Manuscripts Reveal Hidden Lives of 18th and 19th Century Women in New Exhibition

The everyday lives and creativity of women in the 18th and 19th centuries are the focus of a new exhibition at Chawton House in Hampshire.

HomeMade Histories explores how women recorded their experiences through letters, journals, scrapbooks, cookbooks, and artworks. These objects often provide the only surviving traces of their lives.

In official records, most women of the period appear only briefly in the formal moments of birth, marriage, and death. Happily, within the archives of Chawton House their voices endure in the pages they wrote, illustrated and preserved for family and friends. Through more than 50 manuscripts and handmade works the exhibition reveals a world of creativity and connection.

Among the highlights on display is an illustrated storybook created between the ages of eight and 12 by Mary Yelloly. Filled with watercolour landscapes and imagined adventures, Mary’s  Picture History of the Grenville Family shows a young mind reflecting and inventing her own world. 

“The manuscripts in our collection allow us to encounter women speaking in their own voices,” said curator Kim Simpson. “In letters, journals and scrapbooks we see friendships forming, ideas taking shape, and lives being recorded in ways that rarely appear in official histories.”

Letters reveal lively networks of friendship and intellectual exchange, including networking correspondence. Cookbooks compiled by neighbouring households such as the Knight family of Chawton House with their Jane Austen connections and the Hinton family at the Rectory show how generations of women preserved and adapted culinary knowledge.

Journals provide personal glimpses into travel and daily life, including Margaret Ashington’s honeymoon diary, complete with a witty sketch of fellow tourists encountered on her journey.

Creative practice also flourished in the professional sphere. The scrapbook of Victorian historian Agnes Strickland, best known for her influential 12-volume Queens of England, offers insight into the research and artistic experimentation behind her work. Elsewhere, botanical illustration guides by Mary Lawrance demonstrate commercial savvy in one of the rare fields in which women’s scientific interests were widely accepted.

The exhibition also showcases recent research by scholars into the collections which has uncovered intriguing new stories including Dr. Sophie Coulombeau’s evidence that annotations in the Austen–Knight family copy of The Baronetage may have been written by Fanny Knight, raising the possibility that Jane Austen took one of the most amusing caricatures within Persuasion from an example close to home.

HomeMade Histories is on display in the exhibition rooms at Chawton House and is included with house admission. The exhibition runs through 20 September.