How to Create the Perfect Wife

London, spring 1769. Like many people, Thomas Day dreamed of meeting the perfect partner. In fact, Day knew exactly the type of woman he 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 virtue and 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 rooms would ever live up the vision of the ideal woman he had constructed from his reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's scandalous book Emile. 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 social experiment, illuminating the radicalism - and deep contradictions - that lay at the heart of this most fascinating period.

From the No.1 bestselling author of WEDLOCK. The Georgian scandal of one gentleman, two orphans and an experiment to create the ideal wife. This is the story of how Thomas Day, a young man of means, decided he could never marry a woman with brains, spirit or fortune. Instead, he adopted two orphan girls from a Foundling Hospital, and set about educating them to become the meek, docile women he considered marriage material. Unsurprisingly, Day's marriage plans did not run smoothly. Having returned one orphan early on, his girl of choice, Sabrina Sidney, would also fall foul of the experiment. From then on, she led a difficult life, inhabiting a curious half-world - an ex-orphan, and not quite a ward; a governess, and not quite a fiancée. But Sabrina also ended up figuring in the life of scientists and luminaries as disparate as Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, as well as that pioneering generation of women writers who included Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Anna Seward. In HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE, Wendy Moore has found a story that echoes her concerns about women's historic powerlessness, and captures a moment when ideas of human development and childraising underwent radical change.