star-anise:lurkinghistoric:history-of-fashion:1742 William Hogarth - Miss Mary EdwardsMiss Mary Edwa
star-anise:lurkinghistoric:history-of-fashion:1742 William Hogarth - Miss Mary EdwardsMiss Mary Edwards was an heiress who found herself trapped in a terrible marriage to a husband who was gambling away her fortune. In 18th-century Britain, divorce was very hard to obtain, while the law gave husbands control of their wives’ property. So she denied that they’d ever been married. She went back to the clergyman who married them, got the registry entry destroyed, and added an entry for the birth of her son, listing herself, his mother, as a spinster. This was scandalous: it made her a fallen woman, the socially-unacceptable mother of an illegitimate baby - but it put her back in control of her fortune, allowing her to get away from her husband and live independently with her child. And then she had herself painted by Hogarth, in a red dress with lace and diamonds.“At her right elbow enfolds a document carefully inscribed with lines from Elizabeth I’s speech to her troops as they set off to meet the Armada: “Do thou great Liberty inspire their Souls…and make their lives in their possession happy, or their deaths glorious in thy just defense.” With the bust of the same queen behind her, and a globe by her side, Miss Mary Edwards appears in full command of her place in the world.“ (source) -- source link
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