Frontispiece to the 1791 James Johnson
edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories
from Real Life with illustrations by William Blake
"Fresh Threads of Connection": Mother Nature and British Women Writers considers changing conceptions of nature within women's literature in 18th and 19th century Britain. During this formative time in English history, developments in science and philosophy—from Enlightenment definitions of natural law to Darwinian theories of natural selection to philosophical reflections on the Sublime and the Beautiful—challenged popular perceptions of both what it meant to be "natural" and what it meant to be a woman.
Women were often attributed the passive beauty and mystical power of nature, two qualities both prized and feared in a society built on rational thought and orderly process. This connection was both empowering and oppressive: women and nature were emblems of pure virtue and sources of tempestuous strife; they were confined by men, but proved themselves unrestrainable; they embodied humanity's primitive past and symbolized society's idealized future.
Taking its title from George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, "Fresh Threads of Connection" features ten women writers and their unique relationships with nature and each other. The exhibit questions the art and nature of science in the works of Mary Shelley and Margaret Cavendish; it considers visions of human nature in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen; it celebrates the imaginative animal worlds of Anna Sewell and Beatrix Potter; it examines the cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary treatment of nature in works by Christiana Rossetti and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; it analyzes nature as an artistic metaphor in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.
By exploring these authors' unexpected connections in parallel with their literary treatment of nature, "Fresh Threads of Connection" reveals the complex yet intimate bond between Mother Nature and female artists in 18th and 19th century Britain. Women writers of this period embraced, revolted against, and ultimately propelled contemporary debates in both their literature and their lives, creating a legacy of nature-inspired feminist expression that continues to resonate today.