Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800): Literary Landscaper

This talk centres on the property ownership of Montagu, who was born in York at Treasurer’s House. It draws from the final chapter of Nicolle Jordan’s book Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690-1790 (November 2024), which assesses the ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’ in relation to her landowning practices.

Montagu’s status as a prolific letter writer, coal magnate, and extremely wealthy landowner, who undertook vast estate improvements in collaboration with Capability Brown, makes her a unique illustration of how landscape and women’s independence are inextricably linked in the eighteenth century. In carefully modulated engagement with her agricultural and industrial properties, Montagu emerges in her letters as an astute landowner of consummate propriety whose epistolary self-construction nevertheless exposes both the costs and the benefits for a woman thus staking her identity in the rural landscape.