Failed friendship and the negotiation of exclusion in eighteenth-century polite society

The discourses on politeness and friendship in the eighteenth century made clear the expectations of correct social deportment by setting down a code of conduct to which genteel women were supposed to subscribe. Yet few female relationships were able to live up to this ideal. This chapter explores the intersection of exclusion and politeness within elite women’s sociability through an instance of failed friendship involving Mary Sharpe (later Beauvoir) and her female acquaintances Mary Hamilton (later Dickenson) and Elizabeth Carter. It examines two series of letters exchanged between Sharpe and Hamilton, and Carter and Hamilton, over an eleven-year period between March 1779 and January 1790. This unusual set of correspondence documents the breakdown of this connection and the exclusion and ostracism that resulted. This case study thus enables an exploration of the limits of what could be considered acceptable within the context of female friendship and sociability and shows that politeness was as much a force of division as it was for social unity