“Quiet & Clever Together”: Reassessing the Significance of Elite Women and the Literary Culture of the Country House

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines elite women’s agency and participation in the literary life of the country house, focusing on the circle that centred on Jemima Marchioness Grey and her husband, Philip Yorke, at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. The “Society at Wrest” was an exclusive group of close friends and family that included Grey’s childhood friends, Mary Gregory (née Grey) and Catherine Talbot, as well as her sisters-in-law, Elizabeth Anson and Margaret Heathcote (née Yorke). Most members of the Wrest Circle were careful about publishing their works, yet they found a cerebral escape in the shades of “Vacuna” – the name they affectionately gave to Wrest – as they created private literary compositions. Although Grey did not contribute to her friends’ literary compositions, she did, as hostess, play an invaluable role in providing a space at Wrest Park that facilitated and nurtured their intellectual and artistic endeavours. Disrupting the scholarly emphasis on public-facing female intellectuals, this article argues that for some elite women, the value of belonging to a coterie was not about attracting literary fame but rather having access to a permissive environment in which they could embark on private literary pursuits and belong to an exclusive and supportive intellectual network.