Before Victoria (Book #25)

Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era (Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, 2005) was published to accompany an exhibit at the New York Public Library, and it bears certain marks of hasty composition, mostly in sloppy copyediting. But it contains lavish color illustrations and is a reasonably informative set of biographical essays on notable British women of the late 18th and early 19th centuries--from Lady Hester Stanhope to Jane Austen and everything in between. It gives a sense of the breadth of options for women who had a certain amount of money and education and were willing to fight for what they wanted, despite the many social and legal constraints women faced.