Chat, Scribble and Scrawl: Women’s Letters in Britain, c1680-1820

In 1770 Jenny Brownsword wrote to her dear friend, Ann Hare. After some formulaic thanks and reports on people in common, Jenny paused the conversation. With a dash and a gap, she took a breath and then abruptly changed course: ‘now’, she says, ‘we must chat about invalids’.

This paper draws on the over 3000 letters used in my project, ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters, c1680-1820’. One of the distinctive and most valuable features of this curated corpus is the equal number of letters by men and women. This paper exploits this to explore the particular qualities of the letters by women. The distinctiveness of women’s eighteenth-century familiar letters has been variously described as ‘heterogeneousness’, ‘a touch parochial in [their] details’ and ‘like a national editorial’.

This paper addresses such characterisations through the large corpus, reflecting on the role that the topic of the body played in women’s letters. The exploration of women’s letters in this paper also seeks to recuperate women’s own ideas about the distinctive form of their letters. As familiar letters were widely regarded as conversation in eighteenth-century Britain, in what kind of conversation did women engage and claim for themselves in their letters and, perhaps, in person?