Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T15:39:00.014Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Saying it with flowers: Jane Giraud's ecofeminist Paradise Lost (1846)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Wendy Furman-Adams
Affiliation:
Professor of English, Whittier College, California
Virginia James Tufte
Affiliation:
Professor Emerita of English, University of Southern California
Catherine Gimelli Martin
Affiliation:
University of Memphis
Get access

Summary

Were I, O God, in churchless lands remaining,

Far from all voice of teachers and divines,

My soul would find in Flowers of thy ordaining

Priests, sermons, shrines.

(Jane Giraud, frontispiece, The Floral Months of England)

A single flower along the way also can contain the whole ecosystem.

(John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home)

John Milton's Paradise Lost is, after the Bible, the most widely illustrated book in European history. It is also, arguably if controversially, one of the earliest great feminist poems – a poem that, as Joseph Wittreich demonstrated in 1987, has given heart and hope to three centuries of women readers. Yet since 1688, although nearly 200 artists have tried to bring Milton's epic to visual life – among them such well-known figures as William Blake, Henry Fuseli, John Martin, and Gustav Doré – all but four of those artists have been men. Of the four woman artists who have responded in some way to the poem, three have worked during the twentieth century. American artist Carlotta Petrina (1901–97) produced a set of sixteen pencil drawings for a Limited Editions Club issue of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which was published in 1936. Working at the same time, but with no knowledge of her American contemporary, Englishwoman Mary Elizabeth Groom (1903–58) produced a set of nineteen wood engravings for the Golden Cockerel Press's rare ten-book edition of Paradise Lost, published in honor of the coronation of King George and Queen Elizabeth in 1937.

Type
Chapter
Information
Milton and Gender , pp. 223 - 253
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×