Land ownership—and engagement with land more generally—constituted a crucial dimension of female independence in eighteenth-century Britain. Because political citizenship was restricted to male property owners, women could not wield political power in the way propertied men did. Given its foundational sociopolitical function, land necessarily generated copious writing that vested it with considerable aesthetic and economic value. Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690–1790 situates these issues in relation to the historical transformation of landscape under emergent capitalism.
Here we speak with Prolific Ground’s author Nicolle Jordan about women writers, landownership, and proximity to power in eighteenth-century Britain.
BUP: In your introduction, you mention myriad ways that land and landscapes can be understood: as a piece of beautiful scenery but also as a representation of complex social dynamics. How were the writers—specifically writers of underrepresented, underprivileged, and oppressed groups—impacting thinking at the time?
Jordan: The underrepresented, underprivileged, and oppressed groups my book engages with are women, but there are significant qualifications to be made. The four women I write about had economic privilege relative to most of the British population. Readers especially interested in the underprivileged might focus on chapter four, “Elizabeth Montagu, Bluestocking Landscaper.” This chapter addresses the dependents on her estates—including laborers and servants—whom she oppressed, in particular James Woodhouse, her estate steward, now known as the “shoemaker poet.” The tension between mistress and underling proves remarkable in part because the gender asymmetry in their relationship deviates from a more familiar scenario of gender inequality.
My book makes a fundamental distinction between land (a material object) and landscape (a social construct). The women I write about were excluded from political participation in the most traditional sense; they could not hold office. But as privileged women who were, shall we say, “power-adjacent,” they wrote about landownership in ways that demonstrate a profound grasp of its socio-political power. I argue that landscape involves a complex set of social dynamics, and this claim hinges upon the assertion that these women writers exercised an indirect and elusive but nonetheless important form of agency when they wrote about land.
BUP: As you note in your book, married women could not own land at the time. How does that association relate to the built connection and interpretation of the women writers whose work you examine?
Jordan: About ninety percent of landowners were men, and my book is premised on the claim that this vastly unequal distribution of landownership has complex origins and profound social consequences. To oversimplify, people acquired a social position based on their relationship to a rural landed estate; they were owners or dependents. Certain aspects of my book focus on literary representations of women who endure hardship as dependents on land they do not own. But I also explore, by way of contrast, a utopian novel by Sarah Scott that involves a kind of thought experiment: how might genteel women live differently if they owned the estate where they live?
Broadly speaking, I’m interested in how different landownership scenarios affect the lives of women living on that land. And since the writers I discuss have social privilege, I explore how they use their privilege both to critique and benefit from a land-based economy. I encountered an intriguing yet unsettling matter while writing the book, namely, that some women collaborated with patriarchy when doing so served their interest. Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but I tried to delve into the intricacies of this ‘collaboration’ in order to expose some of the inner workings of a social system that both demanded women’s submission and yet offered opportunities for resistance and subversion. I actually find this concept very à propos in today’s world; we still live under patriarchy, and there is ample evidence for it surrounding us every day. Women cannot help but conspire with patriarchy at least to some degree (though some would argue against this claim, and I would learn a lot from the conversation).
BUP: Given the timeframe you write about, where do you see the literary themes, habits, and traditions of these writers influencing the burgeoning Romantic period?
Jordan: William Wordsworth credited Anne Finch—the focus of chapter two (“Stewarding the Country House: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea”)—with crafting “a single new image of external nature.” Others have delved into Wordsworth’s valuation of Finch, and I hope that my book will resonate with some Romantic scholars and perhaps inspire them to explore how the ‘landscape regime’ that I delineate in the long eighteenth century morphed in new ways after the turn of the nineteenth century. Since Romanticism has long been associated with an appreciation for nature, I wonder how questions of landownership figure into recent critical inquiry of this period. More broadly speaking, the English garden, whose origins I explore, certainly endures to this very day, so I’d be especially curious to know how (or whether) landscape description plays a significant role in Victorian literature. Since my book scrutinizes how and why literature cultivates aesthetic pleasure from looking at (and owning) the land, I wonder how that dynamic endured and surely changed over the course of the nineteenth century.
BUP: You conclude that women writers had to accommodate the standards of the time to a certain extent; how does this function in your analysis of their writings?
Jordan: Women were obliged to accommodate themselves to patriarchy. Prolific Ground scrutinizes the rhetorical and aesthetics strategies that Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Montagu devised in order to challenge what I’ve identified as a male-dominated landscape regime. In their own ways, they engaged with land so as to demonstrate a capacity to intervene in this regime. They devised ways to take charge of family land (Jane Barker’s heroine Galesia), pass judgment on the landowning practices of male relatives (Anne Finch), overhaul society through female landownership (Sarah Scott), and exercise uncommon and sometimes dubious female agency to assert power over male dependents (Elizabeth Montagu). These are of course reductive versions of my subjects, but they offer a glimpse into the arguments I pursue. All of these women accommodate and sometimes collaborate with patriarchy, but they also acquire a measure of independence through their imaginative engagements with rural land.
BUP: Do you see the depiction of landscapes as representative of social conditions and dynamics carried over into the writing of the modern day? Are there other areas—both in 1690–1790 and now—that serve similar purposes for those writing about them?
Jordan: Most definitely. The global distribution of wealth continues to empower more men than women. These measures are inadequate to a vastly complicated global economy in which landownership is not the most important form of wealth, but that basic measure of gender inequality endures. Even so, I realize how incredibly lucky I am, having the luxury to research and teach what I love. I try to make connections between my research and teaching interests by using my classroom as a place to talk about the land—its uses, ownership, aesthetic value, and susceptibility to exploitation. It just so happens that right now I’m teaching in my university’s study abroad program in Strasbourg, France. I’ve encountered many community gardens here and spoken to French people who rent a parcel of land from the city to grow flowers and vegetables. There’s a self-serve field of blooming tulips about a 20-minute walk from where I’m staying (scissors provided; .60 €/each). I share these chance encounters with students and ask them to think about their own relationship to rural land.
BUP: To wrap things up, what have you been reading recently?
Jordan: I recently taught a wonderful novel by Jane Alison called Natives and Exotics (2005), which also pertains to your previous question about “landscapes [being] representative of social conditions and dynamics carried over into the writing of the modern day.” Alison tells the story of an Australian girl living in Ecuador who unwittingly witnesses Western imperialism in action (her American step-father is a diplomat who’s orchestrating US access to Ecuador’s petroleum resources). Alison uses language to prompt readers to make connections between organic and inorganic or human and non-human nature; she evokes the earth’s teeth, its belly, and at one point uses the image of the earth “hatching.”
Reading the book was a lesson in how geology, botany, and horticulture have created divergent narratives about nature and how rife the English language is with metaphors that explode those divisions of natural knowledge. Alison’s title resonates with contemporary debates about immigration because it interrogates facile claims about which people and plants are “natives” and asks what makes an animal or plant “exotic.” Twenty years after publication, it’s still a novel for our time, and it stretched my own thinking about landownership, imperial expansion, and colonial botany—all issues I grappled with writing Prolific Ground.
Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women’s Writing, 1690–1790 is available to order here in paperback, hardback, and ebook.
Nicolle Jordan is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she has also served as director of women’s and gender studies.