Summary of Laura Thompson's Heiresses

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Mary Davies was born in London in 1665. She was the heiress to what would become some of the most valuable land in the world. She was married at the age of twelve to a Cheshire landowner nine years her senior.
#2 Mary’s great-great uncle, Hugh Audley, was a lawyer who made his fortune as a usurer. He died in 1662, and six months after the birth of his daughter, Mary, he left a muddled inheritance of unfinished building works and debts.
#3 The heiress-chasing business was beginning to get out of hand in the brutally carefree Restoration era. In 1665, the poet and libertine Lord Rochester absconded with an heiress named Elizabeth Malet.
#4 The best man was the one who helped facilitate the groom’s seizure of the bride. Kidnapping was a live threat, but it was also a deadly game. The heiress, often characterized as a plain girl, was a willing elopee; the man who snatched her was her perverse salvation.

Sujets

• Libertin
• Social history

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669357414
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Laura Thompson's Heiresses
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Mary Davies was born in London in 1665. She was the heiress to what would become some of the most valuable land in the world. She was married at the age of twelve to a Cheshire landowner nine years her senior.

#2

Mary’s great-great uncle, Hugh Audley, was a lawyer who made his fortune as a usurer. He died in 1662, and six months after the birth of his daughter, Mary, he left a muddled inheritance of unfinished building works and debts.

#3

The heiress-chasing business was beginning to get out of hand in the brutally carefree Restoration era. In 1665, the poet and libertine Lord Rochester absconded with an heiress named Elizabeth Malet.

#4

The best man was the one who helped facilitate the groom’s seizure of the bride. Kidnapping was a live threat, but it was also a deadly game. The heiress, often characterized as a plain girl, was a willing elopee; the man who snatched her was her perverse salvation.

#5

The Grosvenor family, who acquired their wealth through marriage to Mary Davies, were the first to make a bid on her behalf. They paid a deposit of £5,000, but could not raise the £3,000 of land demanded by Mrs Tregonwell.

#6

The obituary continued with an oblique nod to the role of the heiress in augmenting the fortunes of the aristocracy. It noted that the honors of some of the most distinguished families in the country are only derived from maternal ancestors.

#7

The life of Mary Davies spanned one of the most extraordinary periods in English history. She was born in 1632, five years after the restoration of the monarchy, and she died in 1730, when London was dealing with the aftermath of civil war, regicide, and the Cromwell interregnum.

#8

Margaret was a wealthy woman who had the ability to collect the best specialists and create a notable museum, open to the public. She was also a member of the Blue Stockings, a group that promoted the importance of education among women.

#9

The two women, Margaret, Duchess of Portland, and Mary Davies, were so alike in their inheritances. Margaret was protected in every way, but she also had inner resources. She had a curiosity that penetrated the blandness of privilege, and she looked beyond it.

#10

Mary was extremely lucky in her husband, Sir Thomas Grosvenor, with whom she was not obliged to live until the age of fifteen. She spent twenty years with him and gave birth to eight children. Thomas became an MP and the local mayor, and he owned horses that ran at Chester.

#11

The real difference between the two heiresses, Mary Davies and Margaret Portland, was that one did not use her brain, while the other delighted in its expansion. Mary saw only the limitations of being an heiress, and transcended them with the carelessness of a fugitive.

#12

Mary’s choices were being directed by others. She had never been anything but a pawn in other people’s games, and she had never learned the skill to play her own.

#13

Mary was attracted to Edward, and they began to court each other. However, the Fenwicks used her illness as a convenient means to get her married to Edward.

#14

Mary’s attempt to communicate with England was proof of her insanity. She escaped to her mother’s house on Millbank, and showed hysteria. The legitimacy of her distress was overlooked, and she became what she was said to be: a lunatic.

#15

The trial of Mary and Fenwick was a great lawyerly feast, but in every one of these courts the issue was the same: was Mary a) an unstable woman who should never have been allowed onto the streets, b) a lunatic woman who denied Fenwick because she had no memory of their marriage, or c) a devious woman who was pretending to be mad in order to extricate herself from the situation.

#16

After the death of her husband, Mary was forced to leave the manor she had lived in for years. The trauma of the intervening years had damaged her, but how beautifully this played into the hands of those who had sought to have her put away four years earlier.

#17

The story of Mary, an uber-heiress, was extreme in every way. But because she was blamed for her own misfortunes, which were caused by injustice, her story was absorbed into the narrative that portrayed the heiress as a mere item.

#18

The heiress-snatching was a popular crime in the early eighteenth century. It was an inversion of the lives of those who had little, and it seemed worth the monumental risk.

#19

The law did not apply offshore or in Scotland, and the clergy were quick to take advantage of that. The result was a boom in blacksmith weddings, which became all the rage.

#20

The term Gretna Green entered the English language as a signifier of larky licentiousness. It became a signifier of transgression, very English.

#21

There was another problem that legislation could not solve: rich women who chose to marry men from whom they should have run, screaming, before the real nightmare could begin.

#22

Stoney Bowles, Mary’s husband, was a sadist who enjoyed controlling his wife. He had a miserable sort of energy, which he deployed savagely. He forced Mary to write her Confessions, a memoir of indiscretions, which he then held as a blackmailing tool.

#23

Mary’s flight from Stoney was the result of eight years of abuse and torture. She had to flee her own house, and began divorce proceedings. Public opinion turned against her, and sided with Stoney.

#24

Mary’s marriage to Stoney Bowes was annulled in 1787, and she was forced to spend the next 23 years of her life in a debtors’ prison. She died in 1800.

#25

The heiress and her hunter was a fixture of popular culture during the Regency period. The next girl to inherit the title of richest heiress in the kingdom was provided with a veritable cornucopia of material by the cartoonists.

#26

In 1841, William Thackeray, then an impoverished magazine hack, spent part of the summer at the home of a Cambridge friend, John Bowes. There he learned the story that he would develop into his novel. Bowes was the illegitimate son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore; although unable to take the title, he owned the family’s English estates.