• Virtue reconsider’d
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Virtue reconsider’d

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Reassessing the lives of married English women in the long eighteenth century, this multidisciplinary volume challenges assumptions of wifely domesticity and docility, and reveals how wives navigated law, literature and economy to exercise agency within...
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  • October 6, 2026
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Wives have long been neglected as a topic of scholarly research. The invisibility of married women in England within the historical record, the complexities of their legal and economic status, and an erroneous belief that women’s activities were confined to the domestic has meant that little attention has been focussed exclusively on wives. Now, however, new scholarship is challenging the orthodoxy of previously dominant ‘private sphere’ narratives and demonstrating that the roles available to married women were more nuanced and dynamic than mainstream assumptions have allowed. This edited volume brings together new research from a number of disciplines to interrogate key issues relating to married women during the long eighteenth century: coverture and the law, literary representation and ideology, paid labour and property ownership. In doing so, it also explores new cross-chronological and multi-disciplinary models that will direct future research.
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Price: $140.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781526187468
Format: Hardcover
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Dr Alison Daniell, University of Southampton
Dr Kim Simpson, Deputy Director, Chawton House

Introduction: Adventurous wives; or, virtue reconsider’d
Alison Daniell & Kim Simpson

I: Wives and the law: Constructing the wife

1 Litigious and literary wives: Teresia Phillips, Melinda Graham and Sarah Rippon
Sarah Ailwood

2 Rethinking marriage: The ideology of wifely duty as subversive agency
Amy Clarke

II: Wives in literature: Writing the wife

3 Wives as they were: Married women in eighteenth-century comedy
Eva Lippold

4 ‘A labyrinth of adventures’: Married women and masculine virtue in Mary Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England (1799) and The Natural Daughter (1799)
Anne Claire Michoux

5 Subversive bodily sensibility in Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline
Heather Heckman-McKenna

III: Wives in the economy: Paid labour and property ownership

6 Rediscovering Francesca Corri née Bacchelli (c.1749-1802)
Brianna Robertson-Kirkland

7 A card to the ladies: Working wives in Winchester and Salisbury
Alison Daniell

8 Wives as slave owners: Elite women in Georgian theatre audiences
David Worrall

Afterword: Going public; or, beyond received narratives

Bibliography
Index