Linda Levy Peck. Women of Fortune

Linda Levy Peck’s Women of Fortune: Money, Marriage, and Murder in Early Modern England opens with, and later returns in detail to, a grisly murder from 1694: Grace Bennet, contemporaneously described as “the most sordid person that ever lived,” was attacked so viciously in her home at Calverton Hall that “her face turned behind her” (quoted on 1). Grace, supposedly murdered for hoarding gold at her Buckinghamshire manor house, is only one of the elite early modern Englishwomen explored in detail in this fascinating book. The main focus of the work is on three generations of women from the Bennet and Morewood families living between 1570 and 1732. Peck’s aim is to see these heiresses not as characterless “transmitters of property,” but as important figures in their own right (3). It is therefore primarily a story of early modern women’s agency: Peck tells the story of these fascinating women as they outwitted suitors, fought for their property, traveled Europe, educated their children, and played the stock market to save the family fortune. One of these women, the philosopher Anne Finch Conway, has been the subject of past research, but the majority of the women in this book have received little or no prior scholarly attention.

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