Women’s paper traces: material manuscripts, print culture, and the eighteenth-century country house

This thesis examines the writing lives of five women: Mary (1736-1800) and Charlotte (1737-1797) Winn, Elizabeth Egerton (c. 1681-1743), Cecilia Strickland (1741-1814), and Hannah Greg (1766-1828). Their respective homes – Nostell Priory, Tatton Park, Sizergh Castle, and Quarry Bank House – are now owned and cared for by the National Trust. I bring these individuals together, for the first time, to understand how Georgian women negotiated their print environments, illuminating how ink, pen, and paper were used to preserve their stories. This thesis cuts across the life cycles of women (unmarried sisters, wives, and widows) and explores how, in differing ways, their paper trails evidence an awareness of a broad print culture outside of the country house. Throughout, I draw upon a range of literature – novels, letter collections, didactic texts, periodicals, memoirs – the combination of which represents the vast and varied written environment that surrounded these women’s lives.

The Winns, Egerton, Strickland, and Greg have each been marginalised in varying degrees from the historical record and, in consequence, this thesis counters their overwhelming archival erasure by placing these women’s stories at the fore of their own narrative. I value their remaining papers, moreover, for more than their textual worth. The thesis pays attention to the layout of handwritten script, the seals that were used to close these letters, the ways these pages were folded and saved, alongside other material traces in order to restore these women’s paper presence despite their archives being edited, dispersed, and partially destroyed. In joining the Winn sisters’, Egerton’s, Strickland’s, and Greg’s manuscripts with the material, cultural, and literary contexts that framed their epistolary endeavours, this thesis animates Georgian paper traces within the conditions and environments in which they were circulated, read, and preserved.