'Blest be this kind retreat': Eighteenth-century gardening and the novel

Eighteenth-century preachers, philosophers and gardeners use the traditional conceit of the "book of nature" in order to represent the natural world as a source of scientific and moral knowledge. This "book," however, required interpretation, and eighteenth-century gardeners and landscape architects were more than ready to undertake the task of explicating nature's hidden meanings. Gardens literalize the metaphorical textuality of the world we call "natural" and, at the same time, "naturalize" human culture by inscribing its image in nature's book.; Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women respond to the naturalization of social and sexual subordination in influential male-authored texts about gardening by re-imagining the garden as a site of supportive community and of longed-for privacy. This study examines the function of revisionary gardens in novels written by Margaret Cavendish, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Robinson Scott, Mary Hamilton, Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe. These writers offer alternative readings of the "book" of nature, readings that emphasize the value of relationships among women while exploring the pain women endure when they are reduced to the status of passive objects of cultivation or decorative figures in the landscape. I build on the work of contemporary landscape historians and feminist literary critics as well as on extensive archival research in order to document the important but long neglected contribution that women made to the eighteenth-century debate over "improvement" as a social and horticultural practice. In the process, I begin the important work of recovering the neglected horticultural context of eighteenth-century women's writing.