Linda Peck's richly detailed Women of Fortune: Money, Marriage and Murder in Early Modern England recovers the lives of three generations of remarkable women. Among them are capable matriarchs like “the £30,000 widow,” Elizabeth Bennet; accomplished philosophers like Elizabeth's younger daughter, Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway; murdered recluses like the controversial widow Grace Bennet; and intrepid European travelers like Grace's daughter Frances, Countess of Salisbury. These women were members of two families intertwined by marriage—the Bennets of Clapcot and the Morewoods of the Oak—whose fortunes were made through trade, finance, and strategic marriage during a period of dramatic economic and imperial growth. In tracing the formation of these families’ wealth from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, Peck focuses on the women who inherited, expanded, and employed that wealth as they forged independent identities. She reconstructs these heiresses’ experiences by undertaking impressive archival work in estate records, parish registers, company minutes, and Chancery court holdings, combing through deeds and account books as well as travel diaries and correspondence, always with an eye for illuminating example. Peck's wonderfully evocative account rescues these women from obscurity by presenting them not simply as “transmitters of property” (3) but rather as human beings who had interests, goals, and values of their own.

This deceptively simple insight is at the heart of several sophisticated arguments regarding the histories of women, gender, and social class that are advanced throughout the book. First, Peck forcefully makes the case for social mobility in seventeenth-century England. She demonstrates that the Bennet and Morewood families were part of a “new Stuart elite that blended land, finance and international trade” (278) and confirms that marriage was critical to the formation of this elite. As mercantile wealth grew, Peck explains, it was invested in large marriage portions that were attractive to indebted aristocrats, often resulting in a merger between landed and commercial wealth. This new Stuart elite largely formed in commercial and cosmopolitan London, and Peck provides a clear account of the growth of trade and the operation of a credit economy emanating from this core. Just as in her earlier work, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (2005), Peck here demonstrates the importance of taste and luxury for economic development, and paints a vivid picture of the transformation of the capital city that began in the Stuart age.

The experience of women and families is firmly at the center of this account of the growth of commerce and finance. Peck offers ample evidence of women's active participation in the emerging market for stocks, lotteries, and mortgages, and she highlights the importance of their legal, as well as financial, acumen. Her research builds upon the work of scholars like Margot Finn, Amy Froide, and Tim Stretton, all of whom have examined women's broad engagement in the market economy and analyzed developments in Chancery (and other equity jurisdictions), where women exercised agency outside of the strictures imposed by common law. As Peck shows, all of the Bennet and Morewood women had recourse to law: they initiated litigation and responded to suits about jointure, dower, debt, and other matters relevant to the preservation of their own property and control. These suits involved sons and mothers, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers and uncles—and of course lawyers and brokers—in lengthy arguments about the proper apportionment of assets and estates. The range of claims, counterclaims, and demands advanced in these suits serve to highlight the dense network of relationships created by the emergence of this new Stuart elite.

Peck provides a compelling organization (and a helpful set of family trees) that enables the reader to understand this complex web of relationships. The narrative arc of the book is in part chronological, tracing the histories of each generation of these interconnected families, and partly thematic, with sections that follow the evolution of changing family fortunes from “money” and “marriage” to “murder” and “metropolis.” Throughout, Peck shows that the extension of elite wealth in this period not only fueled social but also gender change: these women used their wealth to pursue new opportunities and assert independence. This is a significant claim about progress and improvement for elite women in seventeenth-century England.

While Peck does recognize some limits to women's freedom—caused especially by persistent efforts to arrange the marriages and control the fortunes of wealthy heiresses—in the end she convincingly depicts her subjects as important agents in a centuries-long struggle for women's rights that continued well into the nineteenth century. Yet in highlighting this struggle, Peck also reveals some important tensions within the evolution of rights and liberty. After all, as she has shown, these women's wealth was founded in a growing imperial trade and finance, and their agency—whether buying shares or drinking sugar-sweetened tea—was increasingly exercised through new opportunities that relied on the lack of freedom of others. In this way, Peck's fully realized accounts of individual women and a new landed-commercial elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may also have the potential to expand historians’ recent investigations into patterns of family wealth creation and the legacies of colonial slavery in Victorian Britain, such as the work of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership.