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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 Recognizing the 'Learned Lady' in the English Upper Class, 1750-1860 Kimberly A. Kent Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES RECOGNIZING THE ‘LEARNED LADY’ IN THE ENGLISH UPPER CLASS, 1750-1860 By KIMBERLY A. KENT A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2018 Kimberly Kent defended this thesis on April 18, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Charles Upchurch Professor Directing Thesis George Williamson Committee Member Suzanne Sinke Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii This work is dedicated to my mentor, Professor Charles Upchurch, for his unwavering patience, faith and support throughout this project. It is also dedicated to my mother, for showing me that there is no more powerful force in the world than a woman in control of her own destiny. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would also like to acknowledge the amazing staff at The Lewis Walpole Library archive in Farmington, CT and The Yale University Center for British Art in New Haven, CT. This project would not have been possible without the guidance and resources provided by these institutions. I would further like to acknowledge the efforts of my committee, my peer reviewers and everyone at Florida State University’s Department of History. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Anne Lister: Land, Love and ‘Learned Ladies’ ...........................................................18 Chapter 3: Mary Berry: ‘Learned Lady’ or ‘Lion-Hunter’ ............................................................42 Chapter 4: Anne Damer: Private Spheres and Public Agency within England’s Upper Class......74 Chapter 5: Conclusion..................................................................................................................109 References ....................................................................................................................................117 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................120 v ABSTRACT Class is one of the most frequently invoked analytic categories used in the study of British history. Yet, as recognized by scholar Eileen Boris, “class as a category of analysis is pervasive, but taken for granted instead of problematized in the field as a whole.”1 This is perhaps especially true in the way that class intersects with questions of gender. Works such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 and Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class have illustrated how English women experienced class differently from their male counterparts in both the Middle and Working classes within this period. However, there is no equivalent body of study which seeks to explore the disparity in privilege and agency amongst upper-class women.2 While elite men were ensured certain standards of agency and privilege, defended by legal systems and patriarchal societal expectations; women within the upper-classes enjoyed no such guarantees or protections. The ‘Learned Lady’ paradigm is a strategy designed to better recognize the way one kind of upper-class woman subverted gendered norms of behavior to exercise agency and privilege, without sacrificing her social respectability. 1 Boris, Eileen. "Class Returns”. Journal of Women's History, Winter 2013, 25, no. 4, 74-87. Pp. 74-75 2 Due to the limited scope of this article, I do not at this time address how this paradigm translates to working and middling class women in this period, though Pamela Sharpe has addressed the economic capacity of working women in her “Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850”. (Basingstoke and New York, 1996). Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall similarly analyze economic topics as they relate to middle class families in their celebrated Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987; revised edn 2002). I hope to take the framework I have established in this work and see how it corresponds to various economic experiences of womanhood at some point in the future. vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity, Anna Clark recognized that “Her [Lister’s] money afforded her the eccentricity of spinsterhood and the opportunity to educate herself in the classics and travel abroad.”3 She is one of several scholars that have explored the unique autonomy that Yorkshire Heiress Anne Lister enjoyed throughout her life. In these explorations, Lister’s privilege and agency is logically credited to her class and position within the upper-class.4The presumption is problematized by the experiences of countless women within Victorian England who shared Lister’s class status but who did not share her unique level of autonomy, agency and privilege. This is one example of problems that can potentially arise from assumed commonality in female class experiences. In her acknowledgement that it was Lister’s money, and not merely her class, which facilitated her given “eccentricities”, Anna Clark alludes to a more complex explanation for the agency Lister enjoyed. She also points to one of the many circumstances that alter the way women experienced upper-class status in 18th and 19th century England. The complicated relationship between class and gender is almost as old as the field of feminist theory itself. Since the 1970s such feminist thinkers as Marilyn Waring and Selma James have attempted to define class in a way that includes due consideration of sexual difference. The field of British history has proven central to the symbiotic evolution of class and gender. 3Clark, Anna. "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity." Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 1 (1996): 23-50. Pp. 24. 4 For one example see: Steinbach, Susie. 2004. Women in England 1760-1914: a social history. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 78. [See also Donoghue, Emma. 2014. Passions between women. London: Bello. Pp. 50] 1 Works such as Gareth Stedman Jone’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1982 emerged in the 1980s, proposing a different way of seeing the manifestation of class within working-class English culture. Jone’s work challenges strictly Marxist theories of class, reshaping how social class should be approached by scholars by emphasizing the often neglected role of language as a mediator between “class consciousness” and “class experience”5. Published five years later in 1987, Written by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall , Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850; in part clearly outlines the role of rigid gender definitions in shaping societal norms within the English Middle classes.6 While the author’s only make passing mention of what they call the “tensions of class and gender alliance,”7 they successfully convey one of the foundational claims of this argument: that English women and men in the eighteenth and nineteenth century experienced the “theatre of class and gender”8 in functionally different ways. In confronting issues of gender with corresponding issues of class, Davidoff and Hall successfully integrated gender and sexuality into the history of the English Middle Class within this period. A similar tactic is used in The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class by Anna Clark which establishes gender conflict as an operational force within considerations of plebian culture and community. Clark’s work illustrates how the shifting nature of gender difference and interaction directly shaped plebian culture within the 19th century English working class. Her work further recognized the way class experience was impacted by such variables as female employment, religious ideology and radical notions of 5 Jones, Gareth Stedman. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 6 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 400-405. 7 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 407. 8 Davidoff and Hall. Pp. 415. 2 fraternity. The work of Davidoff and Hall as well as Clark reinforces the claim that class in England within this period is a strictly gendered category; regardless of the class level in question. In her most recent work, The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Scott cites Gayle Rubin’s The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex when she describes “Sex” as the division of physical bodies into male and female types and “Gender” as the social or cultural assignment of roles that established reality. The argument that class is a “gendered” category of analysis is based upon these definitions and Scott’s ultimate conclusion that “Gender meant that the limits placed on women were not physical,