Were women able to inherit peerages and estates in Edwardian era England?

by TheHistoryofCats

Suppose a member of the Peerage has two sons. The elder son only has daughters, while the younger son has no children at all. If the elder son predeceases his father, who inherits? The granddaughters or their uncle? I'm sorry if this question seems trivial; a work of fiction I recently consumed just left me wondering about the eventual fates of the characters.

mimicofmodes

It was theoretically possible for someone to apply to the crown to allow their daughter to inherit their title, but on the whole, peerages traveled on the male line. If you're a peer in this period and you only have daughters, from the perspective of your dukedom/earldom/etc. it's the same as not having any children at all: it will go to your brother, and if you don't have a brother, it will go to your cousin (if he's the son of your paternal uncle), and if you don't have a cousin ... it may go extinct.

Regarding property, by this time the "strict settlement" that outlined how money and land was to be conveyed to later generations was significantly weakened. I have several past answers on settlements:

Understanding inheritance in the early 1800's

In English law, you were not allowed to create a perpetual entail - to say "this property can only be inherited on the male line, forever and ever". But by the late seventeenth century, large landholders came up with a way around this by giving their sons a life interest in their estates but ultimately leaving them in trust to their (often not yet even born) grandsons; when the grandsons came of age or married and wanted an income, their fathers would then have them agree to a settlement in which they would also take a life interest in the estates when their fathers died and would leave them whole to their own sons or other specific collateral male heirs in exchange for an income during their fathers' lifetimes. The process would usually repeat in each generation and was usually agreeable for both parties.

In addition to laying out the disposition of the estate, settlements would usually detail what the other siblings would inherit (or really, be given by the son after the father died) as well as what the widow would receive and what rents he could collect; when the settlement was made at the time of the marriage, the bride's father and his lawyers would also be heavily involved to decide what her jointure would be (that is, what amount of money would devolve on her when she was widowed) and how much pin money she would be given regularly, as well as how her children apart from the oldest son would inherit - although these could be increased in the final will if the man had saved a personal estate in his adult life. Property that was held, given, bought, or sold outside of a settlement was owned "in fee" or "in fee simple" and the owner could do what they liked with it, but property that was settled couldn't be mortgaged, couldn't be split up and sold, and couldn't (generally) be inherited mostly by a female descendant who would marry and take it out of the family.

Given the laws of primogeniture in the UK, where the eldest son in a family inherited all property, how exactly did younger sons and daughters of aristocratic families support themselves when a parent died?

Victorian Era Women's Rights in Estate Ownership through Wills/Contracts

In the late nineteenth century, several acts were passed to take the teeth out of the settlement and give the life tenant much more power over the property he was technically just stewarding for the next generation (or his brother, or cousin ...), and by the Edwardian period it was not necessarily the case that a peer's property would be held this way. So any property that's held in fee simple - not settled - could be left by the elder son to his daughters, or by the peer to his granddaughters, which means that they could inherit an estate of some kind. But there was a lot of social pressure to continue to make sure that the next title-holder would be suitably wealthy, so it's unlikely that even if the peer had a lot of property in fee simple he'd leave the bulk of it to them, particularly since upper-class women would be expected to marry upper-class men who could provide for them. Leaving them decent dowries would be more likely.