Mary Bacon's World A farmer's wife in eighteenth-century Hampshire
Mary Bacon's World
A farmer's wife in eightteenth-century Hampshire.
Mary Bacon, (1743-1818) kept a ledger (1789 to 1807) in which she entered farming records and accounts, recipes, cures, weather reports, and almanac material. She also listed the 59 books which she owned, and copied out religious musings, stories, and a letter purported to be from Queen Charlotte to the King of Prussia, complaining about his treatment of her native state of Mecklenburg.
The entries are in no logical order but have been organised into a book.
Mary Bacon. A farmer’s wife in eighteenth century Hampshire, by Ruth Facer. Mary Bacon and her writings form the foreground to the book, but material has been researched from newspapers, contemporary agricultural books, diaries, wills and leases to give a rich and varied contemporary background, demonstrating both the pleasures and the worries of country people in southern England in the late eighteenth century, a period troubled by threats of war.
Did Mary Bacon and Jane Austen meet? Ruth Facer does not answer the question in this book, although it does remain a possibility as there are some links, but she does provide an insight into the world of middle class women living in a rural community in the southern part of England not far from the Austens.
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Chawton House Library, Old Gosport Road, Chawton, Hampshire, United Kingdom, GU34 1SJ
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