Sister Arts

"As its lyrical title suggests, Sister Arts, Lisa Moore's loving account of the unusual and haunting works produced by her four subjects-elegiac friendship poems, picturesque landscape designs, leaf collages and scrapbooks, collections of flowers, shells, and butterflies-at once illuminates and charms, deepening our understanding both of female–female intimacy and the elegantly subversive means women in past centuries found to express such devotion." —Terry Castle

In the great age of English garden design, eighteenth-century women working in the “sister arts” of painting, poetry, and landscape gardening adapted the Linnaean system of plant classification and the tradition of the erotic garden to create art with and for other women that celebrated everything from classical friendship to erotic love. In this book, filled with lush illustrations and intriguing stories, Lisa L. Moore reveals how these women artists used flowers, gardens, and landscapes to express their love for other women.

Aristocratic diarist Mary Delany built a garden grotto for the exclusive use of herself and the naturalist and collector Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. Romantic poet Anna Seward, mourning the loss of Honora Sneyd to an unworthy marriage and then death, wrote her beloved’s face and body into her landscape poems. And in 1790s Connecticut, feminist intellectual Sarah Pierce transformed texts and images into a new poetic evocation of intimacy between women both egalitarian and erotic. These women, Moore shows, influenced later works by Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Tee Corinne.

Moore goes on to trace the legacy of the lesbian sister arts tradition in subsequent art and poetry, including contemporary multimedia work by Kara Walker, Michelene Thomas, Alma Lopez, and Allyson Mitchell. Her book redefines this unstudied sister arts tradition, which becomes visible only when we understand how the works of these women exemplify what she deems “lesbian genres.” It will captivate readers who want to know more about women’s contributions to garden history and landscape design—as well as those looking for a new perspective on queer history, literature, and culture.

Lisa L. Moore is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel.

Preface: Listening to Gossip in the Queer Archives
Introduction: Lesbian Genres and Eighteenth-Century Landscapes
1. Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships
2. A Connoisseur in Friendship: The Duchess of Portland’s Collections and Communities
3. The Voice of Friendship, Torn from the Scene: Anna Seward’s Landscapes of Lesbian Melancholy
4. The Landscape Which She Drew: Sarah Pierce and the Lesbian Georgic
Conclusion. The Persistence of Lesbian Genres: A Circuit Garden
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index