Stephen Bending, University of Southampton
Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2006), 31-47

This essay shows how the letters and journals of Lady Mary Coke, who led a life of relative seclusion after her effort to divorce her libertine husband made her the object of scandalized attention, articulated her feelings of abandonment, resentment, and despair through her comments about gardening. Devoted to gardening as an activity that staved off loneliness even as the garden itself embodied her solitude and her fall from public life, Coke provides us with a striking counterpoint to the prevailing eighteenth-century British idealization of rural retirement as an existence of virtue and peace.