“If your daughters are inclined to love reading, do not check their Inclination”: Passing on knowledge and advice among elite women in eighteenth-century Scotland

Abstract

Clarissa Campbell-Orr, in a study of 'womanhood in England and France 1780-1920 called Wollstonecraft's Daughters, noted the lack of research on British aristocratic women, and especially of work on 'the role of aristocratic women in advancing their children's education' (13). The themes of this conference present me with the opportunity to make a modest step towards addressing this gap, in relation to the experience of some elite Scottish women. Familial letters and memoirs are my main sources. Studies have established the importance of letters, of female epistolary networks, for understanding how women circulated ideas and disseminated their knowledge; they often reveal female views on education, and women's reading practices and experience of reading in their circle. These accounts of personal, 'lived experience' are particularly valuable. Karen Glover, in her recent excellent study, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (2011), remarks that 'when it comes to lived experience, the historiography of women's education in eighteenth-century Britain is surprisingly thin (‘a virtual desert', to quote one recent commentator), and the Scottish situation was worse.' (Glover, p. 26). In letters, Scottish women record their experiences and disseminate knowledge based on that experience in the form of advice to younger women, often family members and daughters of friends.