This challenged received wisdom by probing how the concept of ‘family’ changed over the early- modern period—in effect, from extended groups bound by economics to the ‘nuclear’ unit more familiar today—as well as signalling that intimate, personal or ‘domestic’ relations at all levels of society could, indeed should, be the subject of academic study. Since the 1970s, university courses in ‘gender studies’ and ‘women’s history’ have highlighted other yawning gaps in our under- standing of the past and, in the past decade, ‘emotions’ have become a popular sub-category in UK history departments.
As a renowned military historian and author of the weighty two-volume biography of the Duke of Wellington (Yale, 2013), the subject of the present study may seem, on the face of it, a bit of a departure. In fact, Rory Muir’s first incursion into Austen territory, to which Love and Marriage is clearly a companion, was in 2019 with Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune:
This story is from the February 14, 2024 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the February 14, 2024 edition of Country Life UK.
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