Georgian Women Told to Hide Their Minds | Conduct Books 1761

Three Georgian conduct books, one pocket-sized gift from 1827 London. Dr. Gregory's advice to his daughters: keep your intelligence "a profound secret — especially from the men." The perceptive women who read him had a rather different interpretation.Bound together by J.F. Dove in 1827, this dainty little volume contains three enormously influential texts: Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), and Lady Sarah Pennington's An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761). All three written in the 1760s and 1770s, reprinted continuously for over fifty years, and sold — with considerable commercial success — as gifts.What they were actually giving is the subject of this episode. Gregory diagnoses the problem of female intelligence with striking accuracy, then prescribes a solution that requires no adjustment from the men causing it. Chapone, who publicly outlasted Samuel Johnson in an argument and received explicit praise from Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, tells her niece to mortify her discontent. And Lady Pennington — whose daughters were legally taken from her with no recourse — calls marriage "a hazardous die" and advises "patient submission to an evil which admits not of a remedy." She is not calling it a virtue.With Ann Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert as a shadow reader, and Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf as the unexpected catalyst for looking at a book already on the shelf with entirely different eyes.Features readings from Chapone's Improvement of the Mind, Gregory's Legacy and Lady Pennington's Advice, J.F. Dove edition, St. John's Square, London, 1827.