Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 by Judith W. Page, Elise L. Smith (review)

This beautiful, extensively researched book confers order, clarity, and critical insight on the ubiquity of gardens in women’s lives and creative work from 1780 to 1870. In an apparently seamless collaboration—Judith W. Page is a scholar of English and gender studies, Elise L. Smith an art historian—the authors examine verbal and visual representations of the “domestic, or domesticated, landscape,” glossed as “nature that is near at hand, tended, cultured, and nurtured” (132). This designation, like “home landscape,” encompasses such activities as plant study, genre painting, and the writing of didactic children’s tales set in gardens, as well as gardening in the narrowest sense (1). The book explores many forms of representation and practice, parsing the “complex signification” of actual and metaphorical gardens and offering nuanced readings in a rich array of genres: fiction; journals; memoirs; book illustration; sketching; periodicals; and instructional guides on gardening, botany, and the visual arts (19). Seventy-two sumptuous illustrations complement the lucid and graceful writing.

Page and Smith approach gardens as cultural texts, sites of horticultural and personal growth that express and instill behavioral expectations and social and moral codes. Focusing mainly on middle-class women, the authors calibrate the degrees to which home gardens underscored norms of domesticity, industry, modesty, and devotion to others. But they argue as well that the home landscape provided women and girls a locus of agency and self-cultivation, a “zone for experimentation” where domestic virtues and skills moved outward from the home’s interior into a liminal space, between the private and public realms, in which to experience knowledge-building, religious contemplation, creativity, and play (7). Nineteenth-century gardens, it seems, were good to think with. In the absence of a real garden, advised the Child’s Companion in 1829, you can have “a garden of your mind,” as long as it is orderly and under control (qtd. in Page and Smith 24).

Among Victorian works, the book examines the use of garden spaces in Margaret Oliphant’s Carlingford novels, in which the town’s genteel walled gardens and humbler plots open to the streets become markers of class, gender, and taste. Page and Smith situate Miss Marjoribanks (1866) within garden discourse that insists on neatness and trimness; the appearance and management (or neglect) of gardens signify the social positions of Lucilla Marjoribanks and the less privileged characters to whom she extends charity or contempt. We read that botanical artist Anna Maria Hussey negotiated tensions between her serious study of fungi and her upper-class female readers’ expectations of refinement, sentiment, and poetic language in her Illustrations of British Mycology (1847–55). Seeking to finesse competing demands, the authors contend, Hussey “domesticates science” by locating her readers “in the feminized realm of the home” (108), while for Hussey herself, “the home-bower becomes a place as much of intellectual curiosity as of repose” (109).

Among the strengths of Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape is that its sheer variety of authors, artists, and works allows us to imagine non-canonical figures in dialogue with canonical ones, fiction with science, poetry with praxis. While impressive, the scope does not overwhelm, due to helpful chapter introductions, subheadings, and summaries. Coherence emerges through the unifying concern with gender and the trope of the home landscape as common ground for diverse achievements by creative women. The book traces brilliantly the “transitional motifs” of fences, gates, windows, arbors, and bowers, illuminating ways in which these border devices can suggest constraint and exploration, shelter and exclusion, the meanings of inside and outside (9). Incisively elucidated are cultural anxieties implied by garden writers’ debates on the function and value of feminine accomplishments, on incipient women’s professionalism in science and art, and on the fine line between “suitable exercise” and “unseemly romping” (39), not to mention...