Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the world of eighteenth-century aristocratic women and the gardens they created, inhabited, visited, and imagined. It examines both the physical spaces created by women and the role of the garden (physical and imagined) in relation to female sociability, scandal, high politics, piety, the erotic, and the powerful but contradictory language of retirement with which women in the country were confronted. Combining a survey of cultural representations of the woman in the garden with case studies of four major women gardeners, it offers comprehensive readings of letters, journals and diaries, novels, poetry and physical landscape to demonstrate the complex cultural negotiations women undertook when they gardened on a large scale. Detailed case studies include Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle, the gardening neighbors Lady Caroline Holland and Lady Mary Coke, and the scandalous retirement of Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough.

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