4 - Eighteenth-century women and their norms of correctness

Summary

Introduction

When Horace Walpole (1717–97), the fourth Earl of Orford, discussed with a friend the alleged ‘female inaccuracy’ of constructions like between you and I, he was indulging in an incorrect allegation because men committed this grammatical ‘error’ just as often as women did (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994: 223). But the question also arises as to where women might have picked up the notion that prepositions are supposed to govern the accusative case. The education of the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), for instance, consisted of learning to read, write, draw and do needlework (Halsband 1969: 36), while women of her class would have been taught music as well. Acquiring a thorough grounding in Latin grammar, which would have enabled her to apply the rule to produce the grammatically correct between you and me, was considered more suitable for boys than for girls (Cohen 2006). For a woman from the other end of the social scale, Elizabeth Clift (1757–1818), none of these subjects, let alone Latin, would have been within easy reach: she came from what we would now call a lower-working-class family from Bodmin in Cornwall, and spent most her life as a servant. But she had at least learned to read and write, though at a very elementary level only, as her surviving letters testify (Austin 1991).