Affairs of State: Aristocratic Women and the Politics of Influence

Abstract

This closing chapter returns to my opening image, an aristocratic woman writer sitting at a table with the Prime Minster and a middle-class novelist, to place it in the context of politics in its most specifically institutional sense. I consider the influence of aristocratic women on the political life of Victorian Britain, and the vocabularies and literary tropes that this influence generated. The figure of the ambitious and Machiavellian aristocratic woman allowed men of both upper-and middle-classes to gender and dispel pre-Reform spectres of interested motivation and illegitimate influence. This character type facilitated the defining of a male body politic in a language of disinterested conviction and legitimate authority. Even women of other classes could validate their modes of public involvement in opposition to the negative images of upper-class members of their sex. Upper-class women writers, however, were hardly impervious to the political energies generated by Reform; they could engage with these deleterious representations of influence, drawing from them literary tropes through which to articulate their own distinctive political identities and aspirations.KeywordsMale RelativeWoman WriterLiterary NationPersonal ConvictionParty AllegianceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.