Episode 79: The Thing About the Late Mr. Darcy's Steward
Overrun with moles? Worried about this year's crop yields? Thinking about conducting a comprehensive estate survey? We know exactly who you should call. This episode we cover the profession of estate steward as it existed in Austen's time and get into the many (seriously, many) responsibilities that the job entailed.
Selected Sources:
Adams, Samuel, and Sarah Adams. The Complete Servant: Being a Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of All Descriptions of Servants ... with Useful Receipts and Tables. London: Knight and Lacey, 1825.
Cortese, Beth. “Home Economics: Female Estate Managers in Long Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Society.” In At Home in the Eighteenth Century, by Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, 126–46. New York: Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429297267-6.
Hainsworth, D. R. “The Estate Steward.” In The Professions in Early Modern England, edited by Wilfrid Prest. Taylor & Francis, 1987.
———. “The Rise of the Estate Steward.” In Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward and His World in Later Stuart England, 6–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511983412.
Hey, David, ed. “Steward.” In The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History. Oxford University Press, 2009. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199532988.001.0001/acref-9780199532988-e-1735.
Houston, R. A. “Stewards and Other Estate Officials.” In Peasant Petitions: Social Relations and Economic Life on Landed Estates, 1600-1850, by R. A. Houston, 37–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394095_4.
Shields, Sarah. “‘An Old Maid in a House Is the Devil’: Single Women and Landed Estate Management in Eighteenth‐Century England.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 4 (December 2021): 423–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12807.
