Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Real and Imagined Afterlives of Gardens

A major theme of Southern Women, Southern Landscapes is that gardens have afterlives, whether real or imagined. Authors Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith are interested in the way that many of the women featured in the book created gardens that either faded after their time and were materially lost, or, more happily, were recreated by gardeners who wanted to restore their vision and preserve a particular garden for future generations, like those of Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Lawrence, Anne Spencer, and Corinne Melchers, among others. In the case of lost gardens, the authors often found archival as well as published material—notes, maps, diaries, letters, even poetry and fiction—that provided them with an imaginative vision of what had been. For instance, they could reconstruct a sense of the exuberant gardening practices of Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and Clementine Hunter in Louisiana, even though none of their gardens survive.

About the Speakers

DR. JUDITH W. PAGE received her Ph.D. in English Literature and Language from the University of Chicago. After teaching at several institutions, she was named Professor Emerita at the University of Florida. She is the author of numerous articles and has written or co-authored five books on British Romanticism and on women writers, artists, and gardeners in England. She has also co-edited, with Victoria Pagan, two collections on landscape and the natural world.

DR. ELISE SMITH received her M.A. from Vanderbilt and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, both in art history, and she is now retired after 37 years at Millsaps College. In addition to a number of journal articles, she has written or co-authored five books, including two co-authored with Judith Page, exploring the garden as a personal and professional space for British artists and writers over the centuries.