Beyond the park pale: elite women and the agricultural landscape, 1700-1830

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My book project, 'Beyond the Park Pale: elite women and the agricultural landscape, 1700-1830', investigates the role played by elite women in managing large agricultural estates, paying particular attention to their involvement in estate management, enclosure, landscaping and agricultural improvement. As Amy Erickson and others have recently demonstrated, female landowners controlled significant amounts of property as heiresses, widows and even occasionally as wives. Yet we know next to nothing about how they managed those parts of their estates which lay beyond the park pale; that is, the farms, woodlands, cottages and other property which lay outside the fence or bank encircling the park, pleasure grounds, gardens and house. The existing literature on elite women focuses almost exclusively on their role in household management, country house design and gardening, while histories of agricultural improvement and enclosure have largely ignored women as a category of landowners and improvers. This is all the more surprising, given the growing body of literature on aristocratic, gentle and middle class women's participation in the economy, politics and the anti-slavery movement, all arenas until recently seen largely as the preserve of men.Drawing on archival materials from across Britain, this project demonstrates that landowning women were actively involved in a bundle of related practices - including parliamentary enclosure, estate rationalisation, agricultural experimentation and major landscaping projects - which together remade the rural landscape in the century and a half after 1700. Thus, for example, Jane Ashley of Ashby St Ledgers (Northamptonshire) doggedly lobbied for the necessary Parliamentary Act and carefully calculated the profits she expected to make from enclosure, while her near-neighbour Elizabeth Prowse of Wicken experimented with new agricultural machinery and new crops on her recently enclosed estate. Further research on Scotland, Wales and Ireland - conducted under the AHRC fellowship - will investigate women's landownership and estate management outside England, providing comparative material with which to assess elite women's contribution to the making of the British landscape as a whole. In revealing these women's hidden histories, the book offers a carefully nuanced critique of recent thinking on women's lives and spaces. It argues that rather than universally retiring into domesticity in the eighteenth century, elite women actually played a key part in shaping agricultural landscapes. At the same time, it investigates how gender roles and identities nevertheless impacted upon the opportunities available to landowning women. In doing so, the book explores important questions about propertied women's role in Georgian society, as well as contributes to wider cultural debates about women's place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain.At the same time as conducting the new research and producing the monograph, the AHRC fellowship will include a programme of impact activities designed to maximise the public value of my research. This will include writing short articles for various newsletters and magazines, and making open-access materials available to the general public through the dedicated project website. I am also committed to developing additional knowledge exchange opportunities in relation to National Trust and English Heritage properties like Canons Ashby (Northamptonshire) and Wrest Park (Bedfordshire), both previously owned by landowning women I have researched on the project.