Women and Children in the Georgian Country House
Joanna Martin
Wives and Daughters is a portrait of the world of women inside the country houses that symbolised the power and taste of eighteenth-century Britain. If men dominated public life, their wives were responsible for the household, bringing up children, entertaining, employing servants, nursing and dispensing charity. They also kept closely in touch by letter with news of family, comments on books, remedies and gardening tips, as well as the latest gossip. The women of the powerful Fox family, headed by the Whig Earls of Ilchester, have left an exceptional record of their lives in the great Wessex houses, including Redlynch, Melbury, Bowood and Lacock, into which the girls of the family married over several generations. Wives and Daughters traces the lives of individual women. Courtship, marriage and childbirth, education, houses and gardens, reading, hobbies, travel and health were only some of the women's many interests and preoccupations.
'I wish with all my heart that Lady Ilchester had brought forth a son instead of a daughter, for they are much more convenient things.'
Edward Digby to Lord Ilchester, 1750
