How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate by Wendy Moore

(Basic, $28)

This “extraordinarily strange” book brings to light the real-life misadventures of a would-be Pygmalion, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. By certain measures, the 18th-century children’s writer Thomas Day was a progressive thinker for his time: The young British aristocrat gave generously to the poor, campaigned to end slavery, and supported American independence. Yet he had curious ideas about women. His perfect wife—and he insisted on perfection—would be attractive, intelligent, and most importantly, submissive to his every whim. Finding no worthy candidates among adult women, he adopted two prepubescent orphans, figuring he could raise one into an ideal mate.

The experiment failed, of course, said Torie Bosch in Slate.com. After dismissing the younger of the two as “invincibly stupid,” Day focused on the older girl, Sabrina. He essentially made her his slave, and tested her stoicism by scalding her with hot wax and even shooting bullets at her skirts. Yet Day believed he was doing her good, basing his regimen on a wrongheaded interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories about a proper moral education. “It somehow feels wrong” to find Day’s hubris funny, given how Sabrina suffered. But you will be forgiven the occasional chuckle.

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This isn’t the first book to describe Day’s experiment, said Michael Caines in The Wall Street Journal. Too often he’s been “cast as a deluded yet benevolent eccentric,” a mistake Moore doesn’t repeat. But “the real discovery here is Sabrina and her background,” said The Economist. Moore did an admirable job researching her life, combing through orphanage archives and letters as well as locating her previously unrecognized grave. Told that she was being adopted and trained to become a housekeeper, Sabrina was crushed when she found out Day’s real intentions long after he gave up and sent her away. At least now this forgotten girl, treated for years as a guinea pig, is finally made human.