Because how much privilege did they have, really?

[oursin]

Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian Weekend is miffed off at male columnists dissing on not just Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love but anyone (silly gurliez!!) who enjoys it.

Okay, yet again this is men crapping on anything that women dare to like that they do not.

But I also take exception, or at least have problems with, the blanket dismissal of the Mitfords as 'dead posh women' and “overvenerated, overrated and overprivileged women”.

Sure, they were posh, but how much privilege did they have on their own account?

I invoke Virginia Woolf and her deconstruction of the unfortunate position of the 'daughters of educated men' who did not get the education or the career possibilities or the likelihood of independence that fell to their brothers.

If - and I'm sure these men do not - one reads Decca's autobiographies as well as The Pursuit of Love one observes that the sisters were brought up in a state of haphazard education by a succession of ill-qualified governesses, had no money of their own, and no qualifications for earning any. Which was why Nancy took to her pen in the first place.

There is also a whole swathe of novels writ about the time the Mitford sisters were making their debuts about the awful situation of young women whose only destiny was to make it on the marriage market and their horrible fate if they failed to do this in a timely fashion with a suitable parti.

I note from when I was reading Kimberly Schutte, Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485-2000: An Open Elite? (2009) aristo daughters were about bloodline and kinship networks when they married, and it was a dog's life for the ones who did not marry.

While she was alluding to an even more elevated stratum within society - the female offspring of monarchs - Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon remarked: 'It is only in some special and esoteric sense that women are the protected sex'; 'to what a limited degree it is possible, without falling into the most savage irony, to describe women as the protected sex' as they were dispatched to and fro across nations, often at very young ages, to seal treaties by marrying men they had never met with whom they might not even have a language in common.

So I'm not persuaded being born posh necessarily connotes, for women, certain aspects of privilege that their male relatives would have. Except, perhaps, at the price of very strictly conforming to expectations (which socal conditions, post-Great War, might not have favoured).

Comments

[calimac]

I'm a male who's always been interested in the Mitford sisters, finding Diana and Unity intriguingly interesting rather than pure evil. But my way into this interest was my enthusiasm for the writings of the least typical of them all, Jessica.

[gillo]

With all the current stuff about the Beeb and Diana, it's worth noting that exactly the same holds true about her; dreadfully under-educated, moving within a very limited social circle, offered up as a means of continuing the family line of whomever she caught. She was not quite perceptive enough to grasp the reality of this, which was a pity for all concerned.

[hunningham]

Yes. Delafield's Thank Heaven Fasting. The protagonist is upper-class, privileged but if she doesn't marry - and marry well - she's nothing. And as the book progresses she (and her mother) become so truly desperate. Domestic horror. Delafield wrote another book which ended with a suicide and I couldn't read.

[oursin]

Somebody was recently mentioning somewhere a novel around the same period - I forget the title but I think it was by Ruby Ferguson - which starts with an old lady applying to a Distressed Gentlefolks charity practically starving, because she had been the daughter who never married and never had a proper place of her own.

[antisoppist]

I'm reading Anne De Courcy's The Fishing Fleet - Husband Hunting in the Raj, which is kind of billed as adventurous young women travelling the globe but it's still very clear that it's marriage or eternal doom if you've failed in doing the season or aren't posh enough to have had one.

[oursin]

This was prety much the upperclass equivalent of those Victorian schemes for sending 'surplus women' to The Colonies (mainly Australia and Canada, I think) - bringing racially suitable mates to places where there was a shortage....

[gwyneira]

Rachel Ferguson, _Alas Poor Lady_, I think? I got it from Persephone, but it was so depressing I actually couldn't get through it.

[oursin]

Sounds like it - I was thinking Ruby Ferguson because Lady Rose and Mrs Memmery I recall has similar theme of girls brought up with no prospect but the marriage market, though I think in that it was Eligible Match turns into Abusive Husband.

Good grief Persephone have brought some real downers back into print - Consequences must be Delafield's most depressing work, even more so than Thank Heaven Fasting. Also Streatfeild's Saplings I don't think I managed to finish.