New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond, by Alicia Carroll

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond by Alicia Carroll Susan David Bernstein (bio) New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond, by Alicia Carroll; pp. xii + 242. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019, $59.50, $29.50 paper. The New Woman of the late nineteenth century typically engages with city life and its opportunities for professional work in offices or, on the stage or the page, for social experimentation—like women living alone or loving each other. Alicia Carroll's New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond uncovers an array of women cultivating new ways of working and living together through the manual labor of alternative agriculture, often far from urban centers. Take, for example, Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey's A French Garden in England: A Record of the Successes and Failures of a First Year of Intensive Culture (1909). The book details growing gardens throughout the year in raised beds along with the French companion planting of varieties of vegetables nestled together. Cockerell and Nussey celebrate homegrown produce in their "alternative agricultural experiment within a wider cultural and material exercise in growing local food in England" (61). Carroll claims that Cockerell and Nussey "apply the Arts and Crafts ideals of simplification and ecological interdependence to reinvent the material foundation of the rural household and shape a queer ecology based upon an ethic of partnership between professional women and the land" (23). Today this experiment in sustainability is a familiar paradigm, a practice opposing monocultural food production. Emphasizing the partnerships between Cockerell and Nussey and between the women and their environment, Carroll extols "this assemblage of human and more-than-human companions, along with their wills and appetites … a horizontal rather than vertical relationship" (64). This particular example, the crux of Carroll's second chapter, suggests a post-New-Woman garden utopia, along with drawings of their manual labor in action, of hands inserting seedlings into the soil, where "female partnership on the land and in the home" suggests "a new form of relationality" (75). Not only does Carroll extend "what we know about the New Woman on the ground as well as on the page" by exploring a range of women's work and art with plants, but she also opens up the "limited archive of British nature writing" (83). Cockerell's godmother was Octavia Hill, who promoted the urban open space movement, which is important to the backstory of what Carroll calls "the now often forgotten principle of early green socialism; 'England should feed her own people'" (1). Carroll's study combines the Woman Question with the Land Question to investigate the utopian "New Life" agricultural communities that women designed and practiced, and about which women wrote and made visual art (2). Beginning with late-Victorian New Women writers including Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mary de Morgan, Carroll shows the imbrication of plants and people in a green vision of English women environmentalists. With her interest in narratives that treasure "the ecological entanglements of all living things," Carroll relies on the new materialist perspectives of Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett (69). Alaimo's idea of "trans-corporeality" involves the interplay between organisms including humans, other animals, and plants, as well as toxic inorganic materials (5). Along with Alaimo's trans-corporeality, Carroll draws on Bennett's "entanglement" [End Page 161] of organic and inorganic materials (21), and especially the agency of plants and soil and climate as nonhuman "actants" (42). New Woman Ecologies joins in recent discussions of Victorian ecocriticism, as pioneered by Jesse Oak Taylor's field-defining The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) and Elizabeth Hope Chang's Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century (2019); both are from the University of Virginia Press series "Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism," as is this project. Whereas Chang examines the global reach of plants through a framework of imperialism and the environment, and Taylor pursues urban pollution and the history of anthropogenic climate change, Carroll frames her...