ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the relations between women, land, property and the law, paying particular attention to the routes by which women came to be landowners and the impact of legal doctrines on single, married and widowed women's property rights. It also assesses the significance of women as a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women's landownership using data extracted from the parliamentary enclosure awards. The book addresses women's contribution to a range of spaces beyond the purely agricultural, from country houses and landscape parks to estate villages, churches and schools. It also explores some of the ways that gender mattered, asking how propertied women viewed their own contributions to estate management and improvement, as well as how female landowners and improvers were represented by others.
