Read more about my current projects and research interests:

“Of this place I might have been mistress”: Jane Austen and the Real Historic House

A book project that explores the lives of women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century house in parallel with the cultural interpretation of these histories through the work of Jane Austen, as well as its presentation on screen through period drama.

Through the themes of female learning, empire and enslavement, houses as repositories and records of history, travel between town and country, and wealth and precarity, Of this place I might have been mistress offers an original look at how novels and screen adaptation have shaped our interaction with the fascinating and fraught histories of heritage sites.

I am fascinated by what we can read into Austen’s novels about the English country house, its use and the female experience during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also the implications of the strong connections forged between Austen’s fictional work and the realities of the English country house as experienced by thousands of visitors each year. I am incredibly interested of the effect of both novels and film adaptations on the public perception of the country house and its histories: does stepping through the door of Lyme Park put us in the place of Jennifer Ehle in 1995, or are our feet firmly planted in the real world of the former home of the Legh family? Do we feel we have visited Pemberley, or Lyme?

This project formed the basis of my PhD thesis, which was supported by a full scholarship by AHRC Heritage Consortium.

Relevant publications include a book chapter on the friendship between the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret, published September 2020; relevant media include a Hack History podcast on women on the Grand Tour, also September 2020, and a recent journal article on Eloise Bridgerton and Mary Bennet as thinking women in period drama.

Reading, libraries and book collecting

An area of research adjacent to the work undertaken in my PhD thesis is that of book collections and libraries, and the centrality of the written word and elite female reading practices to curiosity and experiences of education.

What do book catalogues, inventories and receipts tell us not only about what women were reading (and how this fits with prescriptions of genres for women and suggestions of how elite female educations should work), but about how they acquired and curated their collections?

This looks more deeply into source material surrounding country house and town house collections and the arrangement and usage of books in tandem with the arrangement and usage of objects as material and intellectual engagement with the Enlightenment.