Clandestine Marriage ─ Botany and Romantic Culture

Kelley (English, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) argues that botany was the area Romantic writers used to present practical, figurative, and philosophical claims about nature, and analyzes how plants were represented in scientific, literary, artistic, and material cultures during the Romantic era. She describes debates about taxonomy and morphology in England and Europe between 1750 and 150, especially discussions about the adequacy of the Linnaean system and nomenclature, debates about the species category, the development of the Natural System, and evolutionary possibilities formulated by Charles Darwin, then considers the public and private reception of botany in the era through letters, parodies, and periodicals circulated among Quaker botanists, their prominence in illustrated print culture, and the poetic botany of Erasmus Darwin's "Loves of the Plants." She examines female botanical figures and botanists, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Barbauld, female characters whose interest in natural history caused social or marital problems, Maria Jackson's books that challenged Linnaean principles, the botanical caricaturist of pressed flowers identified as Lady Jane Grey of Groby, the paper mosaic botanicals of Mrs. Delany, the botanical drawings of Frances Beaufort Edgeworth, and the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith. She looks at the works of poet John Clare; Caribbean representations, such as Abbe Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's analysis of global and colonial commerce in L'Histoire des deux Indes and Shani Mootoo's novel Cereus Blooms at Night; Indian botanical art and William Jones, William Roxburgh, and other British East India Company officials who commissioned it and studied Indian plants; Percy Shelley's poems; readings of plant nature in the writings of Goethe and Hegel; and James Bateman's monograph The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Theresa M. Kelley is the Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Reinventing Allegory.