This lively and engaging book provides a collective biography of women brought up in the parsonages of Victorian England. Based on extensive reading of the letters, diaries and memoirs of over two hundred women, Yamaguchi reconstructs the sense of identity, status and gentility that women derived as a result of their unique social position as daughters of Anglican clergymen. A father's occupation, he argues, shaped and structured women's lives providing a “qualification” ensuring an entryway into a world of culture, employment, marital opportunity and education that would otherwise have been impossible.

The book begins with a careful examination of the function of the parsonage as a social and organizational hub for multilayered networks of charity, relief and relationship within the local parish. The parsonage appears in Yamaguchi's work as a vibrant “family enterprise” in which education, family life, creativity and piety were finely balanced at the intersection of the public and private spheres. Clerical families were above all, families on display. For Yamaguchi the Victorian parsonage furnished society with a religious exemplar and transformed a gentleman's private residence into a “showcase of ruling ideas.” Parsonages were at once the mirror of a cleric's moral and religious character and the practical embodiment of the theology he taught from the pulpit. It is Yamaguchi's contention that in this environment daughters were expected to play a secondary and supportive role, thereby modeling the well-ordered integrity of feminine submission to a male hierarchy.

The material presented in this book however, belies the notion of passive subordination and restrictive conformity to traditional social and religious expectations. The women that Yamaguchi studies were active agents in Britain's charities; they were pioneers of female education and, in the late nineteenth century, instrumental figures in the women's movement both in church and society. Far from being mere recipients of their father's identities, clergy daughters were often active participants in the major transformations of socio-religious and political culture in nineteenth and early twentieth century society. They were writers, teachers, social activists, administrators and idealists. Clearly the parsonage was not simply a “showcase of ruling ideas” but it was also a place of innovation, creativity and social enterprise that altered the religious outlook of this period as well as reinforcing traditional aspects of Anglican devotion.

This study is ambitious in its chronological sweep. The chapters move from the early nineteenth century through the age of equipoise to the eclipse of domestic ideology in the late-nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century. Yamaguchi traces the idea of the “clergyman's daughter” and the role and function of the parsonage against this dynamic backdrop. The evangelical revival, the feminization of the church and the secularization of society are central themes in the analysis. The ways in which the formal training of headmistresses impacted the intimate link between parsonages and village schools is explored in detail; as are the various changes resulting from the growth of district councils as they relocated parish administration, organization and management. The impact of falling clerical stipends, a decrease in traditional tithes and the consequent diminution of the prestige of Anglican clerical positions are carefully reconstructed from the perspective of feminine life in the parsonage.

However, in tracing this broad arc of change Yamaguchi tends to rely heavily on categories drawn from the work of Callum Brown. The ruling ideas that are showcased by the private lives of clergy families in this book are markedly similar to Brown's version of hegemonic evangelicalism in The Death of Christian Britain (2002). Following Brown's lead, Yamaguchi depicts the Victorian parsonage as the transmitter of one hegemonic religious discourse notably that of evangelicalism. Whilst evangelicalism is indeed a vital strand of religious thought and practice in this period, other streams of Anglicanism are underplayed in this analysis. As the Revd. W. J. Conybeare pointed out in his controversial article published in the Edinburgh Review in 1853, Anglicanism was divided between broad-church and high-church parties as well as evangelicals. If the parsonage was, as this study suggests, closely and intimately tied to the occupations of the father, then differences of ecclesiology, different perceptions of lay participation in the life of the church, different sensibilities and styles of gender, different customs and practices of worship were bound to influence the microcosm of the parsonage in distinct and important ways. For instance, the kinds of books available in parsonages differed between evangelical homes and those of high church and liberal persuasion, the ways in which the scriptures were read differed between doctrinal subcultures, the ways in which women participated in the lives of the church differed as a result of highly nuanced theological convictions about the nature of the church and the role of women within the political economy and the social and moral order. These interesting and important religious and social distinctions tend to be flattened out by an over generalized stylization of Anglican churchmanship.

Yet, there is no doubt that this study fills an important gap in the literature. Hitherto it is clerical wives who have received scholarly attention. Categorizing women by their father's occupation is a new, creative and much needed approach in historical study. The perspective lends coherence and subtlety to the study of religion and culture in this period. Of course the success of this study raises a demand for a similar history of clergy sons and ideally a study that places male and female experiences alongside each other in the formative home culture of the parsonage. Likewise, this study acts as an excellent addition to Linda Wilson's study of nonconformist women who, like the clergy daughters in this study, occupied a third sphere of active participation in the life of the church that was at once both public and private. Contrasting the two studies offers helpful insight into the finer cultural distinctions, similarities and differences that existed between the parallel religious sub-cultures of church and chapel.