Mary Delany and Her Circle, in the Museum and on the Page

Mary Granville Pendarves Delany is having another day in the sun. The diarist, botanical illustrator, and garden designer saw much of the eighteenth century (she lived from 1700 to 1788), and her connections to the worlds of court, fashion, natural history, art, and bluestocking culture make her a figure of perennial interest, yet she has repeatedly slipped from historical consciousness. Her diaries and correspondence, edited by her great-niece Lady Augusta Llanover and published in 1861–62, are often cited for their sharp, witty, and informed observations of eighteenth-century life. Despite having produced not just volumes of writing (including an unpublished novel) but also a chef d'oeuvre in the form of nearly one thousand paper-collage botanical illustrations, now one of the treasures of the British Museum, Delany is not as well known as comparable figures such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or Samuel Pepys. On her death, her writings and artwork went to nieces and nephews. In spite of two marriages, Mary Delany never had children; nor does it appear that she ever experienced pregnancy. The garden she designed at Delville in Glasnevin, outside Dublin, passed from the family and was destroyed completely in the 1950s to make room for a hospital. (The National Botanical Garden of Ireland is now at Glasnevin, surely partly in deference to her legacy.) Interest in Mary Delany resurfaced with the publication of her diaries in the 1860s and faded again with the century. Leslie Stephen wrote an excellent article about her in an early edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, prompted by the resurgence of interest in English women writers that marked early-twentiethcentury scholarship, introducing her to Virginia Woolf's modernist generation, who prized her satire, wit, and sexual frankness as an antidote to what they perceived as stifling Victorian mores. Several biographies and short, edited collections of her letters were published in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1980 Ruth Hayden, a Delany descendant, published the first full-length biography of Mary Delany. The book was lavishly illustrated with full-color plates of the botanical illustrations and other works, and Hayden was able to make use of her access to privately held materials, including a spectacularly embroidered court dress (Figure 1) and Delany's carved ivory tatting shuttle. Reissued in a second edition in 1992, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers remains one of the best-selling books in the British Museum bookshop. Hayden then curated an exhibition of Delany materials at the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1986. Yet when I published an article on Delany's botanical and garden designs in Eighteenth-Century Studies (39 [2005], 49–70), I was not able to cite a single contemporary study of her work. However, we may have reached a tipping point past which this fascinating figure will no longer periodically disappear. The spectacular exhibition Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, which opened September 24, 2009 at the Yale Center for British Art and closed May 1, 2010 at London's Sir John Soane's Museum, as well as the sumptuous accompanying catalogue, should keep Mary Granville Pendarves Delany in view for a long time to come.

The first exhibit to greet a visitor to the Yale show was a spectacular commentary on the relevance of Mary Delany's work for contemporary landscape art. A floral display by landscape architect Jason Siebenmorgen entitled Mrs. Delany's Flowers rose two stories above the entrance lobby to meet the level of the upstairs Delany exhibition. Consisting of a "theater" or staged display of plants in three tiers that beautifully recalled Delany's "auricula theater" of potted flowers at Delville, the design was surmounted by a curtain of preserved flowers of species depicted...