Looking at the Localised: The Emotional Language of Women in England 1700-1830.

This thesis explores the ways in which twelve women expressed emotions in their personal correspondence and diaries over the period 1700 to 1830. The thesis applies a method which draws on approaches of social construction, historical pragmatics, micro-history, and the psychological model of emotions as ‘goal-related’. Using this method, the thesis reconstructs how emotion words attached to recurrent emotion themes were used and given meaning by each of the women in their immediate, micro, relational, contexts. The thesis demonstrates how staying at the level of the localised and a language analysis of individuals can advance knowledge about experiences and practices for women across the eighteenth century and for different sections of society.

The thesis shows how using this approach can enhance scholarship and knowledge on different areas of life and themes in women’s experiences in the period. The first chapter shows that emotions display how aristocratic women understood sociability and social aims between ambitious and more personal socialising. The second chapter displays how gentry women understood a shared language about emotions and the body, and how the contexts of relationships affected the usage of emotions at times of illness and pregnancy, communicating embodiment, and how responses to bodies impacted on everyday activities. The third chapter demonstrates how Quaker women applied emotions to highlight ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kinds of work connected to family and spirituality, using emotion to assess the boundaries of public and private, giving authority to women, and meaning to abstract spiritual practices such as Quietism by way of their own relationships. The last chapter in the thesis compares emotions terms used by all the women to argue studying the minutiae of ways in which common emotion terms were used in context demonstrates how the localised and diverse might have interacted with and influenced wider norms.

This thesis advances ways in which models of studying emotion can be applied. In doing so, this study shows what this kind of analysis of emotions can achieve alongside other histories of women’s lives in eighteenth-century England and how historians might approach analysing and comprehending wider norms of emotion and experiences in the period.