The Wrest circle: literary coteries and their influence on landscape design, 1740-1760
Keywords: country houses
Jemima Marchioness Grey
Bluestockings
literary coteries
garden history
travel writing
eighteenth-century
Wrest Park
Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke
women's history

This thesis examines the Wrest Circle to understand the connection between literary coteries and garden design in the mid-eighteenth century. The Wrest circle, named after Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, centred on Philip Yorke, later 2nd Earl of Hardwicke, and his wife, Jemima Marchioness Grey. Although many members of the Wrest circle held prominent public positions and engaged with the commercial literary world, significantly, they chose to keep their literary compositions within the remit of this inner circle. The coterie also had a significant role in the garden design at Wrest Park, creating the Mithraic Glade that referenced its private literary compositions. While visitors did come to see the gardens at Wrest, nobody beyond the inner circle could understand the full significance of the enigmatic altar and root-house. Critical attention has tended to focus on coteries as part of the public sphere, yet the Wrest circle problematises this understanding, not least since the coterie went to great lengths to make its literary works – and private references in the gardens at Wrest Park – inaccessible to outsiders. Thus, the question underpinning this thesis is how far, and in what ways, could an elite coterie retain exclusivity against a backdrop in which country houses – and coterie compositions themselves – were increasingly subsumed into the public sphere through domestic tourism and the print trade?
Key to understanding the inner circle is the correspondence between members. Not only do the letters allow some insight into the social dynamics between members and the personal references that appear in their literary compositions, but letters also provide a virtual space for intellectual engagement and discussion. This is particularly important in the instance of the female members of the coterie, who were careful not to advertise their literary or intellectual pursuits beyond their immediate close network of friends. While studies of women’s sociability and intellectual engagement in the eighteenth-century has tended to focus on ‘public’ intellectuals such as the Bluestocking circle, this thesis will demonstrate the way in which some elite women operated in an exclusive literary circle. Thus, this thesis also seeks to demonstrate that the women of the Wrest circle offer a particularly interesting example of women’s agency and participation in a country house coterie.
Chapter 1 introduces the members of the Wrest circle through their unpublished manuscript, Wrestiana, using the compositions to explore their academic interests, as well as understand the tensions within the group. Chapter 2 explores the academic and political context for the Athenian Letters, one of the coterie’s key texts that several members composed while they were at the University of Cambridge in the early 1740s. Chapter 3 examines the literary allusions in the gardens at Wrest Park in order to understand the different layers of interpretation that were available to visitors, depending on their proximity to the inner members of the circle and their compositions. Chapter 4 examines the coterie’s travel accounts to understand the way in which, through their exclusive scribal network, members engaged in social readings of the gardens that they visited. Ultimately, this thesis argues that understanding the connection between coterie compositions and garden design in the context of the country house offers the potential to reframe our understanding of the distinction between public and private.