Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Women, Property and Land
- 1 Women, Work and Land: The Spatial Dynamics of Gender Relations in Early Modern England 1550–1750
- 2 Spinsters with Land in Early Modern England: Inheritance, Possession and Use
- 3 Becoming Anne Clifford
- 4 The Heiress Reconsidered: Contexts for Understanding the Abduction of Arabella Alleyn
- 5 From Magnificent Houses to Disagreeable Country: Lady Sophia Newdigate's Tour of Southern England and Derbyshire, 1748
- 6 On Being ‘fully and completely mistress of the whole business’: Gender, Land and Estate Accounting in Georgian England
- 7 Negotiating Men: Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Capability’ Brown and the Construction of Pastoral
- 8 Women's Involvement in Property in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 9 Invisible Women: Small-scale Landed Proprietors in Nineteenth-century England
- 10 More than Just a Caretaker: Women's Role in the Intergenerational Transfer of Real and Personal Property in Nineteenth-century Urban England, 1840–1900
- Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- PEOPLE, MARKETS, GOODS: ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES IN HISTORY
7 - Negotiating Men: Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Capability’ Brown and the Construction of Pastoral
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Women, Property and Land
- 1 Women, Work and Land: The Spatial Dynamics of Gender Relations in Early Modern England 1550–1750
- 2 Spinsters with Land in Early Modern England: Inheritance, Possession and Use
- 3 Becoming Anne Clifford
- 4 The Heiress Reconsidered: Contexts for Understanding the Abduction of Arabella Alleyn
- 5 From Magnificent Houses to Disagreeable Country: Lady Sophia Newdigate's Tour of Southern England and Derbyshire, 1748
- 6 On Being ‘fully and completely mistress of the whole business’: Gender, Land and Estate Accounting in Georgian England
- 7 Negotiating Men: Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Capability’ Brown and the Construction of Pastoral
- 8 Women's Involvement in Property in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 9 Invisible Women: Small-scale Landed Proprietors in Nineteenth-century England
- 10 More than Just a Caretaker: Women's Role in the Intergenerational Transfer of Real and Personal Property in Nineteenth-century Urban England, 1840–1900
- Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- PEOPLE, MARKETS, GOODS: ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES IN HISTORY
Summary
When a Wife, I was obedient because it was my duty, & being married to a Man of sense & integrity, obedience was not painful, or irksome, and in early youth a direction perhaps is necessary if the sphere of action is extensive; but it seems to me that a new Master, & new lessons, after one’s opinions & habits were form’d, must be a little awkward, & with all due respect to ye superior Sex, I do not see how they can be necessary to a Woman unless she were to defend her Lands & tenements by Sword or gun. I know, that by Fees to Lawyers, I laid out 36:000 in a purchase of Land, with as good assurance of ye title; and by ye help architects, Masons &c, I have built as good a House in Portman Square; & am now, by ye assistance of ye celebrated Messrs Brown & Wyatt, embellishing Sandleford within doors, & without as successfully, as if I was Esquire instead of Madame. All that I have mention’d has been effected in little more than 5 years, few Gentlemen in ye Neighbourhood have done more.
Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, Sandleford, 11 July 1782Writing seven years after the death of her husband, the wealthy socialite and Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu could look back over a period in which she had managed coalmining estates in Denton, built a new London townhouse in Portman Square, begun remodelled her country house at Sandleford in Berkshire, and set in process the work of relandscaping its pleasure gardens. To achieve this a husband was far from necessary, but the assistance of professional men was, and it is Montagu's engagements with a predominantly male world of architecture and landscape design that I want to explore in this essay. Focusing on the period in which Sandleford was transformed by ‘Capability’ Brown – and drawing on Montagu's wide-ranging correspondence – this essay investigates the relationship between a powerful Bluestocking and a professional male designer – but a designer whose death in 1783 meant that the transformation of the estate took place largely in his absence.
Unlike Brown – whose limited verbal archive means that he continues to remain something of an enigma – Montagu has left us an extraordinarily articulate and sustained correspondence.
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- Women and the Land, 1500–1900 , pp. 176 - 200Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019