It All Started in a Garden

Moore examines the life of 18th century English artist and aristocrat Mary Delany, particularly with respect to her relations with other women. As an artist and writer, Delany’s work has often been overlooked due to focusing on “feminine” genres and media, creating domestic ornaments rather than works in more traditionally “serious” genres. She was known in particular for her highly-realistic botanical illustrations created as cut-paper collages that were renowned for their realism.

While women’s artistic accomplishments were typically interpreted as intended for male attention, Delany worked within a “self-conscious community of intimate women friends” both in London and Dublin, where her work can be viewed as intended for a female audience. Related to her botanical illustrations, she was a garden designer, with some of her projects intended to create intimate spaces for female eroticism.

Moore specifically notes that Delany’s life should not be interpreted in terms of modern “sexual orientations”. She had two marriages to men and two (or more) long-term partnerships with women, but assumptions about the sexual nature of any of those relationships should avoid preconceptions. In writing about marriage, Delany complained about a lack of love, while providing evidence that love and desire drove her relations with women. If her writings offer little concrete evidence for sexual relationships with women, Moore points out that 18th century understandings of romantic friendship did not treat sex as a crucial distinction in types of relations. Writing about such partnerships both in fiction and gossip could be forthright about a sexual component, while at the same time intensely emotional relationships were treated as ordinary, both by the participants and by their society.

After the death of her first husband left her in somewhat straitened circumstances, Delany lived with an aunt and then with a female friend with whom she traveled extensively. During this period, her correspondence expresses a preference for female friends over marriage, although she did remarry in her 40s. At that time she alternated between renovating their estate in Ireland and visiting in England, especially with Margaret Harley, the Duchess of Portland for whom she did various artistic projects. After her second husband’s death, Delany began living half of each year with the Duchess, when she made her botanical illustrations.

Delany’s extensive correspondence and memoirs show her to be a strong critic of marriage and supporter of women’s friendships. Despite the social and economic pressures for the former, the state had little appeal for her. In contrast, she wrote that only women provided “that happy union of hearts where mutual choice and mutual obligation make it the most perfect state of friendship.” Like others of the era, she envisioned the idea setting for female friendships as an idyllic rural landscape—a “fairy spot of ground”—and her garden designs strove to create such spaces.

In the Irish bluestocking circles that Delany and her first long-term companion Anne Donellan traveled in, various women appear as an ambiguous blend of rival and object of admiration. The interactions of these encounters with her partnership with Donellan provoked expressions of jealousy along with admiration, but among the friends she cataloged and ranked, Anne Donnellan was “so far above the rest as to be ‘out of the question’.” Her writings also document similar romantic friendships between others women in her circle. Although such relationships were considered ordinary, individual women might desire a level of discretion, with one of Delany’s associates noting that her own particular friend was hesitant to make an introduction to Delany, preferring to “preserve decorums” and worried about people commenting on their (the friend’s) relationship. So we can see that the public acceptance of women’s intimate friendships included a variety of attitudes and levels of self-consciousness.

Delany’s proto-feminism included political activism, as when she and a group of other aristocratic women protested being excluded from the public gallery of the House of Lords during debates over possible war with Spain.

Given her opinions, Delany’s second marriage might seem uncharacteristic, but she apparently found an arrangement with a man who supported her artistic endeavors, gave her a garden to work in, and didn’t interfere with her social activities and travels. (Neither of her marriages produced children and the second, at least, seems to have been companionable rather than passionate.)

The article continues with an extensive and detailed discussion of Delany’s garden design projects, especially the creation of a grotto at the Duchess of Portland’s estate which was a joint project between them. (I’m not summarizing this part, which also includes a discussion of 18th c politics.) The grotto, as well as another garden element, were decorated with seashells and was created as a private space for the two women.

The next section of the article goes into detail about the paper-mosaic botanical illustrations.