This innovative and richly illustrated study explores the role of the garden—in both literal and symbolic terms—in women’s lives during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. It is divided into four sections: “Moral Order: The School of Nature” considers how the garden was used as an educational tool, “The Visual Frame: Constructing a View” explores the different cultural lenses with which human societies at this time made sense of the natural world, “Personal Practice: Making Gardens Grow” offers close readings of instructional manuals and garden journals in order to revisit how tropes of garden engagement related to other aspects of women’s lives at this time, and “Narrative Strategies: Plotting the Garden” discusses the appearance of gardens in works of fiction from this era. Judith Page and Elise Smith’s study weaves together these varied histories in a way that offers new understandings of the gendered relationships that informed ideas about what English gardens meant at this time. Far from being “naturalized” spaces existing outside of sociopolitical realms, gardens in Women, Literature and the Domesticated Landscapeare situated as an integral space in which identity politics are negotiated. In this study, as the authors put it, the garden is explored “as a ground for both social and intellectual experimentation” (11).

In the opening section of the book, the authors demonstrate the conceptual connections that existed between child rearing and garden tending during this era, drawing on examples in which parents (typically mothers) and teachers were described as gardeners who had the responsibility of “tending and nurturing” children much as one would cultivate plants in the garden. For example, Mrs. Ellis’s The Pleasing Instructor (1850) notes that “just as a ‘careful gardener looks over his plants, and picks off the snails and grubs,’ so must the ‘kind parents or teachers’ protect children from their ‘many naughty ways and ill tempers’” (18). In a related context, children’s books from this historical period were often set in the garden, although as the authors point out, there is an important distinction to be made between texts that delve into the practical, material elements of gardening (addressed later in the book) and those that use the garden as a symbolic setting, one in which “lessons in virtue” could be situated. In these latter examples, piety, innocence, and an appreciation for “God’s creations” were especially emphasized.

The physical parameters of the garden also served an important symbolic role, with the garden gate or wall acting as a conceptual border between the perceived security and order of the home and the world beyond. In this context, the world “outside of the garden gate” becomes a liminal space in which concerns surrounding domesticity and gendered ideals are often troubled. The “daily reality of borders, limits and confinement” become juxtaposed with “the excitement of freedom and exploration” (43). In tales focusing on education and morality, this tension often serves a pedagogical purpose; as the authors note, “the adventurous child who moves beyond the prescribed limits, especially a girl, is held up as a cautionary example” (43).

Page and Smith’s discussions of the production and consumption of visual representations of plants, gardens, and landscapes serve as an important reminder of the ways in which even the most benign-seeming imagery is inextricably linked to dominant sociocultural ideals. For example, in a consideration of the “appropriateness” of sketching as a pastime for young women, they discuss how this form of art making frequently placed women in a “double bind” (82); sketching flowers and plants was thought to be especially suitable activity for women to engage in, yet, at the same time, the very nature of a sketch—its “unfinished” qualities, for example—served as a form of “proof” that women were not properly suited to other forms of art making. Clearly these simple-seeming botanical images were incredibly complex when it came to their cultural and social relevance.

Page and Smith further complicate the role of the arts in this context, offering examples of how women modified traditional pictorial tropes in ways that alluded to their expanding roles in English society at this time. For example, in their analysis of Maria Spilsbury’s paintings, they point out how at first glance these pictures appear to follow art historical conventions of domesticity and gender roles found in paintings by artists like George Morland and Thomas Gainsborough. In interior cottage scenes like Spilsbury’s Group Portrait at a Drawing Room Table, the figures are gathered in a tidy, if sparse, interior domestic space and are respectably dressed. It is not until we notice that it is a female figure positioned near the open window—a pictorial device that visually blends the garden with the interior of the cottage—that we begin to realize that Spilsbury is taking liberties with pictorial conventions; this symbolic placement within the composition alludes to the world beyond the domestic realm and was traditionally associated with male subjects as is the case in Morland’s art. Likewise, in their analysis of Spilsbury’s “cottage door” paintings, Page and Smith point out the subtle but important difference between these images and paintings on the same theme by Gainsborough. In Spilsbury’s paintings, women and children in front of the cottage are often shown engaged in tasks like sewing or intellectual pursuits like reading, instead of passively waiting for their father or husband to return. In these paintings the home is represented as a site of industrious engagement, and the authors of Women, Literature and the Domesticated Landscape point to the fact that these women and children are depicted outside their cottage door, a compositional device that underscores the significance of nature in unsettling these gendered assumptions.

The production of botanical images by women like Anna Maria Hussey further emphasized intellectual pursuits in nature. Hussey, like her contemporary Beatrix Potter, made close and careful pursuits of fungi in the English landscape during the nineteenth century. While women were encouraged to take an interest in the natural world during this era, these activities were expected to conform to accepted societal conventions. For instance, it was acceptable, as Page and Smith point out, to be a “lady hobbyist” or a “Sunday botanist,” but to publish a two-volume study like Illustrations of British Mycology (1847–55) situated Hussey “outside the norm in several ways” (108).

The discussion of garden manuals produced for women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also offers a rich ground from which to explore how issues of gender, domesticity, and identity were negotiated in this context. The garden served as a transitional space from the home to the rest of the world in a very literal and material sense. Instruction manuals on how to make use of these transitional spaces are, perhaps not surprisingly, laden with sociocultural conventions, and yet these publications also permitted and, at times, even fostered a reimagination of the domestic realm along gender lines. Page and Smith observe: “an ongoing debate about women’s desires, expectations and capabilities extended to the gardening manuals written by women” (163). Manuals such as Every Lady’s Guide to Her Own Greenhouse (1851), published the same year that Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace took the world by storm, emphasized how “feminine taste” could come together with botanical pursuits to “bridge interior and exterior spaces” (166).

Page and Smith have brought together many rich and varied sources—calendar imagery, fictional novels, scientific illustrations, landscape paintings, and garden manuals—to present a coherent argument about the cultural significance of the English garden in women’s lives at this time. This is a meticulously researched book that draws upon some often overlooked sources and perspectives on this topic. The range of material the authors draw on coupled with the interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks employed form a notable strength of this study. The subjects covered in this book make it appealing to a wide audience; however, it will be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of women’s history, art history, visual culture, garden history, and British material and cultural history.