How to Create the Perfect Wife - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Wendy Moore is a freelance journalist and author. Her first book, THE KNIFE MAN, won the Medical Journalists' Association Consumer Book Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for both Saltire and the Marsh Biography Awards. Her second book, WEDLOCK, has been highly acclaimed in reviews and was chosen as one of the ten titles in the Channel 4 TV Book Club. HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE was published to rapturous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

De la contraportada

Praise for Wedlock

'A gripping story, brilliantly told' Amanda Foreman

'Wedlock is the best biography I have read in a long time. It's gripping, addictive and painstakingly researched. The book works on many levels - it's not just a tale of evil but also one of humanity and loyalty'
Mail on Sunday

'A contemporary paced tale of wealth, status and privilege, laced with lust, greed, pride and more than a smattering of gratuitous violence' The Times

'Mesmerising ... Wedlock reads like a cross between Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the Gothic horrors so popular at that time' Financial Times

'As gripping as a novel' Daily Telegraph

De la solapa interior

London, spring 1769. Like many people, Thomas Day dreamed of meeting the perfect partner. In fact, Day knew exactly the type of woman who wanted to marry. Pure and virginal yet tough and hardy, uncorrupted by society yet fully schooled in the discoveries of the day, she would share his dream of living in rural seclusion, attending to his every whim.

As the heir to a sizeable fortune and a student of law at Middle Temple, Day may have seemed something of a catch. However his rather extreme views on female virtueand his disregard for social conventions, not to mention his unorthodox approach to personal hygiene, meant that the ladies of Georgian society did not come flocking. Before long Day came to the conclusion that none of the women he met in elegant drawing roomswould ever live up the vision of the ideal womanhe had constructed from his reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's scandalous book Émile. So, in true Pygmalion style, he hit on the idea of creating the perfect wife.

With this daring plan in mind, he invoked the help of his dazzling circle of friends, including such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and the sharp-tongued Anna Seward. In How to Create the Perfect Wife, acclaimed biographer Wendy Moore tells the story of this bizarre socialexperiment, illuminating the radicalism - and deep contradictions - that lay at the heart of this most fascinating period.