In July 2004, an exhibition entitled ‘Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers’ opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The subject of the exhibition was the watercolours painted by these travellers during their sojourn abroad. These women were not professional artists but ‘amateurs’, artists who operated in the sphere of leisure, not of commerce. The pictures, ranging from the ‘Ruins of Palmyra’ and ‘Four Portrait Heads of Afghan Leaders’ to ‘The Cactus Grove, near Algiers’ and botanical illustrations of Brazilian plants, were presented as art and as unique documents by the exhibition catalogue. This struck me, because the reason Jane Digby, Emily Eden, Maria Graham, and Barbara Bodichon were able to produce this art was that they had learned to paint watercolours, the ‘ideal medium for women’, as an accomplishment, a necessary part of their education as young ladies. Yet, such ‘female accomplishments’ were often disparaged at the time and have been treated in the historiography as a metonym for the dire state of female education in the period. This may explain why the term ‘accomplishment’ is not mentioned in the exhibition nor in its excellent catalogue.

In the long eighteenth century, accomplishments were debated by educationists, moralists, men and women of letters and artists, in essays, novels, poems, educational treatises as well as in visual culture. Most frequently, they were contested, variously held to be showy, superficial, trifling, mindless, and useless though sometimes useful, while the figure of the female performing accomplishments was often the object of satire or ridicule in the period's literature and satirical prints. Yet, the pervasiveness of accomplishments in debates of the time suggests that they must have performed important cultural work. In this chapter I propose to identify what this cultural work was, by using a different approach to the accomplishments. I argue that accomplishments must be studied not just individually but as different expressions of one overarching discourse, just like they were understood to be in the texts and discourses of the period. ‘No doubt the whole of the accomplishments have some general principles…’ declared Mudie at the start of the chapter on ‘Accomplishment’ in The Complete Governess.