‘Even their ashes’: female selfhood and same-sex love in the monument to Mary Kendall and Catherine Jones, c. 1712

This article analyses the joint monument to Mary Kendall and Lady Catherine Jones erected in Westminster Abbey after Kendall’s death in 1710 (and before Jones’s death thirty years later). The monument’s inscription refers to the ‘close Union and Friendship’ in which they lived and Kendall’s purported desire ‘That even their Ashes … Might not be divided’, making this a rare and emphatic public consecration of female same-sex love during the period. The monument features a life-size figure of a woman in contemporary dress, presented both in the round and – unusually – facing directly out towards the viewer. Although it appears beneath Kendall’s armorial device and above words that locate Kendall within her family of origin, the figure appears independent of the signs of familial status with which women were conventionally memorialized. Instead, we are offered an image of contemporary womanhood in and of itself, one that appears to have will, agency, and the character and piety ascribed to Kendall by the inscription below. As this article argues, this emphasis on a woman’s capacity for independent thought, action and moral depth is redolent of contemporary writings by the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell, whose circle included both the inscription’s author and Jones, a woman to whom Astell also had an intense amorous attachment. Through a close analysis of its materiality and form as well as the historical moment in which it was made, the monument is described as both an model of female self-realization and an allied validation of female same-sex love during a period in which women and their intimate relationships with each other were the subject of both Astell’s writings and the politicized panic around Queen Anne’s female companions.