“The Spirit of Contradiction”: Ownership and Irony in Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting.

This article analyzes Jane Collier’s 1753 satirical manual *An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting*, focusing on its critique of eighteenth-century British legal and social ideologies of absolute property, which granted husbands and employers exclusive dominion over property while dispossessing married women, servants, and unmarried dependents of proprietary agency. Collier’s satire exposes the paradoxical and ironic nature of these property relations, showing how disenfranchised groups—such as wives, servants, and unmarried women—engage in emotional torment as a form of “affective coverture,” reclaiming agency through ironic performances of ownership over emotions and relationships. The article situates Collier’s work within broader eighteenth-century legal contexts, highlighting how emotional labor and manipulation function as subversive tactics amid legal and social constraints, and argues that Collier envisions ironic torment as a shared, affective mode of resistance that both reflects and undermines the absolutist property regime.