Behind Closed Doors by Amanda Vickery

Author:Amanda Vickery [Vickery, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300154535
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2009-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Meeting her aunt the same evening going downstairs to dinner sporting ‘a malicious insulting smile’, Gertrude was goaded into insult, denouncing her aunt as ‘an ill-Designing Woman’, thereby inciting another shouting match on the stairs, dignity abandoned.22

Savile appreciated how ‘scandellous to our observing Neighbours’ their disputes must appear. Friends reported that ‘our Quarrell was the Town talk’, ‘the subject of discoarse’ as far away as Derbyshire. The resolution of these ‘domestick affairs’ fell to Sir George Savile as head of the family. Gertrude demanded residential independence, but the Saviles insisted on deferential dependence. ‘My sentence as to that was to choose to live with Mother with a formall respect and civility, or – Perdition.’ Nonetheless, the baronet established Gertrude's entitlement to the coach, proposing a formal system of advance booking the coach in writing. Sir George Savile's temporising counsel was that both mother and daughter ‘keep up to form and cerrimony in all things relating to each other’.23 Propriety restored, the crisis subsided.

This sensible compromise might have ended Savile's quest for emancipation from the family were it not for a twist of fortune worthy of a Victorian novel. Miraculously, in 1730 Savile was left a sizeable property near Newcastle by a cousin. At a stroke, she was delivered from both subordination and dependency. At the deaths of her mother and her sister, the maternal property came into her hands too. At last, at age 40, she became mistress of her own household. At first, she leased a house in Nottinghamshire near Rufford Abbey, the ancestral seat, returning each London season to lodgings in Greek Street. At her brother's death, she established herself permanently in the metropolis, buying her own town house in Great Russell Street, for £240, her last home. Savile had achieved her cherished ambition, so long discountenanced by her family, independence without marriage.

Savile may have been unusually gloomy, but she was hardly unique. The mortification of spinsters in the households of kin can be found from the nobility to the middling. In 1660 Samuel Pepys allowed his sister Paulina to come into his household ‘not as a sister but as a servant’; consequently, ‘I do not let her sit at table with me’, in spatial reinforcement of her inferiority. In 1761, in Horsham in Sussex, the shopkeeper Sarah Hurst protested to her diary: ‘My father very angry with me for nothing … Oh independence thou greatest blessing this world affords when shall I enjoy thee? Liberty the choicest gift of heaven how I sigh for thee.’ While in 1790 Elizabeth Furniss of Bawtry near Doncaster moaned: ‘Few people ever met with more cruelty from a father than I have for whilst he made me a Home the frequent unmerited reproaches and Constant ill humours I met with from him made it a Miserable one.’24 Essentially, Furniss's complaint was the same as Savile's, that a home where one is perpetually made to feel one's inferiority is no home at all.

The shackles of domestic dependence were especially rankling when a parent remarried, introducing an alien authority figure.

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