Peculiar circumstances and tender relations: Educational properties in Lennox, Burney, and Inchbald (Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald)

This dissertation, "Peculiar Circumstances and Tender Relations: Educational Properties in Lennox, Burney, and Inchbald," draws on John Locke's political and pedagogical theories to uncover an unexpected link between issues of property and of education in the eighteenth-century British novel. Locke in the 1690s proposed an education for a "gentleman's son" that was largely a socialization into property relations. I chart how Locke's property-based pedagogy was recast in the works of women writers in the eighteenth century, adapted to form an educational program not for the gentleman's son, but for his daughter. Drawing on the recent revisionist historiography of Eileen Spring, I contend that this new pedagogical approach arose in response to the circumscription of well-born women's property rights over the course of the century. The chapters of the dissertation track the evolving ideologies of ownership by focusing on three novels of education featuring disowned heiresses: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), and Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791).; This analysis joins two revolutions that have been separately documented by historians including J. G. A. Pocock, C. B. MacPherson, John Brewer and Janet Todd: the transition to modern conceptions of property and the rethinking of educational norms. It elucidates the interplay between these revolutions, redeeming one of the cliches of eighteenth-century literature---the story of the girl's "proper education." I argue ultimately that in these works a "proper education" was imagined to teach the well-born young woman her vexed, illogical, and evolving relationship to property.