An Eighteenth-Century Woman (Biology Today) (Mary Granville Pendarves Delany‪)‬

Lately I've found myself spending quite a bit of time in the 18th century, beginning in 2007 with the tercentenary of Carol Linnaeus's birth (Uddenberg, 2007). Then I read a little book with the rather interesting title Sex, Botany, and Empire (Fara, 2003). It's about how the activities of Linnaeus and Joseph Banks changed the way the world saw plants. Linnaeus (1707-1778), who created the fundamental principles of our system of classification, used the sexual organs of plants as the basis for ordering them. Banks, who traveled on the first of Captain James Cook's voyages around the world, went on to emphasize the importance of the plants to the economic and territorial conquest of the world by the British. More recent books have fanned the flames of my interest in Banks and others of this era. Richard Holmes's (2008) The Age of Wonder, a study of science in the development of British romanticism, has Joseph Banks as one of its main subjects, and Andrea Wulf's (2008) The Brother Gardeners deals not only with Banks but with such American figures as John Bartram and Benjamin Franklin. But it was a lesser-known yet intriguing figure who really made me linger in the 18th century: Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, better known simply as Mrs. Delany. She was born in 1700 and died in 1788, so she really is an 18th-century woman, and she knew many of the leading scientific figures of the day, either personally or through their work. She has been receiving quite a bit of attention lately because of a beautiful exhibit, "Mrs. Delany and Her Circle," at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). I've had a fascination with Mary Delany for some time, so I decided it was worth a trip to New Haven to learn more about her and, most of all, to see her work.