THE LIFE OF THE ENGLISH GENTLEwoman runs like a delicate thread through English social history. For such of her existence she had almost no legal rights and she rarely controlled any independent resources. Yet she has left her imprint on stately homes and manor houses up and down the country and her occupations, her tastes and accomplishments provide a charming and original perspective on our past.
Flora Fraser traces the career of the English gentlewoman from the early Tudor period to the present day - from the paragons of classical learning who dazzled the Court in the sixteenth century to the impoverished heroines of Barbara Pym’s novels whose happiness depends on entrapping the curates of North Kensington. In each period she looks at the domestic life and duties of the gentlewoman; her education (or lack of it); her tastes, fashions and pastimes, and her genuine achievements in such fields as needlework, water-colouring, music, writing and gardening. In each century, too, Flora Fraser highlights the few gentlewomen, such as Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Florence Nightingale, who managed to rise above the constraints of their social position to achieve national recognition.
Down the ages modesty and decorum remained the watchwords. We learn how gentlewomen of the eighteenth century took up landscape painting because it was considered more suitable than portraiture which - inevitably - involved an unladylike fixed stare. In the nineteenth century the innate modesty of the lady philanthropists led them to shelter behind all-male committees, no matter how feminine the charity. Even the alacrity with which women of the twentieth century took to the typewriter can be explained as being an extension of the gentlewoman’s traditional skills on keyboard musical instruments.
Flora Fraser’s widely-researched and entertaining text is full of fresh insights into the byways of history. The accompanying illustrations are superbly reproduced and range from the ravishing portraits of Holbein and Gainsborough to twentieth-century cartoons.