How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate - Hardcover

Moore, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465065740 ISBN 13: 9780465065745

Publisher: Basic Books, 2013

Synopsis

A captivating tale of one man's mission to groom his ideal mate.

Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal, yet tough and hardy, and completely subervient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up on his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her.

So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife. A few days after he turned twenty-one and inherited a large fortune, Day adopted two young orphans from the Founding Hospital and, guided by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of the Enlightenment, attempted to teach them to be model wives.

Day's peculiar experiment inevitably backfired -- though not before he had taken his theories about marriage, education, and femininity to shocking extremes.

Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism -- and deep contradictions -- at the heart of the enlightenment.

About this title

About the Author

Wendy Moore is a journalist and author of several previous books, including How to Create the Perfect Wife and Wedlock, a Sunday Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in the Times, the Guardian, the Observer, and the Sunday Telegraph. She lives in London.

Reviews

Who hasn’t dreamed of a perfect better half? But one eighteenth-century British philosopher attempted to make that dream come true. Moore (Wedlock, 2009) lays out the incredible true story of Thomas Day. Unable to find a spouse suited for the bare life of virtue he envisioned, Day set out to create her by taking two orphan girls and subjecting them, without their knowledge, to his wife-molding program. Moore wittily skewers Day’s pie-in-the-sky ideals as they clash disastrously with reality. This engaging account will appeal to a diverse audience, including Enlightenment philosophy students and Jane Austen fans. Day is ludicrous, insufferable, arrogant—and utterly engrossing. His quixotic quest fired the plots of numerous fictional works, including Pygmalion, that examined the quest for perfection. The narrative pulses forward briskly, moving between Day’s story and those of the orphan girls. Drawing on detailed personal accounts, Moore creates suspense and surprise in a manner rarely achieved in biographies. An unusual and unusually fascinating story. --Bridget Thoreson

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465065740
• ISBN 13: 9780465065745
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360