How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore

Author:Wendy Moore [Moore, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465065738
Publisher: Basic Books

NINE

ESTHER

Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1775

Clever, amiable and wealthy, at twenty-three, Esther Milnes was popular with girlhood friends and male admirers alike. Having lost both her parents within a few months of each other when she was four, a not uncommon experience for children in Georgian times, Esther had been brought up by her older sister, Elizabeth, and assorted aunts and uncles in homes scattered across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. On her sister’s death in 1769, Esther had become the sole heiress at sixteen to her family’s mines, land and property worth a total £23,000—more than £3m ($5.6 million) in modern terms—and immediately she found herself prey to fortune hunters, not least her brother-in-law. With her expressive dark brown eyes and plump red mouth in a pretty face, Esther could have her choice. Yet while friends and family pressed her to marry, Esther had remained determinedly unattached. Making her home with two aging uncles in prosperous Wakefield, Esther was simply waiting for the right man to propose.

Born in Chesterfield in 1752, Esther was descended from a long line of merchants who had accumulated wealth through astute dealings in the wool industry across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Two great-uncles had cornered the wool market in Wakefield by exporting manufactured goods to Russia in return for timber. Her father, Richard Milnes, had accrued a tidy sum from lead mines in Derbyshire and advanced his prospects further by marrying an heiress, Elizabeth Hawkesworth, who added the Palterton Hall estate, near Chesterfield, to the family fortune. Of the couple’s nine children, only Esther, the youngest, and Elizabeth, twenty years her senior, survived childhood. Despite being orphaned, Esther grew up happily with her sister in Palterton Hall under the watchful care of their numerous relatives living nearby. When Elizabeth married an ambitious young lawyer named Robert Lowndes in 1761, Esther continued to live in the family home with the newlyweds. But as Esther grew fond of her charming brother-in-law, she found herself suddenly packed off by her sister to a London boarding school at the age of eleven.

At school in Queen’s Square, Esther had impressed her teachers with her application to study, her skill at languages and her dexterity at the harpsichord. Her superlative knowledge of classical history and literature earned her the nickname Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom while her teenage efforts at poetry were roundly acclaimed. Esther addressed flattering odes to her best friends, her favorite teacher and even her books—“Dear instructive constant friends”—and wrote hymns that reflected her late parents’ dissenting faith and her dedication to charity. As compassionate as she was loyal, Esther won lasting friends, who fondly called her Hetty or Essy.

During the school holidays, friends deluged Esther with letters entreating her advice on problems with parents, brothers or suitors, and Esther responded with mature counsel, which they ignored at their peril. Writing to one friend, who was about to travel to India to join her parents, fourteen-year-old Esther wrote: “You will shortly, my Friend, commence a new Life, & enter upon a

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