The Lady’s Last Stake: Camilla and the Female Gambler

Abstract

While I argued in Chapter 3 that the participation of Frances Burney’s eponymous heroine Cecilia in private credit relationships was structurally similar to the sublime gambling of her guardian Harrel, I also noted briefly that her participation in the economy was circumscribed by her gender, most notably once she is married and realizes that her husband is legally liable for any debt she contracts. Margot Finn argues that historians’ articulation of the “common law practice of coverture — which subsumed a married woman’s legal and financial identity under that of her husband” emphasizes “strict limits on the formal economic activities of English women” but does not capture the complexity of the financial activities of married women in the eighteenth century (“Women” 704). Married women’s commercial consumption was widely perceived in the eighteenth century to be a driving engine of the expanding economy, for better or worse depending on the critic, yet married women could not contract debts in their own name. Married women entered into credit relationships in their husbands’ names technically in order to supply their households; the extent to which husbands or wives could be held accountable for such purchases was frequently contested in court, as Finn’s analysis shows.