The Weaker Vessel is a celebration, not a lament. The women whose lives fill its crowded pages include not only royal mistresses, actresses, great heiresses, and the rare (mainly childless) creative artists and writers, but the ordinary maids, wives and widows whose quieter achievements can be deduced from the family papers of the period; fittingly, the final chapter is given over to the role of the midwife. Lady Antonia has avoided the lurid and often-told stories of the Essex divorce and the Castlehaven scandal (though the adventures of Lady Roos and the witty Lady Catherine Sedley make a good substitute); she has looked, on the whole, for the encouraging and heart-warming….

Unlike Lady Antonia's other works, The Weaker Vessel lacks the unifying element of a single central figure, though she is skilful in indicating the dynastic relationships which link characters in different parts of the book. Her arrangement...