Retirement and Disgrace: Women and Gardens in the Eighteenth Century

In the summer of 1760 Sarah Lennox could be found in the hay fields of Holland Park: dressed in her finest clothes, and with one eye on the turnpike road, she was a shepherdess in search of a prince. This was no pastoral daydream, however: the prince in question was the newly crowned George III and for a time, with the aid of her pastoral trappings, it seemed that she might succeed in becoming the queen of England. Ten years later, disgraced by an extra-marital affair and by the scandal of divorce, she had swapped a landscape of pastoral for a landscape of disgrace. Where before she had been a beautiful shepherdess waiting for her handsome prince, now she was a penitent waiting for absolution; and where once she had inhabited the splendid gardens of Holland Park, now, wearing plain clothes and a doleful expression, she was banished to an old manor house and country obscurity. Forced by her family to exchange the pastoral for the penitential, the career of Sarah Lennox in the 1760s traversed the extremes of how her society imagined a woman in a garden; at each extreme she knew only too well the conventions, expectations and costs. If this language of pastoral romance and shameful retirement, of shepherdesses, piety, and penitents, of old manor houses and Edenic gardens seems the fanciful stuff of fiction, the staple of poetic effusions, in short a literary world we should be careful to distinguish from lived experience, in the course of this book I argue instead that such models were never far from the leisured elite, that they were amongst the most powerful associations to come to mind, and that when we look to women gardeners in the eighteenth century, representations of retirement and disgrace, of pastoral, piety, and penitence are fundamental to the ways in which they imagine themselves and were in turn imaged by others. The very ubiquity of myths, visual traditions and narratives surrounding the garden was what in part enabled women to imagine and shape both their lives as individuals and their place in society; but those same myths and traditions could be cripplingly detrimental, and the weight of cultural expectations could be crushing. Providing first a survey of eighteenth-century women gardeners and of the figure of the woman in the garden in eighteenth-century literature, the books then offers a series of case studies in order to demonstrate shared concerns and striking disjunctions, and to argue that the conflicting accounts of female retirement were all too often problematic or debilitating when applied to women's experience. My aim is not to argue that when women created landscapes their actions and experiences were wholly different or even separate from those of men; it is, however, to argue that aspects of that experience--the ubiquitous eroticization of women's landscapes being only the most striking example--could be crucially distinct because of the gendered cultures of retirement with which men and women lived. My subjects, then, are those women who stepped beyond the boundaries of the flower garden, women with larger designs and greater ambitions, and at the heart of this book is women's engagement with the clash of cultural narratives, traditions and agenda surrounding the gardens in which they found themselves. Ranging from the high politics of Princess Augusta at Kew to the suburban depression of Mary Coke at Notting Hill, and from the Bluestocking garden of the urban intellectual Elizabeth Montagu to the scandalous retreat of Lady Luxborough in rural Warwickshire, this book uses detailed studies of individual gardeners to argue that women who created landscape gardens inevitably engaged with the eighteenth century's understandings of women's place in the world, their relationship with the public sphere, with domestic space, with piety, luxury, retirement and fame. If we turn to women's gardens,return us to and illuminate the larger culture of which they were a part.