ABSTRACT
The extent to which the story of Lady Derby and the Great Eastern Crisis has any wider relevance for the history of aristocratic women in the nineteenth century requires further investigation by historians. It requires them to forego the concentration on the 'bodice-ripper', 'carriages and crinoline' aspects of the female experience and to re-enter the world of Lady Glencora Palliser, who might well have been modelled on Lady Derby. Aristocratic women were legally and constitutionally excluded from the formal political process; political historians, and more recently gender historians, have written as though they were also absent from history itself. The tendency of both political and gender historians to isolate the experience of one sex at the expense of the other and present issues of gender relations as divorced from the political narrative has left a fractured picture of gender experiences in the mid-nineteenth century.
