House and Garden Design and the Gendering of Place and Space 1780 – 1890

Savage, Rachel (2024) House and Garden Design and the Gendering of Place and Space 1780 – 1890. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Drawing on a range of disciplines including landscape and garden history, architectural history and feminist social history, this thesis is a study of how ideas concerning house and garden design across the long nineteenth century influenced and shaped gender roles and identities.

Using textual analysis this thesis reviews and appraises how house and garden as both ‘place’ and ‘space’ were constructed and projected through a range of published texts, including those by Humphry Repton, John Claudius Loudon, Robert Kerr and Jane Loudon. It interrogates how different texts contributed to the construction of a domestic ideology in which the concept of home as a gendered space emerged and was extended to parts of the garden, with the flower garden repeatedly presented as a female space. It explores how women writers contributed to this gender narrative whilst also creating a shared cultural experience in which it could be contested.

Alongside textual analysis this thesis draws on the recorded experience of four different case studies all located in Norfolk, Mary Preston at Beeston Hall, Elizabeth Schutz at Gillingham Hall, Charlotte Upcher at Sheringham Hall, and Elizabeth Doyle at Crimplesham Hall. Through researching the women’s accounts of building and improving their houses, developing and managing their gardens and improving the wider landscape, this thesis investigates questions of women’s agency, conformity to gender expectations and how this reflected or differed from the view presented by the house and garden literature of the day.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	James Tweddle
Date Deposited:	02 Jul 2024 11:37
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2024 11:37
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/95756
DOI:

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