Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts: Erotics of Lesbian Landscape

Shell Cottage, Goodwood house, a creation of Louisa, Emily and Sarah Lennox (with more than a little help in the way of installation from their workmen)

Dear friends and readers,

Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts: Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes — and flower arrangements. This blog could be read alongside Amy Clampitt amid thrushes as both come from my reading the same Women’s Review of Books issue (Martha Vicinus, 29:1 (Jan, Feb 2012) as context. Moore’s volume is a companion to Donoghue’s Passions Among Women; both identify a pattern of life in the 18th century they call lesbian spinsterhood and claim was recognized by contemporaries. it reinforces or further supports sense from Austen’s letters that she loved Martha Lloyd more strongly than un-erotic friendship and the depiction of Charlotte Lucas contains memories of their parted relationship (see Letter 61). The value of Moore’s is her reading of texts and art, her identification of women and how her perspective has general application. This time I linked in the Lennox sisters as seen in Tillyard’s book, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832; its adaptation into a mini-series, Aristocrats (which I loved as a kind of Little Women) and the Illustrated Companion to that (shell work!). This because we have another woman’s world which shows the same aesthetic patterns as those found in Moore and yet only one of the women was (possibly) a (closet) lesbian.

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Moore’s four women are Mary Delany, letter writer and respected artist of botany and flower making (1700-88); Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland(1715-85); Anna Seward, the poet and letter-writers (1747-1809); and Sarah Pierce, educator, writer (1767-1852). Moore finds in all these women a lesbian orientation which none of the women were permitted to follow openly, for one was coerced into marriage when young to an old man (Delaney), another was pressured to marry a rich powerful man who enabled her to become an important patroness of the arts (Bentinck). Like Donoghue, Moore makes a strong case and as with Donoghue, I can see Austen’s patterns with Martha, Anne Sharp and her sister more than conform to some of these Moore describes: they are closely similar.

This way of seeing Delaney makes sense of her urging Burney to become a lady-in-waiting to the queen and not being able to see how it was a death-in-life to Burney. Delaney even doubled-crossed Burney by going behind her back to the queen to get this to happen. Burney wanted to marry.

Obvious phallic detail from one of Delaney’s passion flowers

What most interested me was Moore’s interpretation of the flower and sea-shell art. I know that upper class women made these sea-shell caverns, had these picturesque caves built on their properties. I begin to see that Louisa Lennox, the sister who married the rather silly Irish man and lived all her life near her sister Emily who became Duchess of Leinster and supported the younger one, Sarah, when Sarah was ostracized for actually trying to live with a man she loved (he though took advantage of her real need and vulnerability) may reveals a hidden lesbian and sibling-erotic pattern. Louisa especially shows little interest in males and doesn’t care that her husband is child-like and obedient. One would have to read the letters to see what Tillyard might be discreet over here.

Lady Louisa Lennox by George Romney — a telling outfit? Louisa cared more about Emily than anyone else and Emily was fiercely loyal to Louisa.

Allan Ramsay (1713-84), Emily Lennox, Duchess of Leinster

Seward has long been seen as a lesbian from her relationship to Honora Sneyd (who was married to Maria Edgeworth’s father, who proceeded to impregnate her continually until she died). In Belinda, the treatment of Lady Delamar (who may stand for Honora Seyd), especially the fascination of the heroine with her breasts reveals a lesbian intensity and frustration. (See Patricia Smith, “Lesbian Panic in Narrative Strategies,” Modern Fiction Studies, 41 [1995], pp. 567-605.) What is generally known of Seward is how she cared for her father, inherited his money and used her disabled state to justify a life of retirement and socializing by writing to others.

Sarah Pierce was enabled not to marry because her brother supported her; he copied out some of her poems which would not have survived otherwise and they are love poems to other women, her friends.

We can reinterpret these artistic patterns of flowers, the letters and what has seemed “curiosities” and oddities (the shell work) become natural when we simply open our eyes to the strong gender element in the art.

Like Donoghue, what is valuable here is Moore’s book makes us understand yet other women. What this book seems to demonstate is how centrally gendered is art, and how art that we discuss as somehow universal is not and not only shaped by a particular culture but the product of the sexual outlook, experience, orientation, feelings whatever you want to call it of the artist. Using Moore’s perspective could not only shed light on the Lennox sisters’ lives but the botanical drawings and travel book and life, Chicoteau’s Chere Rose: A Biography of Rosalie de Constant (1758-1834) and imagery and activities of women in Ann B. Shtier’s Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860

Ellen