Writing from the Asylum: Martha Shakespear Lloyd at the Linguistic Limits of eighteenth-Century Femininity

Recently rediscovered among family papers, the letters of Martha Lloyd (1756–1830) “of Aston, near Oswestry, Shropshire” are a rare example of first-person female testimony from a Georgian asylum. The fashionably educated Miss Martha Shakespear had been upwardly socially mobile, the daughter of an East London ropemaker and West India merchant who in 1779 became the wife of John Robert Lloyd Esq. of the Shropshire gentry. By 1787 she was a patient in a private madhouse run by the pre-eminent Monros, physicians to Bedlam. Unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate her release from the asylum and her reunion with her husband, her letters display the education that had initially attracted him. French, if regarded by some contemporaries as “showy” and “shallow”, was evidently integral to her sense of status and of self: her use of it in letters to her husband and son constructs her as both an attractive woman and a good mother.

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