A Monumental Autobiography: Marianne North's Gallery at Kew Gardens

Abstract

Marianne North, late nineteenth-century traveller, botanist and artist, author of 'Recollections of a Happy Life (1892-1894)', did something very unusual. She built her own monument. She thought about it, negotiated its location, designed it, hired an architect, supervised construction, paid for it herself, added the finishing touches and, later, had it extended. In an age when monuments were erected to celebrate a myriad of significant events – when Queen Victoria built the Albert Memorial in memory of the Prince Consort – no-one usually built their own. I want to argue that North, in providing her own monument to herself as traveller and botanical artist, strategically positioned her autobiographical identity in a very different monumental context: the North Gallery in Kew Gardens. Kew Gardens, ‘centre of the world of botany’ in the nineteenth century, destined the Gallery to be read in very specific ways. Of these ways, I will be focusing in particular on the North Gallery as a home made in a garden and as an expression and/or extension of late nineteenth-century British national colonialist exhibitory thought.

Keywords

• women, commemoration, monument, botany, kew gardens, victorian era, explorers