Beth Cortese, Julie Hastrup-Markussen and Ross Deans McLachlan

To what extent were young heirs and 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 heirs and heiresses to examine the relationship between gender and wealth. The 1753 Marriage Act along with the 1837 Wills Act places restrictions on women’s personal agency. 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[1] and James Thompson has noted that “inheritance is enabling or authorizing for male protagonists and disabling for female protagonists.”[2] We thus want to explore the extent to which heiresses were owners and agents of their own property and whether they have more or less freedom in the eighteenth or nineteenth century inheritance plot. Complementing close-reading with computational methods, we study character agency to look into the relationship between gender, wealth and agency in eighteenth and nineteenth- century fiction. We compare the heiress’ agency with male heirs and female characters who are not heiresses to investigate how fiction reacts to legal developments restricting heiresses’ rights and whether heiresses face more restrictions on their freedom than other characters due to their fortune.

(in process for a special journal issue about inheritance)