Born That Way: Asexuality and Kinship in “The History of Mrs Selvyn”

This article expands the critical account of queer orientations in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) to include not only sapphic eroticism but also asexuality. In the inset narrative “The History of Mrs Selvyn,” Scott focuses on Mrs Selvyn’s mother, Lady Emilia Reynolds, who is all too eager to punish herself for having conceived a child out of wedlock. I generate a threefold close reading of Emilia’s story, considering it along a spectrum of exemplarity, at one extreme, and feminist subversion, at the other. In between is a symptomatic reading, in which Scott uses the consequence of Emilia’s perverse moral scrupulousness—the fragmentation of her family—to indict the sexual double standard. In framing the narrative as the daughter’s story, I argue, Scott celebrates Harriot Selvyn’s freedom from sexual desire as the apotheosis of her mother’s renunciation of sexuality.