LATE IN HIS LIFE, Arthur confided to his niece that while he might ‘more or less’ like being praised and was ‘not very uncomfortable when being abused’, he experienced ‘moments of uneasiness when I am being explained’. He surely knew he would not escape it. He had resided too long among the tiny elite at the top of Britain's political and administrative power structures to escape attention and, as he might have predicted, professionalisation of the discipline of history ensured interpreters and reinterpreters of his life.

This study has attempted to add to a long conversation about the nature and construction of elites in Balfour's era by exploring the mental and emotional worlds of this imperial actor and some of the people with whom he shared his most private moments. The stories told here inevitably constitute experiments in reconstruction from the fragmentary and disparate sources available for different individuals. Whether, in attempting to study the inner landscapes of subjects, these clues reveal ‘true’ emotional states and senses of self as opposed to performed ones will always be an open question. As both the historian and the theorist of biography observe, in the end it is ‘impossible to differentiate the essence of the self from its manifestations’. Nevertheless, the diaries, letters, shared anecdotes and public expressions of George Pembroke, George Wyndham, Laura and Margot Tennant, Arthur Balfour and Mary Elcho show individuals deep in conversation with themselves, with trusted others and with the world around them. Through the work of many scholars over the past decades, these self-renderings can be at least partially contextualised in terms of the messages, constraints and opportunities facing the broadening British political elite in the fin de siècle epoch.

For these subjects, the years of early adulthood show individual identities powerfully shaped by expectations for gendered selves. The women studied here, and their friends, faced lives dominated and determined by the ‘marriage script’. They were not as overwhelmed by reproductive biology as their mothers had been, however, and given their resources they had more opportunities to move beyond domestic spaces and relationships. The increasingly diverse venues of political action gave them new opportunities for local influence and even leadership in national organisations such as the Primrose League or the suffragist movement.