ABSTRACT
Describing herself as a prisoner in her own house, Anne Dormer complained of her husband’s efforts to cut her off from the company of nearby friends and neighbours. As she wrote to her sister in 1688, ‘a poore woman that lives in a thatched house when shee is ill or weary of her work can step into her Neigh[bour] and have some refreshment but I have none but what I find by thinking writing and reading’.1 Yet Anne’s isolation from her neighbours was not as great as she implied in this passage. In the end, Robert Dormer’s efforts to obliterate his wife’s social identity were a failure. Anne’s correspondence with her sister Lady Elizabeth Trumbull reveals that the ‘neighbourhood’ (and particularly its female complement) played a complex and important role in her married life. Anne’s neighbours served not only as companions in female sociability, but as co-conspirators in her struggles against her abusive husband. Even when local recusant families took opposing sides in the political struggles that launched the Glorious Revolution of 1689, Anne discovered that the bonds of neighbourly obligation were more important to her than partisan political affiliations.
