‘Epistolary Exchange: the Familiar Letter and the Female Botanist, 1760-1820’

Abstract

An investigation into women's involvement with botany in the eighteenth century invariably leads to the culture of letters.The Duchess of Portland (1715-1785) 1 compiled notebooks on natural history, but it is her letters that allow us to uncover social networks and document the circulation of ideas involving botany and plant collecting.The Duchess's ten-year correspondence on botany with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) is significant in illuminating the role of women in botanical culture.At this time, biological specimens were classified according to the taxonomic system of the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), 2 who himself exchanged letters on classification with a number of British women, notably the plant collector, Anna Blackburne (1726-93) (Wystrach 148-68).Consequently women were soon conversing in a new Linnaean language.It is no coincidence then that the two most widely-read introductions to Linnaean botany at this time were epistolary: Thomas Martyn's Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady (1785), translated from Rousseau, and Priscilla Wakefield's, An Introduction to Botany; in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796).3 The rendering by Priscilla Wakefield (1751-1832) of Linnaeus in English rather than Latin meant that, for the first time, literate but unlearned young women gained access to botany through letters: Till of late years, [botany] has been confined to the circle of the learned, which may be attributed to those books that treated of it, being principally written in Latin: a difficulty that deterred many, particularly the female sex, from attempting to obtain the knowledge of a science, thus defended, as it were, from their approach.(An Introduction to Botany ii)

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