Margaret Bird has been working on Mary Hardy for thirty-two years. In 2013 she published the four-volume diary of Mary Hardy, a detailed daily record of Hardy's life as a businesswoman over thirty-six years. Now Bird has produced four volumes of ‘Mary Hardy and her world’, a series of thematic treatments of Hardy's family, business, religious and social world. It is difficult to decide whether Bird's or Hardy's is the greater achievement. Certainly in Bird, Hardy has gained an editor and biographer whose energy and thoroughness matches her own. Mary Hardy (née Raven) was born at Whissonsett, Norfolk and married William Hardy, a brewer of East Dereham and Letheringsett; so the book provides an extraordinarily rich portrait of Norfolk life in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. To the relief of this reviewer, Bird avoids the cliché of seeing Mary Hardy's religious life through the lens of Parson Woodforde. She recognises that an occasionally negligent parson did not represent the norm, and that ‘bustling bishops’ were more common than those of the caricatures. Indeed she makes a splendid assessment of the later Georgian Church of England rooted in the data garnered from ecclesiastical records. At the core of this picture is the centrality of the parish and of faith in this period. Secularisation, so beloved by historians from above, played little or no part when viewed from below. In chapters iii (‘Roving preachers) and iv (‘Wandering flock’) Bird shows the strength of the Evangelical Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist pull on Norfolk people. In 1795 Mary Hardy joined the Wesleyan Methodists, which grew steadily in the county. It is clear that itinerancy brought the opportunity to see and hear a range of preachers and their energetic sermons were at the heart of the novelty of the Evangelical movement in Norfolk. Yet Hardy and her husband continued also to attend Anglican parish worship. Clearly in Norfolk, as in Wales and elsewhere, parishioners ‘sampled’ a range of religious experiences. To do justice to Margaret Bird's work in a short review is almost impossible. Hardy deserves to be as well-known as Parson Woodforde. The achievement of this volume is remarkable and will join Francis Witts's eight-volume Diary of a Cotswold parson as a valuable and detailed portrait of religion and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.