Gender, Wealth and Agency in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860)

Julie Hastrup-Markussen

To what extent were young heiresses independent agents in control of their inheritance? Did their fortune make them targets for fortune-hunters? This paper will focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century novels that feature single and married heiresses to examine the relationship between women and wealth. In the case of heiresses under the age of 21 guardians were responsible for protecting the heiress’ fortune and her virtue from fortune-hunters. The above restrictions both limit and protect women’s financial agency, transferring this agency to parental and marital guardians. Eileen Spring in Law, Land and Family has observed that heiresses are transmitters of inheritance (p. 13). Fiction questions and explores the extent to which heiresses were owners and agents of their own property. Complementing close-reading with computational methods, we study character agency to explore the relationship between wealth and agency. Focusing on Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) we compare fictional heiresses across two centuries. This preliminary comparison will be part of a larger literary historical study of heiresses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.