The country house in English women's poetry 1650-1750: genre, power and identity Sharon L. Young A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 University of Worcester Abstract The country house in English women’s poetry 1650-1750: power, identity and genre This thesis examines the depiction of the country estate in English women’s poetry, 1650-1750. The poems discussed belong to the country house genre, work with or adapt its conventions and tropes, or belong to what may be categorised as sub-genres of the country house poem. The country house estate was the power base of the early modern world, authorizing social status, validating political power and providing an economic dominance for the ruling elite. This thesis argues that the depiction of the country estate was especially pertinent for a range of female poets. Despite the suggestive scholarship on landscape and place and the emerging field of early modern women’s literary studies and an extensive body of critical work on the country house poem, there have been to date no substantial accounts of the role of the country estate in women’s verse of this period. In response, this thesis has three main aims. Firstly, to map out the contours of women’s country house poetry – taking full account of the chronological scope, thematic and formal diversity of the texts, and the social and geographic range of the poets using the genre. Secondly, to interrogate the formal and thematic characteristics of women’s country house poetry, looking at the appropriation and adaptation of the genre. Thirdly, to situate the selected poetry both within and against the extensive and formally published male-authored canon and the more general literary and historical contexts of the early modern period. Across these related strands of discussion, the study has two important implications for our understanding of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry: it adds to our knowledge of women’s poetic practices of the period and extends and complicates our understanding of the country house genre. Each chapter highlights a particular engagement with the genre responding to a complex of historical contexts, literary trends and personal circumstance. Chapter one will explore the contexts which prompt the emergence of the country house poem and the shape and detail of the genre, 1600–1650. It also examines where the specific gendered contexts of women’s writing practices are relevant to the selection of texts. Chapter two focuses on the thematic and formal interplay in Katherine Austen’s manuscript miscellany ‘Book M’ and role the country house genre plays in exploring and negotiating women’s relationship to property. Chapter three shares many of the same historical and literary contexts but from a different religio-political standpoint and focuses on Lucy Hutchinson’s manuscript collection ‘Elegies’. Chapter four examines the appropriation and re-positioning of the country house genre in the poetry of Anne Finch and Jane Barker, arguing that as the post- Restoration period began, the motivation to explore the country house as a symbol of legitimate political power, a location and symbol of retirement and retreat and the site of financial and cultural investment did not wane, but was reworked by Finch and Barker to explore their political sympathies for the Stuart monarchy. Chapter five explores the use of the country house genre by poets associated with Whig political sympathies: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Ingram. Largely unaffected by socio-economic or political marginalisation, both Montagu and Ingram enter into a public, and politically inflected, debate on the importance of taste. Chapter six explores two writers, Mary Leapor and Mary Chandler, who belong to an emerging body of writers of mercantile or labouring class. The discussion will focus on Leapor’s ‘Crumble-Hall’ and Chandler’s A Description of Bath and the contexts of consumerism and tourism to which both poems respond. Table of contents Introduction 1 The country house poem 3 Scope and outline 11 Chapter one Poetry, women and the country house, 1600-1660 15 The country estate, 1600-1660 16 The importance of the country estate for women 19 The country house poem, 1600-1660 26 The representation of women in the country house poem 46 The female poet and the country house poem 51 Critical models of women’s writing 59 Theoretical and methodological implications 64 Chapter two The country house as property: Katherine Austen’s ‘Book M’ 74 Katherine Austen: agent of property 80 ‘Book M’: the manuscript 89 ‘On the Situation of Highbury’ 92 ‘Book M’: the negotiation of modesty and ambition 101 Chapter three Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’: the fashioning of a religio-political retirement 113 Lucy Hutchinson 115 Hutchinson’s appropriation of country house discourse 123 Hutchinson’s adaptation of the country house genre 133 Reversals and reinterpretation 140 Chapter four The country house poem, 1690-1720: exile and community in the poetry 148 of Anne Finch and Jane Barker Finch: the country estate and the building of a political community 155 Barker: relocated country house discourse 175 Chapter five Political gardening: the country house genre, 1715-1732 192 The early eighteenth century country estate: the association 197 of political discourse with artistic taste Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 203 ‘Constantinople. To [William Feilding]’ 210 ‘An Epistle to Lord Bathurst’ 220 Anne Ingram 226 Castle Howard 230 ‘Castle Howard’ 235 Chapter six Visiting the country house: generic innovation in Mary Chandler’s 244 A Description of Bath and Mary Leapor’s ‘Crumble-Hall’ The country house poem: a shift in focus 246 Mary Chandler and the development of the spa town 250 Mary Leapor 259 ‘Crumble-Hall’ 263 Conclusion 274 Bibliography 285 Acknowledgements I would like to thank, first, my supervisor Dr David Arnold for his support and expert guidance during the course of this project. I would also like to thank Prof. Jean Webb and Dr Andreas Mueller who as members of my supervisory team helped in the development of the study. Conversations with many colleagues have helped me think through complex issues and difficulties in the writing of this thesis. In particular, I would like to thank Dr Nicoleta Cinpoeş for her encouragement and friendship. Thanks also go to all staff at the Graduate Research School and to numerous students past and present who have offered advice and support. Lastly, I would like to thank my family without whom I could not have completed this thesis. To my daughters Alice, Harriet, Florence and Maisie, and my granddaughter Grace, I would like to say thank you for their patience and for all the welcome distractions. To my husband Nick, I would like to say thank you for his forbearance, support, encouragement and expert proof reading. A version of my reading of Leapor’s poem in chapter six is published as, ‘Visiting the Country House: Generic Innovation in Mary Leapor’s “Crumble-Hall.”’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 34.1, (2015), 51 Introduction This thesis examines the depiction of the country estate in English women’s poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The poems I shall discuss belong to the country house genre, work with or adapt its conventions and tropes, or belong to what Alastair Fowler categorises as the distinct sub-genres of the country house poem.1 Despite the suggestive scholarship on landscape and place and a broad body of critical work on male-authored examples of the country house genre, the corpus of female-authored country house poems remains largely absent from critical studies.2 Furthermore, in contrast to male-authored poems, they are frequently unavailable to the modern general reader. Even wide ranging studies of the genre, such as, Fowler’s anthology, The Country House Poem, includes only five poems by three women: Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Finch.3 More importantly, to date, there are no substantial accounts of the role of the country estate in women’s verse of this period. This thesis will argue that there has been a collective critical failure fully to appreciate the appropriation and adaptation of the country house genre by female writers in the century and a half following the genre’s emergence. This critical position opens up several areas of potential research and this thesis will, therefore, have three main strands. Firstly, to map out the contours of women’s country house poetry – taking full account of the chronological scope, thematic and formal diversity of the texts, and the social and geographic range of the poets using the genre. As Constance Jordan notes, ‘[i]nvestigators of the past lives of women as 1 The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate poems and Related Items, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 1-29 (pp. 14-16). 2 The scholarship on landscape is extensive. The following studies cover the substantive points: Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 1-8; Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis eds., ‘Introduction’, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 (London: Paul Elek, 1975), pp. 1-46; John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening During the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1989); James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630-1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Ian Robertson and Penny Richards eds., ‘Introduction’, Studying Cultural Landscape, (London: Arnold 2003), pp.