Carolyn A. Day, Remembering Anne Beach: Love, Scandal, and Sickness in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Carolyn A Day, Remembering Anne Beach: Love, Scandal, and Sickness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025. Pp. xviii + 244. £16.55. Pbk. ISBN 978-1-4875-9390-2.

Carolyn Day’s first monograph, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion and Disease, was more centrally concerned with matters medical than this ‘microhistory’, as the author herself calls it.1 The two are linked, however, by Day’s interest in consumption (roughly defined for our purposes as pulmonary tuberculosis, phthisis, or tabes), which led her to begin the research for the present book by investigating Princess Amelia’s (youngest daughter of King George III) early death from consumption. Day’s quest for Amelia’s supposed diary in the Manchester Record office ended in (apparent) abject failure—a feeling familiar to most historians—and prompted Day’s highly productive widening of her project to other British eighteenth-century women who died of this often-fatal and all-too-common disease.