In the two decades after its founding in 1607, the English settlement at Jamestown was virtually always in a state of crisis. Ongoing epidemics and food shortages, tense relations with the native peoples, at least one major hurricane, and a fire that destroyed the English fort jeopardized the colony's survival. Although Jamestown endured, most of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Roughly five out of six settlers died between 1607 and 1624, when James I revoked the Virginia Company's charter and made Virginia a royal colony.

Scholars have pointed to a variety of people or initiatives that supposedly saved Jamestown: Captain John Smith, the adoption of tobacco as a staple crop, the ill-fated Sea Venture (and other ships that brought more settlers and supplies), renewed religious purpose, administrative reforms, royal intervention. In 1621, however, the Virginia Company undertook four individual joint-stock ventures to raise money to save Jamestown (and protect their investment), recruiting subscribers to fund a cargo of clothing and other goods to be sent to Virginia, as well glassworks and a fur-trading outfit. Their fourth project was to send marriageable females to Virginia, where men vastly outnumbered women. With the support of their investors, the company transported fifty-six women who arrived in “this most masculine of environments” (161) in the winter of 1621. The idea was that lonely men would pay the hefty price of 150 pounds of tobacco for the privilege of marrying, though Jennifer Potter concludes that some of the women never wed and that most of the men who did never paid for their brides.

In The Jamestown Brides, Potter chronicles the women's experiences as best she can, given the scant evidence they left behind. Her book's greatest strengths are the stories she gleans from an array of sources – key points of which she summarizes in an excellent appendix – and her description of how she used parish registers, Virginia Company records, genealogies, and other documentary sources, as well as material artifacts and expert interviews, to construct what will likely be the definitive account of the women who traveled to Jamestown in 1621. But the bulk of the book is context – demography, law, economics, environment, and so on – that will be familiar to most historians, if not to a more general readership that is likely the book's main intended audience.

Potter begins with questions, leaving her readers to “find [their] own answers in the pages that follow” (7). “Were these women the victims of a patriarchal society,” she asks,

Potter divides her book into three sections. In Part One, she pieces together information about the women's lives in England and explains the legal and economic circumstances that may have made leaving an attractive option – even for some daughters of gentry families – and explains the myriad challenges faced by the Virginia Company and its settlers in America. In a brief “Intermezzo,” Potter vividly describes life aboard an early seventeenth-century ship and the special problems that overseas travel posed for women. In Part Two, Potter conjectures how exactly the women and men paired up in Virginia and what became of the women who did not marry. She finds that some went to live on established plantations, where their status was unclear. Several died as a result of Opechancanough's uprising in March 1622, when at least one other was taken captive.

Potter clearly admires these women for “their courage and … the steadfast way they made this brave new world their own” (310). But she also concludes – less convincingly and without elaboration – that their situation was not “so very different from the way the colony's market economy profited from the labour of indentured servants … or the way that established planters bought and sold the first Africans to arrive in Virginia” (307).

The Jamestown Brides is an amply researched book that places women at its center. While historians will likely get no new big ideas or interpretations from Potter's book, students and general readers will find it to be a thoughtful window onto Virginia's early transatlantic history.