Women in London, 1700 to 1760
For this network analysis, I filtered the Early Modern Letters Online database by letters originating from London between 1700 and 1760. Honestly, London was partly a practical choice. Other cities I looked at, like Amsterdam and Edinburgh, just didn’t have enough data to produce a meaningful network. London gave me 268 letters across three gender combinations: men writing to women, women writing to men, and women writing to women. The research question I wanted to explore was whether women in early eighteenth-century London were forming their own correspondence communities, or whether they were mostly functioning as connectors within networks that were still largely driven by men.
The data has some immediately interesting patterns. There are 142 unique individuals in the network, and 82 of them are women while only 60 are men. But the letter counts flip that picture a bit. Men wrote to women far more than women wrote to men (122 letters versus 65), while women-to-women correspondence accounts for 81 letters. So women were numerically dominant as nodes, but more often on the receiving end of correspondence than initiating it. The most connected person in the entire network is Anne of Hanover with 83 edges, which sounds impressive until you remember that her centrality mostly reflects her royal status attracting letters from across Europe rather than any intellectual network she was building herself.
That said, the network does reveal some genuinely active women correspondents. Mary Astell authored 18 letters in this dataset, making her one of the most prolific writers regardless of gender, and Mary Wortley Montagu also shows up as a well-connected node. But for most women in the network, the story is different. A lot of them appear with only one or two edges, often as recipients of letters from men like George Ballard (an antiquarian who spent his career documenting learned women) or John Locke. Women’s participation in this network was real, but structurally it was marginal for the majority of individuals. A handful of elite and aristocratic women anchored broad connections while most others appeared briefly at the edges.
One of the things network visualization does really well is show you that difference between centrality and participation in a way that’s hard to see when you’re just reading individual letters. Mapping these relationships across time makes visible the architecture of intellectual community in early modern London. It also shows pretty clearly that access to these networks wasn’t just about gender. Rank and wealth mattered just as much, which is why royal figures like Anne of Hanover or Caroline of Ansbach end up at the center while someone like Astell, a serious philosopher with no aristocratic backing, had to work a lot harder to maintain her correspondence network.
The biggest limitation of this kind of analysis is that the visualization can show you who was connected to whom and how often, but it can’t tell you what those letters actually said or what intellectual work they represented. Everything gets flattened into nodes and edges. I think the most useful way to think about a tool like Cytoscape is as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The network tells you where to look and what questions to ask, but you’d still need to go read the letters themselves to understand what was actually going on.