Until recently it was widely believed that women in the nineteenth century had very little personal stake in land, and this view was reflected by many in the patrician ruling elite at the time. Lord Derby, speaking in 1871 about ‘the question of ownership of the soil’ at the annual meeting of the Manchester and Liverpool Agricultural Society, commented that in the 1861 Census 30,000 people had returned themselves under the heading of landowner, of whom 15,000 were women. Derby commented ‘We know that half of the land is not in female hands, and that probably not one-tenth of our landowners, if so many, are women.’ He slightly understated the case. In the long eighteenth century women were involved in the ownership of 10.3 per cent of land, as has been shown by McDonagh, and my own work on the nineteenth century is broadly confirming of this figure, as will be seen.

A majority of female landowners in the nineteenth century inherited their property. The majority of men who held large estates had usually inherited them too and often found that their management of their land was restricted by the requirements of dependent family members, marriage settlements, dowries and mortgages. It is therefore unclear whether the position of women landowners was really very different from that of men.

Until recently, it was also believed that until the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act married women could not hold land in their own right, and that only spinsters and widows could own land. However, this is an over-simplification. Prior to the act, the default legal position with regard to married women was determined by the common law principle of coverture, in which a married woman ceased to exist as a legal entity. Coverture resulted from the belief that by marriage the couple became ‘two peoples but one flesh’, automatically conferring the dominance of the husband and granting him full authority over his wife and her property. A married woman could own real property but she lost any independent control of the management of the property and the use of any rents and profits associated with it; these were all transferred to her husband. There was a safeguard to prevent a husband selling his wife's land in that the wife had to be independently interviewed by a lawyer and give her consent formally and alone.