Women of Fortune

Linda Levy Peck is a prizewinning historian who has published extensively on politics, society, and culture in early modern England. She is the author of Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (1982), Patronage and Corruption in Early Modern England (1993), which won the John Ben Snow prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies, and Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2005), awarded Honorable Mention (2006) by the Sixteenth Century Conference. She also edited The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991). Now Professor of History Emerita at George Washington University, Washington DC, and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, she has also served as president of the North American Conference on British Studies.

• List of figures; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Family trees; Introduction; Part I. Money: 1. 'The Great Man of Buckinghamshire' The Lord Mayor, the Benefactor, and the moneylender: the Bennets; 2. 'My personal estate which God of his infinite goodness hath lent me' the grocer's apprentice: the Morewoods; Part II. Marriage: 3. 'The £30,000 widow' and Kensington House: the Finches, the Cliftons, and the Conways; 4. 'I was never one of fortune's darlings' city and country: the Gresleys; 5. 'One of the greatest fortunes in England' money, marriage and mobility: the Bennet heiresses; Part III. Murder: 6. “The most sordid person that ever lived' the murder of Grace Bennet; Part IV. Metropolis: 7. 'The Countess of Salisbury who loved travelling' from Hatfield House to the Grand Tour: the Earl and Countess of Salisbury; 8. 'A seventh son and beau major shall gain my Lady Salisbury' courting the Countess: George Jocelyn; 9. 'Diverse great troubles and misfortunes' losing a fortune: John and Grace Bennet; 10. 'Fortune's darlings' single women in Hanoverian London: the Dowager Countess of Salisbury and Grace Bennet; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'In this exhaustively researched and skillfully presented book, Linda Levy Peck recasts passive heiresses as active wives. Promoting their own ambitions and reshaping the families into which they married, these 'women of fortune' creatively re-energized elite cultures and pushed out the boundaries of female opportunity. Peck rightly and rigorously positions them at the very center of England's early modern social order.' Cynthia Herrup, J. R. Hubbard Professor of History Emerita, University of Southern California