"Fresh Threads of Connection: Mother Nature and British Women Writers"
On display March 7 - July 26, 2009
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“Fresh Threads of Connection,” whose title is taken from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, features ten women writers and their unique relationships with “nature”—and with each other. The exhibit, opened in conjunction with the 2009 British Women Writers Conference, weaves together unexpected connections between the authors themselves: it questions the art (and the nature) of science in the works of Mary Shelley and Margaret Cavendish—it considers visions of human nature in Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen—it celebrates the imaginative animal worlds of Anna Sewell and Beatrix Potter—it examines cross-cultural and cross disciplinary treatment of art and nature in Christina Rossetti and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—it explores nature as artistic metaphor in Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Exploring these unexpected connections between authors while exploring changes in the treatment of nature in literature over time sheds light on the complex yet intimate bond between the changing reality of nature and developing realism of art in 18th and 19th century England, and the parallel bond between mother nature and female artists during this period.
