Elite Women, Emotions, and the Lived Experience in the Eighteenth-Century Country House, 1700-1830

Abstract

This thesis explores the lived experiences of elite women residing in the English country house during the eighteenth century. By asking the question, ‘what was it like to be the mistress of the country house?’ this thesis reconstructs the embodied experiences of elite women in these environments as it considers their everyday physiological, emotional, and sensory navigation of their homes. Scholarship looking at elite women’s relationships with the country house has received more attention in recent years following decades of erasure and has reinstated their position as impressive social, cultural, political, and domestic agents whose management of the country house held significant and wide-reaching implications for eighteenth-century society. This thesis adds to this body of work by illustrating how elite women felt about these roles, how they dealt with the pressures and expectations placed upon them, and how this impacted their wellbeing, their health, and their understanding of the country house as a lived environment.  The following chapters are framed around themes that represent important elements of the lived experience— mind, body, self, and death— and look respectively at elite women’s mental health, their embodied experiences of sickness, their assertions of identity, and finally their conceptualisation of mortality and legacy in the country house. To do so, this thesis draws on a range of sources and disciplines and demonstrates how past lived experiences can be accessed and recreated via interdisciplinary study. In so doing, this thesis makes an important contribution to the field by introducing an approach by which an individual’s sentience and lifeworld can be recreated— providing a better understanding of the culture, society and, most importantly, the environments that they inhabited. Through this work, the country house, and the expectations it placed upon its mistresses emerge as a prominent influential force in elite women’s lives and allows us to re-read these environments as conscious declarations of self, experience, and emotion.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Hannah Barker (Supervisor) & Sasha Handley (Supervisor)