In 1919, at the age of seventy-eight, Helen Bright Clark commented that the huge archive of family manuscripts which she had helped collate took her back ‘to another world’. Sandra Stanley Holton has drawn on this fascinating collection of letters, diaries and spiritual memoranda to explore the lives of several generations of inter-related Quaker families: aunts, mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters, nieces. Theirs was a tightly-knit, extensive network, a web of mutual friendships between the extended families of Helen's father, radical politician John Bright, her maternal grandmother, Quaker minister Rachel Priestman, and her shoe-making Clark in-laws. As a student of women's history, Sandra Holton is particularly interested in the light personal papers throw on the lives, relationships and attitudes of women, but her carefully nuanced study also provides insight into the Society of Friends and into the radical politics in which the Bright-Priestman circle was much engaged. As a ‘micro-historian’ she studies individuals in their particularity, in no way suggesting that they were typical, but in so doing she challenges many simplistic stereotypes, including the assumption that men and women necessarily occupied ‘separate spheres’. Helen's manufacturing grandfather cooked small puddings to soothe an ailing child while his wife was away ministering. Unmarried women led fulfilled lives and expressed contentment with their lot, running businesses in the first generation, practising medicine in the third and fourth. Married women, so often regarded as financially powerless, played their part in determining the use of inherited wealth. Believing in companionate marriage, they corresponded at length with prospective husbands before agreeing to engagements, seeking to ascertain the compatibility of their attitudes to faith and life. After marriage they continued to be heavily involved in public life: Helen campaigned for many radical causes, took her daughters to hear debates from the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons, and at the age of seventy went on a demonstration for women's suffrage. Such behaviour was far removed from that of earlier generations: Quaker women aimed to live ‘useful lives’ but Margaret Wood, a product of eighteenth-century quietism, understood this very differently from her politically-active nieces and great-nieces. Far from seeing involvement in pursuits spurned by earlier generations as evidence of secularisation, Holton suggests that there was a change in religious sensibility, the sacralisation of activities once regarded as ‘creaturely’. Part of the delight of the micro-history she practises so effectively is the picture it provides of what Quaker life was actually like: following common practice, Helen's aunt Priscilla Bright was ‘disowned’ (removed from membership) for ‘marrying out’, but her accounts of her day-to-day life show that this did not stop her attending local and Yearly meetings and she remained very much part of the kinship network. The writings of the numerous women involved in that network constitute an invaluable archive, mined with diligence, skill and imagination to provide a book which is both illuminating and hugely enjoyable.