"Like many people, Thomas Day dreamed of meeting the perfect partner. In fact, Day knew exactlt the type of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal yet tough and hardy, uncorrupted by society yet fully schooled in the discoveries of the day, she would share his dream of living in rural seclusion, attending to his every whim. As the heir to a sizeable fortune and a student of law at Middle Temple, [he] may have seemed something of a catch. However, his rather extreme views on female virtue and his disregard for social conventions, not to mention his unorthodox approach to personal hygiene, meant that the ladies of Georgian London did not come flocking. Before long [he] came to the conclusion that none of the women he met in elegant drawing rooms would ever live up to the vision of the ideal woman he had constructed from his reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's scandalous book Émile. With this daring plan in mind, he invoked the help of his dazzling circle of friends, including such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin, Richard Lovell Edgworth and the sharp-tongued Anna Seward"--Publisher's description.