Darwin and Women

A Selection of Letters

Quantity

Darwin and Women focusses on Darwin's correspondence with women and on the lives of the women he knew and wrote to. It includes a large number of hitherto unpublished letters between members of Darwin's family and their friends that throw light on the lives of the women of his circle and their relationships, social and professional, with Darwin. The letters included are by turns entertaining, intriguing, and challenging, and are organised into thematic chapters, including botany and zoology as well as marriage and servants, that set them in an accessible narrative context. Darwin's famous remarks on women's intelligence in Descent of Man provide a recurring motif, and are discussed in the foreword by Gillian Beer, and in the introduction. The immediacy and variety of these texts make this an entertaining read which will suggest avenues for further research to students.

'Darwin and Women contains a wealth of fascinating stories about the lives of nineteenth century women and the slow growth in professionalisation of their work. ... The book is as entertaining as it is enlightening, and allows us to hear many of the voices of women that would otherwise be lost to history.' Ann Kennedy Smith, Dublin Review of Books