Sue Bennett charts the relationship between women and gardens from Elizabethan times to the present day. This study is packed with portraits, garden plans, engravings, watercolours and photographs.

Told through the stories, journals and personal letters of the women of the powerful Fox family, Wives and Daughters is a window into the daily lives and experiences of women of eighteenth-century aristocratic society and the country houses that symbolized the power and taste of eighteenth-century Britain. Combining personality with historical setting and detail, Joanna Martin traces the lives of fifteen individual women in their four country houses through several generations, in society and at home. Taking an intimate and personal look at courtship, marriage, childbirth, education, houses and gardens, reading, hobbies, travel and health, this book is an engrossing account of woman's lives in this fascinating time.

From the early misfortunes of Eve, condemning her descendants to a dubious reputation for fruit management, to the acclaimed successes of plant breeders such as the eccentric Ellen Willmott who combined bankruptcy with iris breeding, the fortunes of the female gardener have been as varied as their roles. Telling the tales of the sixteenth-century housewife, who neatly sidestepped accusations of herbal witchcraft while working her plot, and the unconventional Ladies of Llangollen, who eloped together and created their gothic garden and many other women besides, A History of Women in the Garden showcases female horticulturists through the centuries. An enlightening and entertaining read that will allow the reader to gain fresh enthusiasm for even the most menial of garden tasks, and realise that hundreds of women have trod the garden path before.

It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks and mega-bookstores that, until very recently, books were luxury items. Those who could not afford to buy had to borrow, share, obtain secondhand, inherit, or listen to others reading. This book examines how people acquired and read books from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. Margaret Willes considers a selection of private and public libraries across the period—most of which have survived—showing the diversity of book owners and borrowers, from country-house aristocrats to modest farmers, from Regency ladies of leisure to working men and women. Exploring the collections of avid readers such as Samuel Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, Sir John Soane, Thomas Bewick, and Denis and Edna Healey, Margaret Willes also investigates the means by which books were sold, lending fascinating insights into the ways booksellers and publishers marketed their wares. For those who are interested in books and reading, and especially those who treasure books, this book and its bounty of illustrations will inform, entertain, and inspire.

From the golden age in English history to today s gardeners and designers, this volume recognizes women s contributions to gardening in Britain and around the worldspanning more than four centuries. Despite growing vegetables for their kitchens, tending herbs for their medicine cupboards, and teaching other women about the craft before agricultural schools officially existed, women have been mere footnotes in the horticultural annals for specimens collected abroad. These pioneers influence on the style of gardens in the present day is illustrated here in a style both accessible and scholarly. Presenting a rare bouquet, this collection shares the stories of more than 200 women who have been involved withgarden design, plant collecting, flower arranging, botanical art, garden writing, and education."

This is an insightful and enlightening look at the life and works of the internationally renowned English garden designer. Rosemary Verey was the last of the great English garden legends. Although she embraced gardening late in life, she quickly achieved international renown. She was the acknowledged apostle of the "English style," the "must have" adviser to the rich and famous - including Prince Charles and Elton John - and a wildly popular lecturer. She was a natural teacher who encouraged her fans to believe that they were fully capable of creating beautiful gardens while validating their quest for a native vernacular, She also re-introduced the English to their own gardening traditions. A demanding taskmaster and a relentless perfectionist, Rosemary Verey, in her life as in her work, was the very personification of the English garden style.

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

Green Retreats presents a lively and beautifully illustrated account of eighteenth-century women in their gardens, in the context of the larger history of their retirement from the world – whether willed or enforced – and of their engagement with the literature of gardening. Beginning with a survey of cultural representations of the woman in the garden, Stephen Bending goes on to tell the stories, through their letters, diaries and journals, of some extraordinary eighteenth-century women including Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle, the gardening neighbours Lady Caroline Holland and Lady Mary Coke, and Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough, renowned for her scandalous withdrawal from the social world. The emphasis on how gardens were used, as well as designed, allows the reader to rethink the place of women in the eighteenth century, and understand what was at stake for those who stepped beyond the flower garden and created their own landscapes.