Definition
Marianne North is best remembered for her extraordinary paintings housed in a permanent gallery in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She produced the predominantly botanical art during various solitary travels around the globe. She also penned three volumes of memoir outlining her many intrepid adventures, Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North 2 vols. (1892) and Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life: Selected from the Journals of Marianne North Chiefly between the Years 1859–1869 (1893), which were posthumously edited by her sister Mrs. J. A. Symonds. The texts describe in detail North’s scientific curiosity and her environmental concerns, but her compassion rarely extends to the indigenous people she encounters. Thus, while she should be commended for her remarkable achievements as a Victorian woman, we must take into account her imperial attitude and the colonial ideology to which she contributed.
Life
Marianne North was born in...
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References
Agnew, Éadaoin. 2011. “An old vagabond”: Science and sexuality in Marianne North’s representations of India. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 7 (2): 1–19. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue72/agnew.html.
Brockway, Lucile H. 2002. Science and colonial expansion: The role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. London: Yale University Press.
Hooker, Joseph. 1882. Preface. In Official guide to the North Gallery, ed. William B. Helmsley, 5th ed. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Karapenka, Lara, and Shalyn Claggett. 2017. Strange science: Investigating the limits of knowledge in the Victorian age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Losano, Antonia. 1997. A preference for vegetables: The travel writing and botanical art of Marianne North. Women’s Studies 26 (1997): 423–448.
Morgan, Susan. 1993. Introduction. In Recollections of a happy life: Being the autobiography of Marianne North, xi–xxxix. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
North, Marianne. 1892. In Recollections of a happy life: Being the autobiography of Marianne North, ed. John Addington Symonds. London: Macmillan and Co.
———. 1893. Some further recollections of a happy life: Selected from the Journals of Marianne North Chiefly between the Years 1859–1869.
Ponsonby, Laura. 1990. Marianne North at Kew gardens. Exeter: Webb and Bower.
Symonds, Mrs John Addington, Preface, Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life: Selected from the Journals of Marianne North, 1893. London: Macmillan and Co.
The Athenaeum. 1892. Review of recollections of a happy life: Being the autobiography of Marianne North. London (3357): 269–270.
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Agnew, É. (2019). North, Marianne; Recollections of a Happy Life. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_109-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_109-1
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