Sexuality in heterotopia: Time, space and love between women in the historic house

Women's History Review

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 533-551

  Oram, Alison ^a  

^a LEEDS METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84866091811     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2012.658178     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. Calderdale Council (2008) Calderdale Libraries, Museums and Arts, Exhibitions and Events May to October 08 (Halifax: Calderdale Council), p. 3, repeated on p. 14. The nature of sexual identification has changed considerably over the past two hundred years and the term 'lesbian' is an anachronism. In using it occasionally to refer to their sexual relationships with other women, I am not suggesting that either woman would have recognised or claimed a lesbian sexual identity.
2. Victoria Glendinning (1983) Vita: the life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
3. National Trust (2009) The National Trust Handbook for Members and Visitors 2009 (London: National Trust), p. 153.
4. Michel Foucault (1986) Of Other Spaces, reprinted in Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998), The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge), p. 239.
5. Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson);
6. Leonore Davidoff (1990) The Family in Britain, in F. M. L. Thompson (Ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950. Vol. 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 71-130;
7. Mark Girouard (1978) Life in the English Country House: A social and architectural history (New Haven: Yale University Press).
8. Jane Hamlett (2009) The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History, Cultural and Social History, 6(1), pp. 97-107.
9. Also see Beth Lord (2006) Foucault's Museum: difference, representation, and genealogy, Museums and Society, 4(1), pp. 1-14.
10. Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge).
11. See Patrick Wright (1985) On Living in an Old Country: the national past in contemporary Britain (London: Verso);
12. R. Hewison (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline (London: Methuen);
13. and Raphael Samuel (1994) Theatres of History: past and present in contemporary culture (London: Verso).
14. Laurajane Smith (2006) Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge).
15. Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces', p. 241.
16. For an analysis of how country houses have come to be seen as part of the national heritage, especially in the post-war period, see Peter Mandler (1997) The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press).
17. Mandler, Stately Home, pp. 387-397.
18. See Gaby Porter (1988) Putting Your House in Order: representation of women and domestic life, in Robert Lumley (Ed.) The Museum Time Machine (London: Routledge), pp. 106-126;
19. and articles in Gender and History (1994) 6 (3);
20. Trevor Lummis & Jan Marsh (1990) The Woman's Domain: women and the English country house (London: Viking Penguin).
21. Ruth M. Larsen (Ed.) (2004) Maids and Mistresses: celebrating 300 years of women and the Yorkshire country house (Castle Howard: YCHP);
22. Gail Lee Dubrow & Jennifer Goodman (Eds) (2002) Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
23. For the influence of black history see Caroline Bressey (2009) The Legacies of 2007: remapping the black presence in Britain. Geography Compass, 3(3), pp. 903-917.
24. Robert Mills (2006) Queer is Here? Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender histories and public culture, History Workshop Journal, 62, pp. 253-263.
25. Richard Sandell (2007) Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference (London: Routledge), pp. 185-192.
26. Mary Evans (1999) Missing Persons: the impossibility of auto/biography (London: Routledge), pp. 4-22.
27. Nigel Nicolson (1973) Portrait of a Marriage (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson);
28. Helena Whitbread (Ed.) (1988) I Know My Own Heart: the diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1840) (London: Virago).
29. Angela Vanegas (2002) Representing Lesbians and Gay Men in British Social History Museums, in Richard Sandell (Ed.) Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), pp. 98-109.
30. Bella Dicks (2003) Culture on Display: the production of contemporary visitability (Maidenhead: Open University Press).
31. For a discussion of the readings of the historic house by lesbian and gay visitors, see Alison Oram (2011) Going on an Outing: the historic house and queer public history, Rethinking History, 15(2), pp. 189-207.
32. I was influenced in this reading by Annette Kuhn's use of heterotopia in relation to the 1930s experience of film musicals: Annette Kuhn (2002) An Everyday Magic: cinema and cultural memory (London: I. B. Tauris).
33. Michel De Certeau (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press).
34. Carolyn Steedman (2001) What a Rag Rug Means, in Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
35. Jill Liddington (1998) Female Fortune: land, gender and authority: the Anne Lister Diaries 1833-36 (London: Rivers Oram Press).
36. Jill Liddington (1996) Gender, Authority and Mining in an Industrial Landscape: Anne Lister 1971-1840, History Workshop Journal 42, pp. 59-86. Recent scholarship has shown that it was not uncommon for property-owning women to wield authority in their localities.
37. Kathryn Gleadle (2009) Borderline Citizens: women, gender and political culture in Britain, 1815-1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 4.
38. For the early works see Jill Liddington (2003) Nature's Domain: Anne Lister and the landscape of desire (Hebden Bridge: Pennine Pens).
39. Peter Brears (1978) John Harper at Shibden - a gothick lady and her architect, York Historian, 2, pp. 56-64.
40. For the influence of the Romantic and gothic styles in this period see Girouard, English Country House, pp. 226-230, 242-244.
41. Anna Clark (1996) Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity, Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, pp. 23-50.
42. Martha Vicinus (2004) Intimate Friends: women who loved women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: Chicago University Press), pp. 18-28.
43. Anira Rowanchild (2000) 'Everything done for effect': Georgic, Gothic and picturesque in Anne Lister's self-production, Women's Writing, 7(1), pp. 89-104.
44. Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart.
45. R. A. Innes & Pauline Millward (n. d., c. 1971) Shibden Hall Families, in Shibden Hall Halifax (Halifax: Calderdale Leisure Services).
46. Laurajane Smith argues that this lack of signage is typical of country houses, where the middle class visitor is expected to have the cultural capital to recognise the architecture and furnishings. Smith, Uses of Heritage, p. 126.
47. Calderdale, Welcome Guide to Shibden Hall, Introduction, n. p.
48. Liddington, Female Fortune, p. 4.
49. Rosalind Westwood & Pete Brown (1998) Shibden Hall Halifax: a visitor's guide (Halifax: Calderdale Council Leisure Services Department), see especially pp. 8-11, 17-19.
50. Feminist historians have extensively unpicked the notion of family: Leonore Davidoff et al. (1999) The Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy (Harlow: Longman);
51. Katherine Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England, 1914-60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
52. For how single people of the gentry class organised their living arrangements see Amanda Vickery (2009) Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press), chs 2, 7 and 8.
53. Westwood and Brown, Visitor's Guide, p. 11. The same edition is still currently on sale.
54. Adam Nicolson (2008) Sissinghurst (London: The National Trust), p. 2.
55. Glendinning, Vita, pp. 165-172.
56. Vita Sackville-West (1941) English Country Houses (London: Collins), p. 10.
57. Nigel Nicolson (1984, first published 1978) Sissinghurst Castle Garden (London: The National Trust), p. 10.
58. Until feminist literary studies reappraised it, Orlando was treated as an odd and minor part of Woolf's oeuvre: S. Raitt (1993) Vita and Virginia: the work and friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press). The book was described by Nigel Nicolson as the 'the longest and most charming love-letter in literature'
59. Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, p. 202.
60. Paula Weideger (1994) Gilding the Acorn: behind the façade of the National Trust (London: Simon & Schuster).
61. For a succinct appraisal of histories of the National Trust, see John Walton (1996) The National Trust centenary: official and unofficial histories, Local Historian, 26, pp. 80-88.
62. Weideger, Gilding the Acorn, pp. 341-360.
63. Ruth Taylor (2006) The National Trust, in Alison Hems & Marion Blockley (Eds) Heritage Interpretation (London: Routledge), pp. 97-109.
64. Adam Nicolson (2008) Sissinghurst: an unfinished history (London: Harper Collins);
65. For Foucault's discussion of gardens as heterotopias, see 'Of Other Spaces', pp. 241-242.
66. Nigel Nicolson (1984 [1978]), Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, p. 14.
67. Affrica Taylor (1997) A Queer Geography, in Andy Medhurst & Sally Munt (Eds) Lesbian and Gay Studies: a critical introduction (London: Cassell), p. 8.