Landscape, Letters and Female Landowners in the North: The Writings of Beatrix Heelis and Anne Lister

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This project will investigate the relationships between literature, the picturesque and agricultural landscapes depicted in the writings of Anne Lister and Beatrix Heelis (neé Potter). I will look at both women's conception of rural and agricultural spaces (and what those terms might mean) through their journals, diaries and letters from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I will explore how land is valued and experienced, with a literary-critical focus, interrogating the attitudes towards agency, authority and stewardship found in their works. On the face of it these two writers seem poles apart: Lister (1791-1840) was a minor (but socially ambitious) member of a Yorkshire landowning family; Heelis (1866-1943) was from an upper-middle-class London-based family. Yet both had a strong attachment to the landscape of Northern England and were fastidious recorders of detail; of everything from their working lives and financial interests, to their observations on the natural world.Looking at landscape and its associated art as a mode of viewing, I will be asking what we might be able to learn from Heelis and Lister's ideas of the picturesque, as well as studying their management of private land with public rights of way. These investigations of female stewardship ultimately pose as many questions as they might answer. For example, who is allowed to view these picturesque scenes and landscapes, and what histories of ownership and exploitation does this system of viewing rely upon? This project offers a new direction in nineteenth-century ecocritical scholarship: unearthing the minutiae of our past through the archives of two remarkable women, to inform our readings for the future. The diaries of Anne Lister offer a rich commentary on nineteenth-century land management and constitute a striking example of lesser-studied literature engaging with these issues. Lister is currently experiencing a surge in critical and popular interest in her sexuality, but no scholarship has yet explored her complex relationship to land: from sinking coal pits and managing tenant farmers, to her interest in landscape gardening. This thesis will provide a new reading of Lister's writings as narratives of place and space, mapping the remarkable degree of environmental and industrial change which occurred in the successive years between Lister, and the arrival of Heelis' writings a century later. There is little critical scholarship on Beatrix Heelis which focuses closely on her stewardship and management of land. This offers a timely opportunity to explore in further depth the extensive unpublished archival material which formed the basis of my masters dissertation on Heelis' conservationism. Studying the textual and topographical dichotomy of the two women's writing with a literary-critical focus facilitates a valuable comparative discourse, illuminating the value of diary-writing, obsessive journalistic detail and letter-based communication in nineteenth and twentieth-century land management more widely. Building on this work, I intend to show how both women can, and should be, foundational figures in an ever-evolving collage of compellingly paradoxical and unquestionably striking female landowners.