An epistolary marriage: letter writing and the family in the lives of Edith and Philip Lyttelton Gell c. 1880-1902

This dissertation explores the dynamics of a marriage through the letters which emerge from the archive of Edith and Philip Lyttelton Gell. Both husband and wife promoted empire in individual public roles and both held the view that marriage and family were institutions of national and imperial importance; the Gells’ marriage was at once public and private. For several reasons, however, Edith and Philip did not entirely conform to the gendered standards of family life and bourgeois domesticity the late nineteenth-century Britain. This raised inner conflict which was expressed in letters between Philip and Edith, Edith and her sisters, and Philip and his lifelong friend Alfred Milner. At once an intimate and a performative practice, correspondents confided cautiously, feared judgement and sought to resolve what they perceived as shortcomings in their own lives. By thinking about letters as vehicles for emotional expression, this dissertation examines the how letter writing functioned to mediate between the personal anxieties of correspondents and the public standards to which they aspired. It argues that the circulation and absorption of vulnerability constituted emotion work, through which Edith and Philip sought to reconcile the private and the public dimensions of their lives and their marriage.