Matriarchal Economies: Women Inheriting from Women in Eighteenth-Century Wills, Courts, and Fiction

Abstract

Despite the legal tradition of primogeniture and the laws of coverture in eighteenth-century England, women did in fact inherit and transmit money, land, and property. This essay illuminates female-to-female inheritance in wills, courts, and fiction. It examines cases of women inheriting money and property from other women in novels, such as in the work of Charlotte Smith and Charlotte Lennox, and also instances where they gift their patriarchal inheritances to other women, as depicted in the work of Frances Burney and others. We know that women willed property in the period, but are these fictional cases just imaginative fantasies of female economic independence and power? Utilizing regional case studies of wills and courts, this essay argues that women wielded their economic agency by directing portions of their wealth to deserving daughters, nieces, and friends. I then examine this practice in fiction, comparing the types of female relatives and friends involved in the transmission of property, the kinds of property willed and inherited, and the legal stipulations involved with inheritance in order to extend and complicate our understanding of women's roles in the transmission of property. My larger claim is that in both actual and fictional cases, women's financial legacies and bequests could successfully navigate the patriarchal economic structures that often disenfranchised them.