‘My little Cane Sofa and the Bust of Sappho^;: Elizabeth Iremonger and the Female World of Book-Collecting

Abstract

The eighteenth century has long been recognized as the age of the bachelor and the spinster. In his pioneering study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Lawrence Stone comments that,

As a result of the shortage of suitable males, owing to the level of low nuptiality among younger sons and to the rise in the cost of marriage portions, there developed in the eighteenth century a new and trouble- some social phenomenon, the spinster lady who never married, whose numbers rose from under five per cent of all upper class girls in the sixteenth century to twenty to twenty five per cent in the eighteenth century.