Timely and well considered, Women and the Land 1500–1900 brings together a valuable series of essays that review qualitative and quantitative aspects of the relationships between women and real estate. As Amy-Louise Erickson comments in her synoptic afterword, it is surprising that so much of this research is still new and still needed in the twenty-first century. Women have routinely owned land, housing, businesses, and capital since the early medieval period in Britain, but as the editors and Erickson explain, historians have often discussed women's involvement as marginal, anomalous, or exceptional. This “cognitive bias,” as Erickson terms it (275), results from similar historical assumptions about the pervasiveness and significance of patriarchal privilege built into the laws and practices of inheritance and coverture. As a consequence, although the established literature on the creation of the estates system, or agricultural improvement and enclosure, often notes in passing that some women were substantial landholders, this did not disturb the underlying assumption that these processes were determined by men, so the “typical” historical subject for their study should be male. As this volume attests, such presumptions are long overdue for revision, and it goes a long way to revising them very successfully.

Editors Amanda Capern, Briony McDonagh, and Jennifer Aston have organized two broad categories of essays: those that explore the experiences of particular female property owners in detail; and those that offer more quantitative surveys of the extent, types and dynamics of women's participation in property markets, transfers and development. The former retells the stories of some quite well-known women in the early modern period, particularly Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Montagu, but from the perspective of their behavior as female landed magnates. Jessica Malay translates Clifford's well-known determination to secure her inheritance into an effective analysis of the ways that Clifford interwove a restoration of the physical fabric of her lordship with a desire to reinstate and project her own, and her family's, authority over the region. Similarly, while Elizabeth Montagu is well known as an eighteenth-century intellectual, Stephen Bending reconfigures her as an extremely wealthy landowner and hands-on commissioner of architectural and landscaping projects on her Sandleford estate in Berkshire. Although she employed the leading designers (JamesWyatt and Lancelot “Capability” Brown), she controlled the interpretation and execution of their plans and modified them repeatedly. Similarly, Jon Stobart assesses Sophia Newdigate as a cultured, sophisticated, and acute observer of English landscape, antiquities, architecture, art, sculpture, and gardens, with a concerted, and extremely early, interest in the picturesque. These examples of women sharing supposedly male cultural territory should be contrasted with Capern's study of the abduction of Arabella Alleyn, whose life was an extreme illustration of the legal and societal disabilities experienced by propertied women. Capern recounts how Alleyn was orphaned at age two, left as an heiress to substantial estates in Essex, and then abducted by members of her mother's family, before eventually being coerced into marriage with one of them. Capern argues that such abductions occurred more frequently than historians of the gentry suggest and that they were sometimes downplayed or euphemized in familial histories. Her account also illustrates powerfully that Alleyn was never reconciled to these events and wrote her memoirs half a century later to preserve an account of these injustices.

The other essays in this study provide contextual case studies of a number of important aspects of women's experiences of property. Amanda Flather discusses the spatial location of female economic activity. Her research reinforces the recent research by Maria Ågren and Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood in breaking down the idea of separate spatial or economic spheres between women and men in the seventeenth century. She illustrates the ubiquity of female agricultural labor, albeit linked to gendered ideas about work (such as gleaning) or sexuality (women alone in the fields were at risk of sexual assault). Judith Spicksley rereads single women's wills and inventories to show that they were active investors in livestock with potentially more direct access to land, particularly in northern England, before 1640. Only later in the seventeenth century did such women opt for secured loans, mortgages, and (eventually) government stock. Joan Heggie, Janet Casson, and Aston respectively illustrate the involvement of women as landowners, small-scale rentiers, and business owners in the Midlands and north of England in the nineteenth century. These three essays illustrate the importance of Erickson's comment about historians’ failure to register activity that was clearly widespread and (as importantly) recognized socially and legally at the time. Although these groups of female property holders only represented 10–20 percent of registered owners or testators at any point in time, they were clearly active as investors, managers, and developers of their property despite the formal legal disadvantages under which they operated until the 1870s. This point is reinforced insightfully by McDonagh's consideration of the capacity and frequent participation of women as managers and developers of landed estates. Management involved measurement, so women who managed kept accounts as men did, but perhaps, as McDonagh notes of Olivia Sparrow, also for fear of being taken advantage of by male stewards and estate managers.

One issue that recurs through this volume but is not addressed directly—perhaps because it would add an additional layer of complexity—is the question of intersectionality between gender and class. Women like Clifford, Newdigate, and Montagu possessed levels of wealth that, in Stobart's words “entitled them in ways that their gender perhaps did not” (145). This relationship between property and gender deserves more systematic attention. Here, McDonagh and Casson outline the difference in scale and resources of women in their samples, but elsewhere, although the available evidence is limited it would be interesting to understand, for example, how female rentiers operated in expanding northern resort towns and how their behavior might have differed from that of larger female landholders, or whether female business owners acted differently depending on the size and scale of the enterprise and how they behaved compared to men of the same rank. However, as Erickson concludes, “there are many questions to be investigated about how different and how similar women and men were as owners, as tenants and as labourers. But the first step is to see two sexes to start with” (274).