Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland, 1740-1840

The Pursuit of the Heiress is a new, greatly enlarged and more widely focused version of what the late Lawrence Stone described as ‘a brilliant long essay or short book on the subject of the role of heiresses among the Irish aristocracy’, which was published by the Ulster Historical Foundation under the same title in 1982 and has long been out of print. The new book comes to the same broad conclusions about heiresses -- namely that their importance as a means of enlarging the estates or retrievi