‘Epistolary Exchange: the Familiar Letter and the Female Botanist, 1760-1820’

Abstract

An investigation into women’s involvement with botany in the eighteenth century invariably leads to the culture of letters. The Duchess of Portland (1715-1785) 1 compiled notebooks on natural history, but it is her letters that allow us to uncover social networks and document the circulation of ideas involving botany and plant collecting. The Duchess’s ten-year correspondence on botany with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) is significant in illuminating the role of women in botanical culture. At this time, biological specimens were classified according to the taxonomic system of the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), 2 who himself exchanged letters on classification with a number of British women, notably the plant collector, Anna Blackburne (1726-93) (Wystrach 148-68). Consequently women were soon conversing in a new Linnaean language. It is no coincidence then that the two most widely-read introductions to Linnaean botany at this time were epistolary: Thomas Martyn’s Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady (1785), translated from Rousseau, and Priscilla Wakefield’s, An Introduction to Botany; in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796). 3 The rendering by Priscilla Wakefield (1751-1832) of Linnaeus in English rather than Latin meant that, for the first time, literate but unlearned young women gained access to botany through letters: Till of late years, [botany] has been confined to the circle of the learned, which may be attributed to those books that treated of it, being principally written in Latin: a difficulty that deterred many, particularly the female sex, from attempting to obtain the knowledge of a science, thus defended, as it were, from their approach. ( An Introduction to Botany ii) The readership for Linnaean texts in English fostered an audience that was inclusive of women and adaptations and translations of Linnaeus in English flourished, but this is not straightforward, since authors of scientific texts carefully modified their Linnaeanism for female readers as I will show. Botany books written by women in an informal “familiar format”, such as Wakefield’s Introduction , demonstrate that knowledge of botany at this time was feminised and polite (ii). Maria Jacson’s Botanical Dialogues (1797) and Harriet Beaufort’s Dialogues on Botany (1819) should perhaps be mentioned here alongside Sarah Mary and Elizabeth Fitton’s Conversations on Botany (1817) and Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Vegetable Physiology (1829). The familiar format embraced both dialogues and letters. The familiar letter in particular had a strong relationship to the conduct book or advice book, which had sprung from a long tradition of literature directed towards promoting ideal behaviour. Whilst I acknowledge the impact of this tradition on the development of botany books for young women, my emphasis will be on drawing out the emancipatory moments in science writing for girls, offering a textual reading which teases out the many ambiguities and contradictions involved in young women’s access to botanical science in the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was instrumental in shaping the feminisation of botany in England at this time due in part to Thomas Martyn’s translation of the Lettres