Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830

List of contents

1. Introduction
2. Women, Land and Property
3. Managing the Estate
4. Improving the Estate
5. County Houses, Gardens and Estate Villages
6. Representing Women and Property
7. Beyond the (Park) Pale

About the author

Briony McDonagh is a historical and cultural geographer at the University of Hull, UK. She has published widely on the British rural landscape, on women’s histories and historical geographies, and on the geographies of protest, property and the commons. She is Chair of the Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and co-PI of the University of Hull’s Gender, Place and Memory research cluster.

Summary

Social and economic histories of the long eighteenth century have largely ignored women as a class of landowners and improvers. 1700 to 1830 was a period in which the landscape of large swathes of the English Midlands was reshaped – both materially and imaginatively – by parliamentary enclosure and a bundle of other new practices. Outside the Midlands too, local landscapes were remodelled in line with the improving ideals of the era. Yet while we know a great deal about the men who pushed forward schemes for enclosure and sponsored agricultural improvement, far less is known about the role played by female landowners and farmers and their contributions to landscape change.
Drawing on examples from across Georgian England, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 offers a detailed study of elite women’s relationships with landed property, specifically as they were mediated through the lens of their estate management and improvement. This highly original book provides an explicitly feminist historical geography of the eighteenth-century English rural landscape. It addresses important questions about propertied women’s role in English rural communities and in Georgian society more generally, whilst contributing to wider cultural debates about women’s place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It will be of interest to those working in Historical and Cultural Geography, Social, Economic and Cultural History, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Landscape Studies.

Additional text

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape has won several prizes including: The Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize for the best book in British or Irish rural history and The Women's History Network Book Prize for the best first book in women's or gender history.

‘McDonagh’s rich and exciting new monograph makes a welcome contribution to the field of women’s and gender history, whilst also greatly enriching our understanding of landscape, agriculture and property in Georgian England [..] McDonagh’s exploration of women’s involvement in the process brings a new perspective to well-trodden ground. By recovering so many examples of propertied women, and by investigating the ways in which gender informed women’s perceptions and practices of landownership, McDonagh also shows for the first time that Georgian women played a significant, yet hitherto unrecognised role in making the English landscape.’

— Dr Rachel Delman, University of Oxford, Reviews In History, 2288 (2018)

‘The book is composed of seven tightly written chapters with an appendix providing the key information on the female landowners, estate managers, builders and improvers featured in the text. This is a most useful reference with details of their route to landownership, marital status when managing the property, approximate years managing the estate, the names of husbands and children, and finally their own maiden name.’
— Professor Liz Griffiths, University of Exeter, Agricultural History Review, 66.1 (2018)

‘While the contribution made by women in business, the arts and philanthropy during this formative period has been acknowledged, the role of women in shaping the British landscape has largely been ignored, not only by contemporaries, but by modern historians and archivists too. As a historical geographer and feminist, McDonagh sets out to correct this omission and challenge the view, expressed by John Beckett, that "eighteenth-century landowning was a man’s world".’
— Professor Liz Griffiths, University of Exeter, Agricultural History Review, 66.1 (2018)

Product details

• Authors: Briony Mcdonagh, Briony (University of Hull Mcdonagh
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 30.04.2019, delayed
• EAN: 9780367244088
• ISBN: 978-0-367-24408-8
• No. of pages: 224
• Series: Studies in Historical Geography; Studies in Historical Geography
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art > Architecture