Females of the Present Day, by A COUNTRY LADY - 1831: considered as to their influence on society, &c.

London: John Hatchard and Son, 1831. First edition, inscribed in a secretarial hand on the front free endpaper, "From the Author" (most likely executed by the publisher at the author's express request); and below this in a contemporary hand: "Mrs Grover".
The distinguished historian Linda Colley notes that, "This insistence that women must stay within the private sphere, while at the same time exerting moral influence outside it, dominated though it did not exhaust discussion of female rights in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The anonymous, but clearly Anglican and conservative author of Females of the Present Day, Considered as to their influence on Society (1831), for example, echoed [Hannah] More in her belief that 'our influence in the country at this period is extensive', insisted that such influence was founded on woman's place in the home, yet warned, too, that domestic duties were incompatible with passivity: 'We were sent into this busy world to be useful'" (Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, 2005, p. 276).
An online search of institutional libraries cites 8 locations in Britain and Ireland and just 5 internationally (University of Central Florida, Duke, NC Greensboro, Carnegie Library Pittsburgh, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). Octavo (165 x 97 mm). Contemporary purple calf, gilt lettered spine with floriate centre tools, gilt roll tool border on sides enclosing concentric blind fillets and rolls, central panel of overlapping scallop shingles, red speckled edges, marbled endpapers. Neat annotation to title, altering the quotation from Ecclesiasticus 26:16: "As the sun when it ariseth in the high heaven; so is the beauty of a good wife in the ordinary ordering of her house". Spine a little worn and sunned (much of gilt rubbed away), corners rubbed, touch of foxing to endpapers, yet a very good copy.