Hill, Bridget: Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850.(Book Review)

History: Review of New Books, March, 2002 by Tobriner, Alice

Hill, Bridget Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850 New Haven: Yale University Press 220 pp., $37.50, ISBN 0-300-08820-5 Publication Date: December 2001

Bridget Hill is a historian of and for the people--she is not afraid to personalize her statistics with live characters, and even make the passage of events, whether traumas or delights, interesting and (can this be?) exciting, for Open University students or graduate researchers alike. Moving across her scenes--as though within a faded eighteenth-century diorama--come the women: farm managers and small business owners, governesses and learned ladies, criminals (according to an inhuman Poor Law) and female preachers, caretakers of aging parents and writers of romantic letters and novels.

A...

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