3 - Bluestocking gardens
Elizabeth Montagu at Sandleford
from Part II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
When I am sitting in my garden, I can add myself to the whole map of created beings. I consider some insects feeding on a flower which like them was call'd forth by the rising sun, & whose race & task of life will end with its decline. My imagination can travel on, till it gets to those planets whose revolution round the sun is many years in accomplishing…My hopes, fears, desires, interests, are all lost in the vast ocean of infinity & Eternity. Dare I find fault with the form or fashion of any thing that relates to me in the presence of him before whom all modes & forms pass away, & to whose duration all the systems of Worlds beyond World, & Suns beyond suns, are more transient than the flowers of our parterres are to us. From these thoughts I draw a philosophick peace & tranquillity for what atom in this stupendous system shall presume to find fault with its place & destination.
Elizabeth Montagu to the Earl of Bath, Sandleford, 8 August 1762Drawing on the wealth of Elizabeth Montagu's manuscript correspondence from the 1740s to the end of the century, this chapter explores the place of the garden and the role of retirement in the life of one of the eighteenth century's most public of women. The vast bulk of Montagu's manuscript letters are now housed in the Huntington Library, and it is on these manuscripts that I focus in particular. While many of Montagu's letters have appeared in print – notably in collections of the early nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century – those printed collections are inevitably partial and often misleading as to Montagu's range of interests and daily concerns. Notably, they tend to play down accounts of the garden in favour of Bluestocking sociability and literary interests; and crucially – though perhaps inevitably – they tend to elide Montagu's frequent, but telling, repetitions.
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- Green RetreatsWomen, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture, pp. 135 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013