Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (review)

Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, the diarist, botanical illustrator, and garden designer, saw most 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 1861-1862, 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 Despite having produced not just volumes of writing (including an unpublished novel) but also a chef d'oeuvre in the form of nearly one thousand paper-collage botanical illustrations, now one of the treasures of the British Museum,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 in 1788, her writings and artwork went to nieces and nephews; in spite of two marriages, she never had children nor even seems to have experienced pregnancy. The garden she designed at Delville in Glasnevin, outside Dublin, passed outside 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, partly in deference to her legacy.)

Interest in 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 DNB, prompted by the resurgence of interest in English women writers that marked early twentieth-century scholarship, introducing her to VirginiaWoolf'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 Delany. The book was lavishly illustrated with full-color plates of the botanical illustrations and other works, since Hayden was able to make use of her access to privately held materials, such as a spectacularly embroidered court dress 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 (ECS, 2005), I was not able to cite a single contemporary study of her work. However, we may now 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 23, 2009, at the Yale Center for British Art and closed May 10, 2010, at London's Sir John Soane's Museum, as well as the sumptuous accompanying catalogue, should keep her in view for a long time.

The exhibition catalogue is an indispensable reference. Stuffed with nearly 300 gorgeous full-color illustrations, it is a volume any book lover, gardenist, or art appreciator would want to own for its beauty alone. Eighteenth-century aficionados in particular, however, will appreciate the meticulous attributions, Index, and Bibliography, which allow the book to be used as a Who's Who of Delany's slice of eighteenth-century court culture. The fourteen essays collected here, including a valuable introduction by each of the curators, report expert research on many aspects of Delany's achievements, from fashion to natural history and painting to zoology. Unfortunately nothing was included about her biting, satirical literary voice. Her insights about marriage and friendship in particular rank with some of the best-known feminist writing of the period and commentary on this aspect of her work would have been a welcome addition to the book.

Of particular interest to scholars are two Appendices, a Concordance identifying Delany's botanical illustrations...