vickery is reader in history, Royal Holloway University of London, and the author of The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England, which won the Whitfield, Wolfson, and Longman-History Today prizes. She is also the co-editor, with John Styles, of Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830.
… a definite addition to your want list – and if you don’t already have it, you must also add Vickery’s previous work …
The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England [Yale University Press, 1998; softbound edition, 2003] is already on my toppling TBR pile(s). Here are a few [of the many] reviews of this earlier work, the winner of several history/ literary awards:
Jane Austen in Vermont 