Power and patriarchy in the British country house: introduction to the special issue

The country house is perhaps one of the most visible expressions of wealth, power, and patriarchy in the British national landscape. Passed between titled men through law and custom which has historically deprived even aristocratic women of the legal rights afforded to their male counterparts, many of these grand landed estates—once economic and political powerhouses in real terms—now stand in as symbols for a ‘national’ heritage and cultural patrimony.¹ Some such houses now survive in ruins, serving as particularly literal metaphors for their spendthrift former owners’ habits, or else as ghostly testament to wars waged at a local, national or global level.² Others, as Kate Retford has recently reminded us, have harnessed their historical draw as the artistic and intellectual retreats and repositories of the affluent, consciously refashioning themselves as both (current or historic) family homes and public, living museums which invite prurient visitors to peruse ‘how the other half live’.³ In these homes which are open to the public, grand declarations about the architectural or artistic ingenuity of great men abound along the visitor route, amply backed up by the guidebook—but the traces of women’s lives and influences are often written into the very fabric of the buildings themselves: in the ballrooms and miniature theatres where they hosted lavish society events, in the long galleries and libraries where they wrote or embroidered or swept, in the kitchens and laundries where they toiled in sticky heat, in the nurseries and schoolrooms where they grew up or raised somebody else’s children. Indeed, as Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh so pithily observe, ‘[w]omen have participated in virtually all aspects of a great house, and their presence has been rendered less visible only by the shorthand of history, which has persisted in subordinating women to men’.⁴ How, then, have women variously founded, maintained, resisted, or disrupted the networked power that upholds the country house? And—crucially, given their widescale erasure from and marginalisation within many such houses which serve as public heritage sites today—how might their stories and traces be recovered, problematised, and interrogated anew?

This special issue brings together a range of perspectives in response to these questions, drawing from a major conference that sought to interrogate the relationship between gender, power, and authority within and beyond the British country house, both historically and contemporarily. Sponsored by the UK Women’s History Network, Power & Patriarchy drew together early career researchers and heritage practitioners in order to place the country house in conversation with current feminist, queer, anti- and decolonial discourse, actively challenging the purported ‘scarcity’ of othered lives and traces within such spaces.⁵ Taking place online on 25 and 26 January 2022, speakers and participants explored themes as broad and diverse as women’s political and intellectual networks, their archival practices and traces, country houses as hubs of colonial and imperial exchange (and women’s entanglements therein), women who led rent strikes or owned lands much more extensive than their male contemporaries, and queer and gender-diverse lives within and beyond the estate walls. The programme comprised not only conventionally academic panels and papers, but a whole range of creative and artistic interventions besides, from poetry and prose readings to the screening of a short film; this broadening out was a deliberate choice by us, as organisers, in our attempts to cultivate a genuinely interdisciplinary forum for grappling with women’s place/s within the country house.

So, too, was our decision to focus almost exclusively on platforming the work of early-career researchers and practitioners, explicitly recognising here that country house studies, broadly conceived as a historiographic and biographical tradition, has hitherto been dominated by the perspectives of much more established, predominantly white and typically male scholars whose voices have been afforded the authority and legitimacy that comes with these privileges.⁶ This remark is not intended to undermine their foundational work, but rather to ask: whose perspectives have been, and are still, missing from our conceptions and understandings of these nexuses of social and economic relations? In recent years, the field has shifted and broadened its horizons, moving—slowly but surely—towards the inclusion of more diverse, plural histories, disrupting foundational notions of the country house as a bastion of elitism, power and patriarchy; encompassing everything from decolonial analyses of material culture to workers’ protests, queering the country house, and much more besides, our programme likewise strove to destabilise the creation myths on which the country house has rested for so long. The excited conversations, resonances, overlaps, and points of connection generated within those two days represented—for us, at least—new pathways for reading this last bastion of patriarchy, disrupting the elitist singularity of the storied ‘great house’ and its benevolent owner in favour of interrogating who and what is variously included or excluded, placed on a pedestal or firmly into the margins, and how these things are always necessarily intercut with the politics of gender, race, and class within and beyond the estate walls.⁷ Where, our speakers asked, are the intellectually engaged women in the gilded library or the oak-panelled study? Where within the manicured landscapes and sweeping sketch galleries are the people whose labour abroad, as colonial subjects or enslaved individuals, built and sustained these grand palaces? Where are the working women, the political negotiators, the rebels, those who forged their own paths outside of the blueprint of heteropatriarchy that is male primogeniture? If, as Oliver Cox aptly puts it, the British country house has for so long been ‘the strongest visual signifier of the structures of wealth and inequality that secured enormous amounts of power and privilege in the hands of a minority of men who dominated British politics and the British empire into the twentieth century’, then how might we recover the voices and lived experiences of those who lived beyond these dominating structures—and those who continue to live in their long shadow today?⁸

Citation as feminist memory: building on feminist readings of the country house

The contributors to this special issue, and the original conference of which it is proudly a result, grapple with many of the above questions and the critical tensions they raise—but of course, our work does not exist in a vacuum. As feminist historians, we honour the politics of citation, which explicitly acknowledges the foundational influences, legacies, and genealogies of scholars who have long challenged the historical exclusion and erasure of those whose influence has long been marginalised in favour of consolidating a masculinised, white and heteronormative intellectual economy.⁹ To quote Sara Ahmed, ‘[c]itation is feminist memory  … [It] is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow’.¹⁰ The recent proliferation of scholarship and curatorial interventions around women’s histories—too numerous to cover comprehensively here—with(in) the country house is thus indebted to an earlier generation of feminist historians (a ‘first wave’ of feminist scholars, so to speak) who utilised an impressive array of archival sources and ego documents to uncover the lives and worlds of the aristocratic women in these spaces. This remark as to the initial focus on elite women is not meant as a barbed criticism so much as a statement of fact, evidenced in seminal works of scholarship by Judith Lewis, whose 1986 book In the Family Way constituted the first major study of aristocratic women’s positions as key agents of social reproduction and dynastic legacy-making, and Pamela Horn’s popular work of historical non-fiction Ladies of the Manor (1991), which explored women’s experiences of growing up in and/or marrying into the landed elite.¹¹ Building on these works, Marcia Pointon, Kim Reynolds, Amanda Vickery, and Dana Arnold have adopted archival methods to excavate aristocratic and moneyed women’s personal papers, bringing into sharp focus their central roles as collectors, as purveyors and producers of material culture, as key political negotiators, and as architects of their own social and intellectual lives and legacies; all of these discursive currents are interrogated and complicated anew in this special issue.¹² This earlier raft of scholarship laid the foundations for a new wave of feminist historical scholarship exploring elite women’s museological pursuits, collecting, cultural production and consumption, and artistic and intellectual patronage within and beyond the walls of the British country house in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries specifically, framing such women not merely as spouses or daughters of titled men but rather as active arbiters of taste and builders of high-profile cultural and intellectual legacies for their families. This work has been boldly taken forward by historians and scholars of material culture including Kate Hill, Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella, Madeleine Pelling, Lizzie Rogers, and Tom Stammers, to name a few; such studies amply demonstrate how elite women were afforded the autonomy and resources to cultivate their intellectual selves, and how their country houses endowed them with the physical space, privacy, and relative freedom to establish and display their collections and intellectual practices.¹³

Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh’s seminal 1990 book The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House was arguably the first notable study to map women’s various roles and experiences across the socioeconomic spectrum, from maids to noblewomen, from the mid sixteenth to the late twentieth centuries.¹⁴ Adopting a similarly holistic approach to understanding the interplay of gender, power, and class in the country house, Ruth Larsen’s 2004 edited collection Maids and Mistresses: Celebrating 300 Years of Women and the Yorkshire Country House offered a variety of perspectives and historical accounts of women from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as did Terence Dooley et al.’s much more recent co-edited collection, Women and the Country House in Ireland and Britain (2017).¹⁵ Larsen’s edited volume was one output of a collaboration between the University of York and the Yorkshire Country House Partnership throughout 2004; the project also encompassed a three-day interdisciplinary conference, ‘Women and the British Country House, 1650–1900’—the first of its kind and a direct predecessor to our own symposium, eighteen years later—as well as temporary, interlinked exhibitions at seven Yorkshire properties.¹⁶ In drawing academic historians, curators and heritage practitioners together into conversation and collaboration, this project signified something of a step change in terms of how women’s histories might be (re)interpreted and presented to visiting publics at such sites.

Seizing upon both the surging popularity of feminism within the cultural mainstream and interdisciplinary collaboration as a tool for the larger project of feminist historical recovery, heritage organisations and privately owned properties alike have since made use of curatorial and creative interventions as ways of presenting visitors with alternative and so-called ‘hidden’ histories of women’s lives. In 2018, to mark the centenary of some British women gaining political suffrage, the National Trust led its ‘Women and Power’ programming stream, which included a series of podcasts spotlighting specific women’s histories at different Trust sites, and curatorial interventions at particular properties with links to the pro- and anti-women’s suffrage movements.¹⁷ The legacy of this project can be seen in recent moves by the Trust to reinterpret and re-present country houses in ways that centre these stories—examples include NT Lacock Abbey, which has a strong female lineage beginning with a thirteenth-century abbess known as Ela, Countess of Salisbury, and NT Kedleston Hall, the home of Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, who in 1912 became the President of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.¹⁸ In 2023, English Heritage marked Women’s History Month with the launch of a suite of digital educational resources telling the stories of women at its sites throughout British national history, including painters, sculptors, gardeners, artists, designers, intellectuals and nurses, all of whom have had a hand in shaping the histories of its places and properties.¹⁹ Many privately owned houses which are open to the public have likewise taken creative approaches to delivering public programming around women’s histories, including artistic residencies such as that of the artist and musician Linder Sterling at Chatsworth, and digital resources including podcasts, short films and photogrammetry documenting women’s site-specific histories, such as those created by Historic Royal Palaces across its six sites.²⁰

The (de)colonial turn

This welcome wave of explicitly feminist scholarship and curation of British country houses has been unfolding in tandem with—but, until recently, seldom directly in conversation with—a paradigm shift which might most aptly be described as a ‘(de)colonial turn’ in the scholarly study, curatorial presentation, and the historical interpretation and present-day uses of such sites. Across both academia and the heritage sectors, particularly within the disciplines of history and critical heritage studies, research on the colonial and imperial entanglements of British country houses have been underway since at least the mid-2000s. Much of this research was collaborative since its very inception, and on this front English Heritage led the charge, initially by commissioning academic historians such as Miranda Kaufmann, Laurence Brown, Susanne Seymour and Sheryllynne Haggerty to produce detailed studies of its properties’ links to transatlantic slavery and colonialism, and thereafter by co-producing research by academics and its own curatorial staff, such as Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann’s highly influential 2013 edited volume, Slavery and the British Country House.²¹ In 2018, UCL-based historians Margot Finn and Kate Smith published a co-edited collection, The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, which offered a multidisciplinary and multi-pronged consideration of how imperial expansion across Asia (particularly India) shaped the British country house, primarily through propertied families’ accrual of wealth, tastes, and possessions in British colonial regimes, and the ways in which these newly acquired riches travelled home to Britain.²² Also based at UCL is the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, which hosts a searchable database of British people who owned or were otherwise involved in the captivity and forced labour of enslaved peoples during the British transatlantic slave trade; built on a wealth of archival data documenting compensation payments made by the UK Government to British slave-owners, this resource was built with the aim of bringing the long and complex legacies of slavery out of the annals of the archive research and into contemporary public knowledge.²³

Although such work has been well underway in the heritage sector for nearly two decades, it was only in 2020, with the global groundswell of anti-racist consciousness-raising galvanised by the Black Lives Matter movement, that conversations about the colonial and imperial legacies represented by many Britain’s country houses were catapulted into the mainstream. A catalysing moment in public consciousness was the publication, in September 2020, of the National Trust’s Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, a path-breaking study detailing colonial and imperial links to ninety-three of its properties, including products and chattels of enslaved labour, the international slave trades, the East India Company, and resistance to and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.²⁴ Commissioned by the Trust and led by its inaugural Global Connections Fellow, Corinne Fowler, the Report caused a furore, dividing public opinion between those who welcomed and supported this move towards more honest, plural and inclusive histories, and those who perceived Fowler’s research as an attack on the nation’s history. Although it is far from the only organisation to undertake and disseminate research of this nature, the fact that the National Trust’s work on this issue has proven so divisive is indicative, at the very least, of its historical self-fashioning as a conduit of British national history and identity, and moreover of the country house itself as a signifier of a burnished, singular national history.²⁵ Such a major disruption to this vision has therefore been decried by some as an affront to the very idea of Britishness, and has since been co-opted by rightwing campaigners and cultural commentators into the fabrication of so-called culture wars in an effort to quell this emergent facet of research and intepretation.²⁶ This polarisation of public opinion perhaps partly explains why the Trust’s public-facing work in this area largely appears to have slowed since the Report’s publication, although Fowler has since forged ahead with research on the colonial connections and legacies of rural Britain, publishing two titles that trace these histories in our national landscapes.²⁷

Queering the country house

Moves to queer the country house—that is, to reframe it in relation to LGBTQ+ histories—have proven altogether less controversial for heritage organisations (though not entirely without controversy²⁸). The National Trust has again led innovative work in this respect, including ‘Unravelling the National Trust’, a suite of site-specific contemporary art commissions from multidisciplinary queer artist Matt Smith, exhibited at four Trust properties from 2012 to 2014; Smith’s creative interventions married existing objets d’art and archival materials with the use of craft as a subversive, queer mode of self-expression.²⁹ From 2016 to 2017, the Trust ran a programming strand called ‘Prejudice and Pride’ wherein it worked with curators, creative practitioners, LGBTQ+ focus groups, and researchers from the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums & Galleries (RCMG) to produce temporary exhibitions at some of its sites, as well as several short films spotlighting particular people and locations.³⁰ On the public, NT-led side of the project, this programme culminated in the publication of Prejudice and Pride (2017), an alternative guidebook intended to ‘[shed] light on the LGBTQ heritage of many National Trust people and places’, including ‘stories of exile and tragedy, tales of loving relationships and family, and sometimes challenging histories of public front and private expression’.³¹ On the sector-facing side, the result was a co-edited volume entitled Prejudice & Pride: LGBTQ Heritage and its Contemporary Implications (2018), which featured a suite of short essays and opinion pieces on the meanings, relevance and uses—both actual and potential—of LGBTQ+ histories within and around different heritage settings including the (National Trust) country house.³² Historic England has likewise produced a series of online resources, including a crowdsourced map and a series of accessible research articles, on LGBTQ+ heritage across the country, known as its ‘Pride of Place’ campaign; although this project goes far beyond aristocratic properties and landscapes, it nonetheless makes use of archival materials originating from country houses to shed light on some lesser-known histories of gender and sexuality at these sites, beyond the bounds of heteronormative inheritance.³³

This public engagement programming has been complemented and undergirded by a small but vital body of biographical and site-specific scholarship which variously fashions country houses as sites of queer pilgrimage, queer domesticity, and queer worldmaking. Of particular note here is Alison Oram’s work on queer public history and interpretation at sites including Sissinghurst (home to the writer—and Virginia Woolf’s erstwhile lover—Vita Sackville-West), Plas Newydd (the home of the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby), and Shibden Hall (whose most famous resident was lesbian icon Anne Lister).³⁴ Oram has noted the ways in which historic houses, in their tendency ‘to invoke dominant narratives of class, national identity and the heteronormative family’, often deal in a deeply conservative, elitist and heterosexist mode of public history, and her contrary interpretations thereof serve to ‘disrupt heteronormative presumptions about the historic house and, instead, reveal elements of queer domesticity’.³⁵ Indeed, we were honoured to welcome Alison as a speaker at the conference itself, where she discussed Anne Lister’s visit to Plas Newydd and how chronologies of queer pilgrimage to historic sites might be used in changing curatorial strategies. Other public historians and scholars of material culture have likewise made use of the material traces of queer presences within the country house to delve further into how such sites have provided their owners and visitors with spaces to cultivate their own queer domesticities, sociabilities, and emotional and intellectual lives and practices.³⁶ The timing of Power & Patriarchy coincided with the arrival of a landmark contribution to the burgeoning literature on queering the country house, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840 by Freya Gowrley, our keynote speaker.³⁷ In her keynote address, Gowrley held up Strawberry Hill House, the antiquarian Horace Walpole’s Georgian Gothic villa in Twickenham, bequeathed to his friend Anne Seymour Damer upon his death, as an illustrative example of queer kinship and an alternative mode of inheritance beyond the overwhelmingly heteronormative framework of male primogeniture. Building on the slow, careful archival methods of queer scholars before her, Gowrley contended that close-reading the material traces and marginalia left behind by the owners and inhabitants of country houses can engender a deeper understanding of the intersections of gendered, sexual, and aesthetic otherness within and around such sites.

All of these efforts to queer a rigidly heteronormative institution, to uncover alternative modes of kinship and to find expansive, dissident expressions of sexuality and gender within spaces that insist upon the primacy of heterosexual familial genealogies, illustrate country houses’ diverse and complex figuring in LGBTQ+ histories: as home, as sanctuary, as arena of oppression, as place of pilgrimage, as place of exile. In their boldness and in their focus on novel interpretative methods and modes of enquiry, they expose the ways in which such histories have been hidden from view in favour of upholding a heteronormative succession narrative, while also offering concrete ways to push forward with the project of queering the country house and thereby to bolster its contemporary resonances and enduring relevance. There are, of course, many voices and stories that are still broadly missing from this nascent canon of queer country house histories. As Oram reminds us, ‘while the visitor’s reading of the historic house as queer might challenge mainstream norms of heterosexuality, ideas about class and cultural value may be less easily dislodged’, and as a result this broad historical project has to date tended to focus overwhelmingly on queer cultural icons within the white, British, propertied classes.³⁸ This is where some of the creative interventions and methods which formed part of our own conference programme, including Babar Suleman’s short film (featured in this special issue as a photographic and creative critical commentary), Freya Gowrley’s close reading, Darryl Peers’s creative reimagining of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as a queer love story, and Alison Oram’s calls to the ghosts of queer pilgrimages past, offer meaningful ways of tracing, connecting and identifying with the queer lineages which—whether hidden or not—are part of the fabric of country houses’ past, present and future lives.

New discursive currents and collaborations

Taken together, these productive intersections between the country house and feminist, decolonial, and queer histories and methodologies represent a moment of collective reckoning with what has long been (and, for some, still remains) a hermetically sealed site of privilege and power, and they pose a plethora of new possibilities in terms of what these places do, who they are for, and what they might represent. They also illustrate a broad shift towards much more collaborative and public-facing modes of knowledge production and exchange, whereby the heritage sector and the academy increasingly work together to engender new and varied ways of understanding and interacting with country houses. Here, UK Research & Innovation’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDP), Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDA) and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP), models which variously apportion resources and funding to higher education institutions (HEIs) and partners (including galleries, libraries, archives, museums and other heritage organisations) to co-host doctoral students for the full or a part of the duration of their doctoral research, warrant a mention because they have been a critical driver of change and innovation across both heritage and academia.³⁹ These kinds of cross-sectoral and cross-cultural collaborations between HEIs and non-university partners are growing ever more popular, not least because they can contribute towards strategic objectives for both partners and they produce original research which may be used by the non-HEI partner for maximal public impact. For historic house organisations specifically, these collaborative ventures offer new and impactful ways to tap into the research potential of their collections, to deliver tangible outcomes for heritage and public history, and to bolster access to their archives—all of which help to solidify their public, intellectual and commercial value as heritage sites.⁴⁰ Indeed, nearly half of the contributors to this special issue—four authors, including us—are or have recently been been recipients of CDAs and CDPs, working as active, embedded researchers in the archives of properties in the care of the National Trust, English Heritage, and the Chatsworth House Trust respectively.

All of the contributors to this special issue are pushing forward and stretching these new discursive currents in other ways: through their creative and curatorial practices; by paying attention to what—and who—has been placed in the margins; by placing primary sources, material culture, well-trodden historical narratives and their lesser-known archival counterparts in dialogue with feminist, queer, and post- or decolonial theory; and by careful attunement to the emotional and cultural lives of objects. In so doing, our contributors offer diverse contributions to knowledge that break new discursive ground and reposition women, queer, and gender-nonconforming folks as agential forces in establishing, maintaining, resisting, and disrupting the heteropatriarchal machinations of power in the British country house.

The opening three articles make extensive use of primary archival material to bring women’s reading and writing out of the margins of discussions surrounding women’s intellectual and familial relationships at Nostell Priory from 1550 to 1798, a country house now in the care of the National Trust. Katie Crowther’s article focuses on the fragmentary insights gained into Mary and Charlotte Winn, the unmarried sisters of Rowland Winn, 5th Baronet of Nostell, lives through paper traces within the Winn archive. Through these fragile paper ties, Crowther explores Mary and Charlotte’s sporadic and often frustrated relationship with their brother between 1760 and the 1790s. Crowther argues that the sparseness in women’s archives can be utilised to provide novel and creative ways to recover women’s voices which place them back within the archival history of the family.

Moving beyond the paper traces, Edward Potten and Amy Solomons draw upon the extant book collection in situ in Nostell’s library and billiard room to build on the methodological challenges of studying women’s book collecting and ownership, namely that women’s reading survives in fragmentary, decontextualised traces. Potten explores a collection of around 140 books which formed part of the inheritance of Sabine Winn (nee d’Hervart) on the death of her mother. Potten argues that this unique collection reveals a culture of book gifting, and gives insights into the cultural, intellectual and social lives of men and women across different geographical locations. Indeed, in her article, Solomons argues that the nature of women’s split lives, which are separated by the geographical upheaval of their lives pre- and post-marriage, means that their book collections are naturally fragmented. Solomons analyses the extant collection of Sabine Winn, made up of a handful of books, along with archival evidence of Winn’s role as an active book collector to suggest that book historians should take an expanded approach to women’s book collecting and ownership in the long eighteenth century. Together, Crowther, Potten and Solomons skillfully draw upon fragmentary evidence of women’s intellectual lives through material and paper traces in Nostell’s archives and through in situ book collections.

These reconsiderations of women’s power, as agents of their own emotional and intellectual lives and worlds, should not be taken at face value. As Hannah Cusworth reminds us in her consideration of Henrietta Howard, a cultural and artistic patron in her own right and the erstwhile mistress of King George II, elite historical women should not be uncritically absorbed into the canon of feminist history; the tendency towards feel-good, ‘girlboss’ popular reinterpretations of strong and authoritative women does not sit easily alongside the material evidence of their participation in, and considerable benefitting from, imperial exchange and (in Howard’s case) transatlantic slavery. Tracing the better and lesser known paradigms of Howard’s biography—as the King’s mistress, as a survivor of domestic abuse, and as an imperialist—Cusworth’s article skilfully shows how elite Georgian women utilised empire and slavery as means of accruing material benefits, wealth and power in a patriarchal society. Drawing on histories of material culture at Howard’s riverside villa, Marble Hill, this is a bold call to more fully interrogate the nuances of historical women’s lives, to pay attention to the historical, political and economic contexts in which they unfolded—and to resist the girlbossification of women’s history.

Just as country houses have provided spaces for women’s intellectual autonomy and exchange throughout history, so too have they functioned as domains for women’s political participation and diplomatic negotiations—despite, or perhaps because of, women’s disenfranchisement in much more public political arenas. Caroline McWilliams’s article examines how, during the interwar period, some of the early twentieth century’s most high-profile society women—often styled as unthreatening, glamorous ‘hostesses’—took advantage of the relative seclusion of their rural retreats to broker and cultivate their power as soft diplomats working behind the scenes of some of the most prominent state figureheads and political scandals of the 1930s. At Fort Belvedere in Surrey, in the years prior to and following the abdication of King Edward VIII and the constitutional crisis it ignited, McWilliams interrogates how the King’s lover Wallis Simpson transgressed social convention and fashioned herself as a de facto royal hostess. Elsewhere, McWilliams examines how Cliveden House in Berkshire became the ideal incubator for political intrigue, controversy, and (alleged) homegrown Nazism, presided over by Simpson’s contemporary and fellow American-born socialite Nancy Astor. These case studies illustrate Cusworth’s above point about the complexity of women’s history and the importance of resisting easy feminist canonisation and the assignation of moral good, for neither Simpson nor Astor—both controversial women who held racist and anti-Semitic views—can be cleanly positioned as ‘pioneering’. As such, McWilliams amply demonstrates that the elite hostesses of the 1930s were—intentionally or not, and in complex and often contradictory ways—radically disrupting the rose-tinted idealism and patriarchal symbolism of the British country house.

Country houses have often been framed in terms of their overtly heteropatriarchal histories and lineages, but they can also be read against and around this imposition, as rich and fertile sites for LGBTQ+ people’s lives and histories. In Helen Ritchie’s article on the studio studio ceramicist Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie’s romantic and artistic entanglements with other queer women, the family estate is remade as a space for alternative sexual and creative expression. Pleydell-Bouverie, Ritchie argues, leveraged the economic and material conditions of the Coleshill estate to gain freedom from—not consignment to—the societal duty and patrilineage that she boldly rejected, and her own discrete home on the estate became a space to cultivate queer domesticity and pleasure.

Despite the surge in critical and scholarly considerations of the country house in relation to queerness, ethnicity, empire and the indelible legacies of otherness that mark its outline, there have as yet been almost no interventions that place the house and its surrounding landscape in direct, unflinching dialogue with all of these facets of its history (and its present) simultaneously. At the conference itself, multidisciplinary artist and writer Babar Suleman offered a bold riposte to this marked absence with their short film HOW PERFECT IS THIS HOW BLESSED ARE WE, which sees the artist—as a person often identified as ‘queer’ and ‘Pakistani’—wandering through Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s landscaped gardens at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, addressing an absent or would-be lover. Suleman’s film offers a bold riposte to the novel conceit of unrequited love which has so often been nestled into the literary ecology of the country house, as well as a scathing critique of the ways in which the country house—as a physical place, an institution, and both a product and a mechanism of colonial, patriarchal and queerphobic violence—has excluded and othered queer people and people of colour. As Suleman notes in the photographic and creative commentary that concludes this special issue, the film and its accompanying texts are not site-specific—far from it, they reflect the inflections of privilege, exclusion, marginalisation, and histories of exploitation that are all but ubiquitous to these sites—but the use of personal narrative enables the artist to suffuse the landscape with their own felt and lived experience, to disrupt the meticulously constructed facade of the English rural idyll by articulating their own sense of place within and around its violent impositions. In reflecting on their own artistic practice and their relationality to the country house and its legacies of imperialism, queerphobia, and exploitation, Suleman’s article offers a powerful reflection on the unrequited love, the presence and ubiquitous absence, and the yearning and disappointment that dwell in the long shadows of gleaming stone walls and manicured hedges.

Collectively, the contributions that comprise this special issue disrupt, deconstruct and reimagine anew the horizons of feminist, queer, and decolonial historiographical work within and beyond the British country house. From eighteenth-century women’s intellectual pursuits to their weaponisation of their own power and privilege within the British empire, from defying the conventions of elitist heteropatriarchy to mapping out its contours and impositions, these articles offer a whole raft of new perspectives on how women and queer people have interacted with the kind of networked power that underpins and maintains the British country house. In this volume, women figure not merely passive subjects under patriarchy but rather, variously, as willing participants and promulgators, as forces of resistance and disruption, as controversial and problematic brokers thereof, and as agents of their own lives and worlds—within, against and in the margins of this overarching power structure. For all their diversity and range, these articles are linked by a common thread: they caution against the common impulse to uncritically singularise, or to ‘girlbossify’, particular historical figures and narratives, because history is messy and complex and morally ambiguous, and because women can be simultaneously oppressed in one respect and oppressor in another. There are voices and stories that are still missing, from both this special issue and from the intersecting disciplines it draws into dialogue—for example, trans and gender-nonconforming people’s lives and stories are still woefully underrepresented within broader social histories of the country house and its attendant communities, as are the histories of the working-class women and colonial subjects at home and in British-occupied territories who have kept many such estates operational. Singular gestures towards these gaps and silences are not enough, nor are small tranches of scholarship—however innovative and invaluable we know them to be. It is hoped, then, that this special issue will help to take forward pre-existing conversations and actions, and to spark entirely new ones, around feminist, (de)colonial, and LGBTQ+ histories of the British country house, foregrounding new critical lenses and methods for interrogating the rich counter-histories of this seat of power and patriarchy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy Brownson

Lucy Brownson is an archivist, feminist cultural organiser, and a Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, UCL. She recently completed her PhD, a feminist analysis of archival practices at the intersection of gender and class in the British country house, at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the Chatsworth House Trust. Lucy prioritises feminist, queer, and liberatory approaches to historical and archival work, particularly through her work as part of a grassroots community archive project in Sheffield.

Amy Solomons

Amy Solomons is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford. She recently completed her PhD, Fragmentary Traces: Female Readers in Family Libraries, 1700–1840, at the University of Liverpool in collaboration with the National Trust.

Notes

1 Caroline Bressey, ‘Contesting the Political Legacy of Slavery in England’s Country Houses: A Case Study of Kenwood House and Osborne House’, in Slavery and the British Country House, ed. Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013), 115.

2 Giles Worsley, England’s Lost Houses: From the Archives of Country Life (London: Aurum Press Ltd, 2011); Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgway, eds., The Country House and the Great War: Irish and British Experiences (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016).

3 Kate Retford, ‘“A family home and … not a museum”: Living With the Country House Art Collection’, Art and the Country House, November 20, 2020, https://www.artandthecountryhouse.com/essays/essays-index/a-family-home-and-not-a-museum-living-with-the-country-house-art-collection (accessed May 15, 2024).

4 Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh, The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House (London: Penguin, 1990), 1.

5 For a recent example of this well-trodden trope, see Rebecca Smith, ‘Here’s What’s Missing from the History of Rural Britain: The Hidden Stories of Women who Shaped it’, Guardian, August 30, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/30/rural-britain-women-forestry-farmer-coalminer-communities (accessed May 5, 2024).

6 Arguably one of the founding fathers of country house studies, Christopher Hussey’s architectural and art-historical analyses of country houses set the tone for the kind of educated paternalism of generations of scholarship that followed. See Christopher Hussey, English Country Houses, Vols I-III (Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1986 [1955]).

7 Susie West, ‘Social Space and the English Country House’, in Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain, ed. Sarah Tarlow and Susie West (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 103–22 (p. 106).

8 Oliver Cox, ‘From Power to Enslavement: Recent Perspectives on the Politics of Art Patronage and Display in the Country House’, Art and the Country House, November 20, 2020, https://artandthecountryhouse.com/essays/essays-index/from-power-to-enslavement-recent-perspectives-on-the-politics-of-art-patronage-and-display-in-the-country-house (accessed May 15, 2024).

9 Annabel L. Kim, ‘The Politics of Citation’, Diacritics 48, no. 3 (2020): 4–9 (p. 5).

10 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15–16.

11 Judith S. Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Pamela Horn, Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country House Society, 1830–1918 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1991).

12 Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Kim Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1998); Dana Arnold, The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998).

13 Cf. Kate Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Women and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella, ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources, 33,.no. 1–2 (2017): 1–10; Madeleine Pelling, ‘Collecting the World: Female Friendship and Domestic Craft at Bulstrode Park’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 41, no. 1 (2018): 101–120; Lizzie Rogers, ‘Curiosity and Collecting in the English Country House: A Space of Female Enlightenment 1680-1820’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2020); Tom Stammers, ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850–1920’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 31 (2021), https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.3347.

14 Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh, The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House (London: Penguin, 1990).

15 Ruth Larsen, ed, Maids and Mistresses: Celebrating 300 Years of Women and the Yorkshire Country House (York: Yorkshire Country House Partnership, 2004); Terence Dooley, Maeve O’Riordan, and Christopher Ridgway, eds, Women and the Country House in Ireland and Britain (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017).

16 University of York Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ‘Women and the British Country House, 1650–1900’, n.d., https://www.york.ac.uk/eighteenth-century-studies/conferences/pastconferences/womenandthebritishcountryhouse/ (accessed May 20, 2024).

17 National Trust, ‘Women and Power Podcast Series’, 2018, https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/virtual-visit/podcasts/women-and-power-series (accessed May 3, 2024); National Trust, ‘Challenging Histories Public Programme 2017–19’ (2019), https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/our-cause/history-heritage/challenging-histories-public-programme-2017-19 (accessed May 3, 2024).

18 National Trust, ‘History of Lacock Abbey’, 2023, https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/wiltshire/lacock/history-of-lacock-abbey (accessed on May 3, 2024); Julia Bush, ‘The Anti-Suffrage Movement’, British Library blog, March 5, 2018, https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/the-anti-suffrage-movement (accessed on May 3, 2024).

19 English Heritage, ‘Women in History’, 2023, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/women-in-history/ (accessed on May 3, 2024).

20 Chatsworth, ‘Linder’, 2018, https://www.chatsworth.org/visit-chatsworth/chatsworth-estate/art-archives/artists-at-chatsworth/linder/ (accessed on May 3, 2024); Historic Royal Palaces, ‘Women’s History at Our Palaces’, n.d., https://www.hrp.org.uk/womens-history-at-the-palaces/#gs.b6wmrh (accessed on May 3, 2024).

21 Miranda Kaufmann, English Heritage Properties 1600–1830 and Slavery Connections: A Report Undertaken to Mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: English Heritage and University of Oxford, 2007), https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/learn/research/english-heritage-properties-1600-1830-and-slavery-connections.pdf (accessed on May 3, 2024); Susanne Seymour and Sheryllynne Haggerty, Slavery Connections of Brodsworth Hall, 1600-c. 1830 (Nottingham: English Heritage and University of Nottingham, 2010), https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/learn/research/the-slavery-connections-of-brodsworth-hall.pdf (accessed on May 3, 2024); Seymour and Haggerty, Slavery Connections of Bolsover Castle, 1600-c. 1830 (Nottingham: English Heritage and University of Nottingham, 2010), https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/learn/research/the-slavery-connections-of-bolsover-castle.pdf (accessed on May 3, 2024); Laurence Brown, ‘The Slavery Connections of Northington Grange’ (Manchester: English Heritage and University of Manchester, 2010), https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/learn/research/the-slavery-connections-of-northington-grange.pdf, (accessed on May 3, 2024); Laurence Brown, The Slavery Connections of Marble Hill House (Manchester: English Heritage and University of Manchester, 2010), https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/learn/research/the-slavery-connections-of-marble-hill-house.pdf (accessed on May 3, 2024); Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann, eds, Slavery and the British Country House (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013).

22 Margot Finn and Kate Smith, eds, The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: UCL Press, 2018).

23 University College London Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, ‘Home’, 2024, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ (accessed on May 4, 2024); Susanna Rustin, ‘Interview: Jamaican Director of UCL’s Slavery Research Centre: British Racism is “clear and sharp”’, Guardian, September 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/22/jamaican-director-of-ucls-slavery-research-centre-british-racism-is-clear-and-sharp (accessed on May 4, 2024).

24 Sally-Anne Huxtable, Corinne Fowler, Christo Kefalas, and Emma Slocombe, eds, Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, 2020, https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/binaries/content/assets/website/national/pdf/colonialism-and-historic-slavery-report.pdf (accessed on May 4, 2024).

25 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), 119–22.

26 Katie Donington, ‘Whose Heritage? Slavery, Country Houses, and the “Culture Wars” in England’, in Cultural Heritage and Slavery: Perspectives from Europe, ed. Stephan Conerman et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 139–66.

27 Corinne Fowler, ed, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2020); Corinne Fowler, Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2024).

28 Jamie Grierson, ‘National Trust Reverses Decision Enforcing Use of Gay Pride Padges’, Guardian, August 5, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/05/national-trust-reverses-decision-on-gay-pride-badge (accessed May 4, 2024).

29 Matt Smith, ‘Queering the Historic House: Destabilizing Heteronormativity in the National Trust’, in Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experiences, Politics, Transgressions, ed. Brent Pilkey et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 105–20.

30 University of Leicester Research Centre for Museums & Galleries, ‘Prejudice & Pride: Exploring LGBTQ+ Histories at the National Trust’, n.d., https://le.ac.uk/rcmg/research-archive/prejudice-and-pride (accessed on May 5, 2024).

31 Alison Oram and Matt Cook, Prejudice & Pride: Celebrating LGBTQ Heritage (Swindon: National Trust, 2017).

32 Richard Sandell, Rachael Lennon, and Matt Smith, eds, Prejudice & Pride: LGBTQ Heritage and its Contemporary Implications (Leicester: RCMG, University of Leicester, 2018).

33 Historic England, ‘Pride of Place: England’s LGBTQ Heritage’, 2023, https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project (accessed on May 5, 2024); Historic England, ‘Pride of Place: Elite Homes and Royal Residences’ (2023) <https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/homes-and-domestic-spaces/elite-homes (accessed on May 5, 2024).

34 Alison Oram, ‘Going on an Outing: The Historic House and Queer Public History’, Rethinking History 15, no. 2 (2011), 189–207; Alison Oram, ‘Sexuality in Heterotopia: Time, Space and Love Between Women in the Historic House’, Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (2012), 533–51.

35 Oram, ‘Going on an Outing’, 196 and 199.

36 Cf. Fiona Brideoake, ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community’, Romanticism on the Net 36–37 (2004–05), https://ronjournal.org/articles/n36-37/extraordinary-female-affection-the-ladies-of-llangollen-and-the-endurance-of-queer-community/, (accessed on May 5, 2024); George E. Haggerty, ‘Queering Horace Walpole’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 46, no. 3 (2006), 543–62; Matthew M. Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020); Freya Gowrley. ‘Rethinking Strawberry Hill’, Art History 44, no. 5 (2021), 1077–80; Anthony Delaney, ‘Cotqueans: Queer Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2022).

37 Freya Gowrley, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840 (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

38 Oram, ‘Going on an Outing’, 193.

39 J. D. Hill and Andrew Meek, ‘AHRC-Funded Collaborative Studentships: Their Nature and Impact on Partners, Subject Areas and Students’, report commissioned for UKRI, May 2019, https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/AHRC-261121-CollaborativeStudentshipsNatureImpactPartnersSubjectAreasStudents.pdf (accessed May 5, 2024).

40 Shaun Evans and Elen Wyn Simpson, ‘Assessing the Impact of Collections-Based Collaboration across Archives and Academia: the Penrhyn Estate Archive’, Archives and Records 40, no. 1 (2019): 37–54 (pp. 41–42).