Margaret’s Choice: Negotiating Space, Class Identity, and Gender Ideologies in The Paston Letters

This article offers a reader response to the trope of the woman ensconced in her tower through the life and writings of Margaret Paston. The Pastons were avid consumers of romance, so the trope is one that Margaret would have known well. During her lifetime, the Pastons came to possess Caister Castle, and Margaret spent some time there. She found that with the increase in social status of owning a castle came the more restrictive movement necessitated by castle life. While living in her manor houses, Margaret made herself accessible to all manner of people, and manor house architecture itself expressed a gender ideology of equality. I argue that through her move from castle to manor house, Margaret was actively rejecting the higher status position of the upper aristocracy and the restrictive gender ideologies laid out by castle architecture and chose instead to remain part of the lower aristocracy, its gender ideology of greater female freedom witnessed by both the more equal accessibility of spaces within the manor house, and by Margaret’s relative ease of movement and accessibility there.