Hothouse Flower: Nurturing Women in the Victorian Conservatory

This most unusual book traces the interrelations of architecture, horticulture, literature, social history and gender. The Victorian conservatory and the lady enclosed within it proved to be ambivalent, enigmatic and self-contradictory. What began optimistically as protection ended as imprisonment. The metaphor offers a vision of fractured femininity, juxtaposing the vegetable against the human in a dialogue of disjunction and paradox. The work is illustrated throughout with images from gar...