Conville & Walsh

Sabrina Sidney spent her first years at London Foundling Hospital, but was adopted at the age of eleven by Thomas Day, a young gentleman of independent means with an interest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and some curious ideas about education). After deciding that the women of the eighteenth century did not match up to his exacting standards, Day had adopted Sabrina and another girl, aged twelve, with the intention of training them up according to Rousseau’s ideas. Whichever of the two girls showed most potential, he would make his wife.

The program consisted of a Spartan regime, including such experimental methods as firing pistols beside their ears, and dropping hot sealing wax on their arms. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Day’s marriage plans did not run smoothly, and they were abandoned to a boarding house with a meagre allowance.

Sabrina Sidney went on to feature 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. Yet Sabrina’s was an incredibly difficult life, for in such a class-conscious society she inhabited a curious half-world in which her status seemed pulled back and forth between that of a ward, an ex-orphan, a not-quite fiancée and a governess.

Another riveting study of women’s historic powerlessness, and a story of an extraordinary life, HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE is the perfect follow-up to Sunday Times number one bestseller WEDLOCK.