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Book Review
| Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. By Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii+287 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $49.95.
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| Speaking for Nature began as a meditation on Jane Jacobs' observation that, in Sylvia Bowerbank's words, "the sentimentalization of nature is part and parcel of [our] ecological crisis" because it allows us to be "at once the greatest destroyers and lovers of wild nature" (pp. 135, 220). Speaking for Nature historicizes that sentimentalization, what Bowerbank calls at one point "the romancing imagination" (p. 54), by tracing its emergence in chapters addressing the writings of a number of early modern Englishwomen, including the well known, such as Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Wollstonecraft; the obscure, such as Catherine Talbot, Jane Lead, and Anna Seward; and even the nearly anonymous, such as eighteenth-century writers of educational texts for children. |
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