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- Title
Queer Intimacy: Speaking with the Dead in Eighteenth‐Century Britain.
- Authors
Herbert, Amanda E.
- Abstract
On 21 January 1716, a woman named Sarah Savage suffered a tremendous loss in the early and unexpected death of the person closest to her: her friend Jane Hunt. Hunt’s passing was so painful to Savage that she dreamt repeatedly of hearing her deceased friend’s voice, sharing conversations that were, to Savage’s sorrow, revealed as fantasy when she awoke. Savage craved Hunt’s company. She combed through Hunt’s papers and recalled moments that the two had shared. She began writing to her deceased friend, quoting Hunt from memory and then responding to the dead woman’s ideas as if the two confidants – one living and one dead – were having a conversation. And Savage referred to this practice quite consciously, explaining that it was through ‘Mrs. H’s Papers in which she being dead yet speaketh’. This article considers love and bereavement in eighteenth-century Britain. It provides a case-study of one middling-sort British woman, Sarah Henry Savage and demonstrates how, via her experiences of loss, she came to remember a deceased friend on the written page. Sarah Savage’s story provides us with a close, unparalleled view into the ways that eighteenth-century people thought and wrote about the deaths of those they loved. For while much excellent scholarly work has been done on ideologies and experiences of death and dying in the eighteenth century, we know relatively little about what happened to the survivors of loss after shrouds had been sewn, graves dug and funeral sermons were brought to a close. Sarah Savage’s texts help to reveal the texture and praxis of eighteenth-century relationships via a new paradigm: queer intimacy.
- Subjects
BEREAVEMENT; HISTORY of gay people; SAVAGE, Sarah; HUNT, Jane; SOCIAL conditions in Great Britain; GRIEF; INTIMACY (Psychology); GENDER role; DEAD; EIGHTEENTH century
- Publication
Gender & History, 2019, Vol 31, Issue 1, p25
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12370