The recently-published book Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690-1790 argues that exploring the status of women specifically through a problematics of land yields profound insight into the extent to which the possibilities for female identity were grounded in the social codes governing the land, and thus in landscape. Other renditions of British women’s literary history uncover similar quandaries arising from contradictory codes of femininity; this book asserts the unique manifestation of these issues in and through the land. This talk features the storied “Queen of the Bluestockings”, Elizabeth Montagu.
Over a long lifetime, Montagu embraced various scholarly, sociable, commercial, and charitable activities, seeking to prove herself worthy of her fabulous wealth. As an industrialist who ran some of the nation’s most profitable coalmines, she signals the advent of capitalism, which presents a discordant element in her frequently pastoral self-image. I interpret her several attempts to landscape her collieries as a way to cleanse them of the social degradation that she fears may compromise her gentility. Such canny, strategic conduct turns landscape into a means of accommodating herself socially and ideologically to a changing economy in which she finds opportunities to negotiate her independence.
Nicolle Jordan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. She teaches British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on landscape and women’s writing. In addition to the authors featured in her recent monograph, Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690-1790 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2024), she has also published articles on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Maria Graham.
All welcome- this seminar is free to attend but booking is required.