The Secret History of Domesticity – Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge

A gift to all teachers and scholars of the British novel.

–Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley “Christianity and Literature”

I have assigned this book to graduate students . . . Accounting for most of what has gone on in the last thirty years of scholarship in its dynamic synthesis, The Secret History of Domesticity lays the groundwork for new inquiry into eighteenth-century life. As a reader, as a scholar, and as a teacher, I am grateful for it.

–Erin Mackie “Eighteenth-Century Life”

Its central argument is wonderfully simple . . . McKeon will set new agendas in the understanding of the early modern to modern eras.

–Brean S. Hammond “Times Literary Supplement”

McKeon’s scholarship is commanding, his erudition staggering, his systematic rigour and intellectual control steady and sure.

–John Richetti “Eighteenth-Century Fiction”

The scholarship is breathtaking and the intellectual analysis rigorous.

–Cynthia Wall “Studies in English Literature”

The strength of the book lies in the wealth of historical, literary, and pictorial examples that evoke the texture of domesticity, from bedchambers to bigamy.

— “New Yorker”

Those in the fields of 17th- and 18th-century cultural studies will find this book fascinating.

— “Choice”

What defines The Secret History is its elegant waving of thousands of facts, prints, quotations, dates, events and characters.

–Dwight Codr “Scriblerian”

Michael McKeon is Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England and The Origins of the English Novel, and the editor of Theory of the Novel.