The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell by Lynn Staley (review)

Lynn Staley’s new book is an ambitious and eloquent study of the literary trope of the island garden as a foundational English lieu de mémoire, a place that, as Pierre Nora proposes in “La mémoire collective” (1978), can rationalize historical events as much as it can justify future ambitions. Consequently, the enclosed garden emerges in Staley’s book as a focal point for narrative fictions of Englishness from Bede to Marvell. Yet The Island Garden is not a literary history: instead, interlocking explorations of the garden open up new ways of thinking about enclosed, rural spaces as productive concepts for an emerging language of English collective identity. From the outset, the central node in Staley’s construct of “England’s language of place” is enclosure: “the island enclosed by the sea, the garden enclosed by its wall, the bride enclosed by her chastity” (3). This sense of being encircled by, yet isolated from, geography gave rise to a “language of England’s self-definition” that could summon the trope of the island garden in moments of great urgency, either to verbalize collective anxieties or to assert a providential trajectory.

Each of the book’s four long chapters is a case study for a given cluster of associations with the island garden trope. Chapter 1, “Writing in the Shadow of Bede: England, the Island Garden,” charts the island garden in insular historiography from its beginnings to the seventeenth century. Originally contrived by Gildas, the island garden was appropriated by Bede, whose expansion of this invented tradition inspired later users, from the leading twelfth-century historians to the post-Reformation Tudor propaganda machine. As the chronologically most capacious chapter—covering more than a millennium—the book’s opening section also serves as an introduction to the dual nature of the island garden: idyllic, yet permeable and therefore fragile. By contrast, the second chapter, “The Island Garden and the Anxieties of Enclosure,” connects fourteenth-century writings in Middle English with Marvell’s poetry. Self-absorbed and introspective, the idea of England at the heart of this chapter emerges as a rural landscape beset by sociopolitical turmoil. Langland’s peasant croft, the enclosure conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and, finally, Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” are the mainstays of this chapter. The Langlandian enclosed croft remains the focus of the subsequent chapter, “The Fourteenth Century and Place.” Here, Staley pits Langland’s landlocked agricultural garden against the expansive fiction of “the royal isle protected by St George” as promoted by Edward III’s administration. A clear strength of the two middle chapters is their openness to other, intersecting narratives, from the political coming of age of England’s parliament to the turbulence of the Reformation decades. Perhaps because of its narrow synchronic focus, Chapter 3 offers a concentrated and ultimately persuasive discussion of two competing vocabularies of authority. Given the energies expended by scholars, including Staley herself, on Ricardian and Lancastrian narratives in recent years, this perceptive analysis of Langland’s political language against the backdrop of Edward III’s policies will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between literature and power in the mid-fourteenth century. Chapter 4 engages with the book’s argument somewhat obliquely, and ventures off the beaten path to explore the single narrative of the apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders in four centuries of English writing. In many ways, this last chapter is also the most successful. Taking a step back from the politically charged contexts of the first three chapters permits Staley to weave together the garden trope, ideas of chastity, and literary constructs of gender in an exemplary manner.

A book that encompasses ten centuries of writing cannot exhaust all narrative possibilities, no matter how modestly it defines its subject. But in the case of The Island Garden not all omissions are equally justified...