It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Marriages for money, although they had been criticised on moral and practical grounds for centuries, were still very common in eighteenth-century European society, particularly among the wealthy and landed classes. Even in Jane Austen's supposedly romantic novels, money is always a consideration when deciding whom to marry, to the point that some of her characters contract entirely …
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the most remarkable English women of the eighteenth century, yet she remains relatively unknown outside eighteenth century scholarship. This is certainly undeserved, as she was an influential courtier, a prolific writer, and the author of the entertaining Turkish Embassy Letters, in which she wrote of her experiences living in …
I recently came across a striking passage in Samuel Pepy's diary in which he receives advice on how to get his wife Elizabeth pregnant. At the time of writing, July 1664, he and Elizabeth had been married for eight years, but they remained childless. While attending a dinner on 26th July, Samuel asked the women …