Women and the Land seeks to recapture the extent of women's landownership in England 1500–1900. The contributions by historians, literary scholars and historical geographers expertly uncover women's share in landed wealth in the English past. The project has an ‘explicitly feminist agenda’ that deliberately seeks to challenge the idea that patriarchal property relations in England meant that property was exclusively concentrated in male hands (p. 1). The essays reveal the many ways that women were able to cultivate their own relationships with landed property – through ownership, management and use. This challenges the persistent narrative that female landowners were invisible actors in the history of land and property in England. Moreover, it is argued that this is crucial to our understanding of contemporary gendered issues of property and landownership – both in Britain and on a global scale – and that this is a story of continuity, rather than change.

The ten essays recover what the editors describe as the ‘faintest of footprints left by women in the archives’ (p. 25), making use of a wide range of source materials – from tax records and account books to court records and title deeds, correspondence to family papers and memoirs – and employing both quantitative and qualitative accounts of women's experiences of land and other forms of property. While this often centres on women's rights to land, the book shows that land often meant much more to women than simply title (inheritance) or even use (dower and jointure). For instance, Amanda Flather focuses on the ‘spatial complexity’ of the landscape, arguing that understanding the ways women used and experienced rural space for work is crucial to any understanding of women's access to land (p. 29). Judith Spicksley uses wills to explore the experiences of spinsters who pastured their animals through micro-rentals, hired their livestock for profit, or pledged their land as formal security for credit, revealing how the management of moveable property was often intimately tied to women's experience of land. By contrast Jon Stobart's essay on Lady Sophia Newdigate's tour of southern England and Derbyshire in 1748 reveals how travel writing allowed elite women to construct their own identities in relation to the landscape.

The book emphasises the importance of women's writing as a lens through which to explore their relationship with property. Jessica Malay's essay on Lady Anne Clifford sheds new light on her relationship with the land she fought so hard to claim and protect, and captures Anne's sense of heritage in her writings, which appears to have become an intrinsic part of her identity. In her essay on the autobiography of Arabella Alleyn – an abducted heiress – Amanda Capern listens to the ‘voice’ of Alleyn herself as she recounts her experience of male predation and abuse, and shows how these experiences affected her relationship with her inherited property. Briony McDonagh's essay on elite women's bookkeeping offers new insights into wealthy women's contribution to household estate accounting. Likewise, Stephen Bending's essay on the wealthy socialite and Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu focuses on her correspondence with a professional male designer as she negotiated the predominately male world of architecture when envisioning the transformation of her property at Sandleford. As these essays demonstrate, using women's writing as a historical source allows us to get closer to their daily practice of household and estate management, and, to borrow Capern's words, ‘takes us with them into the sphere of lawyers' offices, compound and other public spaces’ (p. 102).

The contributors also pin down how marital status, wealth, class and lifecycle intersected with gender in determining and directing opportunities for women's property ownership. Joan K. F. Heggie's vast dataset of around 20,000 unique property transactions in the Register of Deeds shows that half of women involved in property transactions in the 1785–1789 period were married, and that, rather surprisingly, their participation dropped considerably to approximately 30 per cent in the decades following the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 (pp. 211–212). Janet Casson tells the story of ordinary women who owned small plots of land, and dispels the assumption that only wealthy women were equipped with the tools to manage their property. Finally, Jennifer Aston's essay on women and land in towns shows how female ownership of property could mark ‘a distinct period in both the female lifecycle and the lifecycle of the property itself’, and that women (both married and unmarried) were able to exercise ‘considerable financial and testamentary agency’ when bequeathing their property in wills (pp. 244, 264).

This book has thrown into stark relief the dearth of research exploring women's relationship to land across the rest of Britain and, indeed, the wider world. An essay exploring the ways in which English legal traditions were exported via British colonialism would have been a welcome addition to compare the experience of women in England with those living under British rule abroad.

The unfortunate problem that persists within historiography – as adeptly raised by Amy Erickson in the Afterword – is that the extent, or indeed existence, of female landownership in the past is too often sidelined by economic historians, as well as historians of property, the aristocracy and the agricultural revolution. Women and the Land therefore makes an important intervention, and by situating the lived experiences of female landowners at the centre of the English economy it lays bare how little we know about the ways men, as a gendered group of individuals, navigated property networks and access to land, and what impact this had on the transmission of property. This thought-provoking book presents a tangible rebuttal to any suggestion that women were irrelevant as landowners in the past. By synthesising exciting new research on the extent of women's landownership across four hundred years of English history, and by revealing women's varied experiences of property-owning despite the many barriers they faced, the book has ensured that future studies of property and economy in England can no longer ignore or underplay the role and contribution of women.