How to Create the Perfect Wife

How to Create the Perfect Wife
Author: Wendy Moore
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465065732

A captivating tale of one man's mission to groom his ideal mate. Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal, yet tough and hardy, and completely subervient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up on his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her. So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife. A few days after he turned twenty-one and inherited a large fortune, Day adopted two young orphans from the Founding Hospital and, guided by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of the Enlightenment, attempted to teach them to be model wives. Day's peculiar experiment inevitably backfired -- though not before he had taken his theories about marriage, education, and femininity to shocking extremes. Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism -- and deep contradictions -- at the heart of the enlightenment.

Novel Gazing

Novel Gazing
Author: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1997-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780822320401

DIVThis is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. Eve Sedgwick has brought together contributors to navigate this new terrritory through discussions of a wide range of British, French, and American novels--including canonical/div

A Concise History of the Common Law

A Concise History of the Common Law
Author: Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett
Publisher: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.
Total Pages: 828
Release: 2001
Genre: Common law
ISBN: 1584771372

Originally published: 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956.

The Legacy of the Moral Tale

The Legacy of the Moral Tale
Author: Patrick C. Fleming
Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781621902041

The moral tale was foremost among the new genres of children's literature that emerged in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Written expressly to impart moral lessons to their young readers, such tales had a profound impact on the generation we now know as the Victorians. In this original and discerning study, Patrick Fleming traces the rise and subsequent impact of the moral tale through the works of representative authors like Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Charles Dickens, who through Oliver Twist and later writings developed his own brand of experiential didacticism which clearly had roots in the moral tales he read as a child. Scholars studying Victorians' childhood reading have typically emphasized fairy tales and eighteenth-century novels rather than works especially written for children, while children's literature scholars have focused on the "Golden Age," which began around 1860 and is epitomized by such works as Lewis Carroll's Alice' Adventures in Wonderland. However, as The Legacy of the Moral Tale makes clear, children's literature began long before the Golden Age, and the moral tale was prominent among the genres the Victorians remembered. In revealing this long-overlooked connection, the book expands our understanding of the history of the novel and highlights the moral instruction to which nineteen-century readers were accustomed. -- from back cover.