My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile - Softcover

Brown, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007235704 ISBN 13: 9780007235704

Publisher: HarperPress, 2006

Synopsis

The life and times of Henrietta Luxborough, 18th-century aristocrat, gardener and society exile.

Henrietta St John was born on St Swithun’s Day in 1699 into a world of wealth, privilege and seeming security. Beloved sister of rake and statesman. Viscount Bolingbroke, she grew up in Hogarthian London and Wiltshire, her ancestral home, into a headstrong woman of poetry and letters – Pope, Swift and Gay were amongst her acquaintance. Yet with more wit and intelligence than was good for a high-ranking woman of her time and a wild mane of dark curly hair, Henrietta was not the easiest of marriage propositions. She succumbed at twenty-seven, with her infatuation for the son of the infamous and exiled South Sea Company chief cashier. Soon afterwards, she was accused by her pompous husband of infidelity with a young poet, and sent into the country to moulder and die.

In refusing to fulfil these cruel expectations Henrietta created for herself, and for us, an eccentric and enchanting company of friends from the understorey of mid-18th-century society. Her circle – they liked to set their wooden chairs in a circle in the garden, sip port and gossip on warm, moonlit nights – was a lively collage of characters far removed from the Court and the City, and yet occasionally touched by great events. It was Henrietta’s gardens, however, that most sustained her sanity and that now shape Jane Brown's lively biography. Through evocative descriptions of the gardens and houses her heroine inhabited, Jane Brown reconstructs Henrietta’s remarkable and tumultuous life, and reveals an intricate portrait of early 18th-century English culture and society.

About this title

Review:

‘Henrietta is brought alive with enlightening understanding and narrative pace...Brown has unearthed a wonderful character who has until now only existed in the margins of garden history. With great verve she places Henrietta at the centre of the genesis of the picturesque garden movement.’ Guardian

‘The garden itself has long vanished, but Brown, with her rare gift for horticultural and personal passions, brings it to vivid, tender life, as she does the irrepressible Henrietta and all her turbulent times.’ Sunday Times

Praise for ‘The Pursuit of Paradise’:

‘A genuinely important contribution, not just to understanding gardens of the past, but to how we might get the most pleasure from the gardens of the future.’ Monty Don, Observer

‘If you want to be impressively well informed about why every self-respecting home must have a patio, or why delphiniums, gladioli and larkspur are distinctly passé, then latch on to this illuminating book.’ Penelope Lively, Mail on Sunday

Praise for ‘Tales of the Rose Tree’:

‘A superbly researched and narrated celebration ... Jane Brown has done the species and her readers a service in reminding us of its fabulous history.’ Literary Review

Praise for ‘The Pursuit of Paradise’:

‘Be warned. This is a rich brew, not to be taken in one gulp. Gardening in this book encompasses science and history, philosophy and art, literature and the military, politics and sex! It is all tremendous fun.’ Ruth Gorb, Guardian

The Guardian:

'Henrietta is brought alive with enlightening understanding and narrative pace...a wonderful character...'

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0007235704
• ISBN 13: 9780007235704
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320