Disappearing women? Wives in fact and fiction during the long eighteenth century

Abstract

The thesis examines how coverture was imagined, reconfigured and interrogated within a range of women’s fictions of the long eighteenth century. This comparative study of law, history and literature is a unique, novel and wide-ranging study which brings existing secondary research together with new data and interpretations. The thesis firstly sets out to discover how coverture was experienced by women of the time. This is vital because the existing secondary historical literature suggests a gap between the lived experience of women and the strict legal provisions contained in the doctrine. This in turn means that some of the assumptions which have previously been made about coverture in women’s fiction may not be accurate as they do not reflect historical reality. A series of models of coverture were therefore constructed to provide an accurate backdrop for the various literary interpretations which follow. These historical models draw on established secondary sources and also use new research formulated especially for this thesis. The thesis also examines the underlying philosophies which supported coverture: justifications which were not true in fact but which were promulgated in order to support its existence. These were powerful cultural ideas in their own right and the thesis argues that the way in which they were integrated into fiction changed over time.
Each chapter focuses on one aspect of coverture. Chapter One examines land ownership; Chapter Two looks at moveable goods, money and investments; Chapter Three analyses coverture within the marital relationship, with a particular emphasis on how the androcentric power structures at its heart might be subverted and Chapter Four examines working wives. Each chapter contains an explanation of the theoretical legal position which is then examined against the existing secondary literature and new primary-source case studies. The findings are then applied to selected fictions. The only exception to this is Chapter Three, which seeks to analyse Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Maria in terms of her own experimental relationship with Gilbert Imlay. In Chapter One, a range of novels from the early eighteenth century is examined, including The Prude and Davys’ The Reform’d Coquet. Chapter Two focusses on the work of Eliza Haywood, with the Female Spectator and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless taking centre stage. Chapter Three concerns Mary Wollstonecraft’s two novels and Chapter Four examines Frances Burney’s final novel The Wanderer. As well as addressing separate aspects of coverture, each chapter also focuses on a different period of time. This enables cross-chronological analysis to be undertaken to identify changes to the understanding of coverture that occurred over time and how these were expressed in society and the literature of the period. This three-way analysis of law, history and female-authored fiction, together with the cross-chronological nature of this study, provides fresh insights into women’s fiction and the ways in which coverture was understood by those living under it.

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ORCID for Helen Paul: orcid.org/0000-0002-4786-7192

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