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Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island by Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum recalls a long-forgotten piece of P.E.I.’s history. It tells of the division of most of the island’s land in 1767 among a group of mostly absentee British landlords.

The group, all male, included government officials and military officers who by means of a lottery were rewarded for their support of British imperial policy. This book highlights the lives of four women who came to own estates on the island through inheritance.

Bittermann and McCallum have thoroughly researched these four absentee landlords, all of whom resided in England. The authors recount the attention — or lack thereof — that the women gave to their wilderness properties, the subsequent problems attached to the bequests they received, and the political struggle by the P.E.I. government to get the land back from the proprietors.

Lady Landlords is enjoyably illustrated with a number of black-and-white reproductions of paintings and photos, and is recommended reading for anyone interested in P.E.I. history, women’s lives in an era dominated by men, or the lives of aristocrats in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.