Conville & Walsh

Conville & Walsh is delighted to announce that rights to HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE, a new book proposal by number one bestselling author Wendy Moore, have been sold to Weidenfeld & Nicolson for UK & Commonwealth rights.

HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE tells for the first time the story of the real-life inspiration for My Fair Lady and Pygmalion. In 1769 a young man of independent means, Thomas Day, embarked on an extraordinary social experiment: he adopted two young orphan girls with the aim of educating them to become the ‘perfect’ wife.

Day was strongly influenced by the progressive ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and believed that he could “create” an ideal companion who would live up to his exacting standards of femininity. He intended to marry the most successful candidate after six years and quietly send the other to an apprenticeship. Inevitably, his experiment failed. One of the girls proved resistant to his education, whilst the other, whom he called Sabrina, was subjected to a bizarre regime intended to condition her for the life he envisaged as a married couple. Fashionable clothes and frivolous conversation were banned, and Day would fire pistols next to her ear and drop hot wax on her skin. When the teenage Sabrina rebelled, he abandoned her in a boarding house with a meagre yearly allowance.

Yet this was not the end of Sabrina’s story.  She would go on to figure in the lives of luminaries such as Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Fanny Burney. Kirsty Dunseath, Wendy’s editor at Weidenfeld, said that ‘Wendy is a terrific storyteller and she has hit on yet another captivating subject. She has a true talent for making history come alive.’

Wendy Moore is the bestselling author of WEDLOCK, which went to number one in the Sunday Times Bestsellers’ Paperback Nonfiction list and was selected for the Channel 4 Book Club. WEDLOCK was critically acclaimed in both hardback and paperback, attracting praise such as “mesmerising” (Financial Times) and “the best biography I have read in a long time” (Mail on Sunday).

Wendy Moore is the first historian to discover Sabrina’s origins and tell the complete tale of her extraordinary life. HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE will be published in late spring 2012.