A life of propriety

Anne Murray Powell was born to a middle-class English family in 1765. She was neither famous nor unusually talented, but her story embodies the values of her time, place, and class. Katherine McKenna's biography, based on an extensive collection of letters and papers, shows how the three distinct environments in which Powell and her family lived - England, New England, and Upper Canada - were shaped by important aspects of late eighteenth-century and early Victorian society. During this period distinctions between the public and the private realm grew large, with increasingly separate roles for men and women. Changes in cultural values concerning gender, ideals about family relationships, and ideas of the appropriate role for women brought uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction. Anne Powell's life embodied this shift in values and illustrates how they were carried from the old world to the new.