Women under the Law in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Literary and Legal Campaign of Dorothea Du Bois

Abstract

Dorothea Du Bois’s (1728-74) authorial career was defined by her efforts to recover what she believed was her rightful position in society both in the eyes of the public and under the law. When she was a child, her father, the 6th Earl of Anglesey, abandoned her mother and declared that their marriage had been bigamous, rendering Du Bois illegitimate. Du Bois’s contrasting representations of her fraught family history in her writings, fictional and non-fictional, reflect her dynamic response to a series of legal disputes of the 1760s and 1770s regarding the earl’s true heir. Du Bois appeals to the law as an ideal moral arbiter, yet she reveals the system in Ireland to be animated by self-interested men for whom women’s suffering was irrelevant. Thus, while Du Bois’s motivation in writing was deeply personal, her works illuminate aspects of women’s experience neither her society nor the law would acknowledge.