Cultivating One’s Understanding: The Garden and the Bower

Abstract

Ten years after Percy Bysshe’s death, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley writes two entries in her private journal that explicitly connect her sense of isolation and retirement with her garden: ‘I have a comfortable (for me) abode & a nice garden … I confine myself to my garden’ and ‘Percy is well — & I alone with him at Harrow — with no absolute annoyance near — never going out — never even walking beyond my garden — seeing no one, in absolute solitude — yet my spirits are better than they used to be’.¹ Despite Shelley’s oppressive loneliness, this last phrase allows some room for hope: the garden encloses, even hems her in, yet it also provides a kind of internal liberty that to a certain extent eases the very low spirits initially defined by that closed state, the garden-like confines of her life. Her garden both defines her limited sphere and provides some relief from limitation; it both surrounds her body and frees her spirit. For Shelley, at least in these two entries, the garden represents two seemingly contradictory states, freedom and enclosure, and the former arises as a condition of the latter.