Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-7drxs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T13:24:22.679Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A WOMAN'S LIFE IN MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND: THE CASE OF LETITIA BUSHE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2000

S. J. CONNOLLY
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Belfast

Abstract

Letitia Bushe (c. 1705–57), daughter of a minor Irish landowner and one-time office- holder, was a member of the intellectual and cultural circle that included Swift's friend, the letter writer Mary Delany, the ‘proto-bluestocking’ Anne Donnellan, and the ‘heretic’ bishop Robert Clayton. The means by which, as a single woman of independent but limited means, Bushe maintained her position within this circle had elements of informal domestic servitude. At the same time a cache of unusually intimate letters reveals a determined individualist, consciously distancing herself from some of the official pieties of her society, and enjoying a greater freedom of thought, action, and speech than might at first sight have been expected. The letters also document Bushe's intense and tortured relationship with a younger woman, Lady Anne Bligh, an episode which raises important questions about the nature of women's friendships at this time.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I should like to thank Dr T. C. Barnard, Dr David Hayton, and Dr Mary O'Dowd for their comments on earlier versions of this article. For permission to quote from the Castle Ward papers I am grateful to the Chief Executive, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and the National Trust.