Jane Loudon

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Standard Name: Loudon, Jane
Birth Name: Jane Wells Webb
Used Form: Jane Webb
Used Form: J. W. L.
While still an adolescent JL published tales and verse; next, in 1827, came a highly unusual science-fiction horror novel. After marrying a horticulturalist she participated in his writing career with work on his gardening magazine and his accounts of travelling in search of gardens to explore and assess. She also pursued her own related line with improving stories about a child naturalist, and with a flow of works, 1839-55, designed to encourage and inform women gardeners. Several of her titles are sufficiently like each other to be confusing, including her best-known, Gardening for Ladies, and a series of books about different kinds of plants, which are distinguished only by subtitle.
Black and white photograph of an oval painting of Jane Loudon, shown from the waist up. She is wearing a simple dress with dark bodice and light skirt, a light cape patterned with flowers, and a lace collar. Slender chains lie around her neck and in her dark, neatly piled hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Catherine Crowe
CC referred to herself as a disciple of Scottish phrenologist George Combe .
qtd. in
Kunitz, Stanley J., editor. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. H. W. Wilson Company, 1936.
Her intense interest in spiritualism, physiology, and the supernatural put her ahead of her time, since the widespread popularity of spiritualism developed...
Family and Intimate relationships L. E. L.
According to Leopold Charles Martin, the young Letitia Landon (along with other future writers, Emma Roberts and Jane Loudon ) was quite a daughter to his mother Susan Martin (wife of the artist John...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Isabella Spence
EIS says that her early friendship with Jane and Anna Maria Porter was inherited, developing from the friendship between their parents,
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817.
325-6
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Anna Maria Porter
which had been formed, no doubt, in Durham. In...
Friends, Associates Emma Roberts
ER had become a great friend
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
of Letitia E. Landon during her researches at the British Museum. The two of them, along with Jane Webb (later Loudon) were as daughters . . . at all...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
At the same period EOB was a friend of another miscellaneous writer, Elizabeth Isabella Spence , who entertained in the same eccentric, low-budget style. These two elderly ladies (Spence was ten years older than Benger)...
Friends, Associates Catherine Crowe
CC had already become a friend of Sydney Smith and his family. In Edinburgh she became friendly with members of various intellectual circles, including astronomer John Pringle Nichol , chemist Samuel Brown , artist David Scott
Literary responses Maria Elizabetha Jacson
John Claudius Loudon quoted from MEJ 's work in his Encyclopaedia of Gardening in 1834, but thirty years after Jacson's third edition, Jane Loudon criticised the work as too intellectual.
Percy, Joan. “Maria Elizabeth Jacson and her ’Florist’s Manual’”. Garden History, Vol.
20
, No. 1, 1 Mar.–31 May 1992, pp. 45-56.
54
Shteir, Ann B. “Botanical Dialogues: Maria Jacson and Women’s Popular Science Writing in England”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
23
, No. 3, 1 Mar.–31 May 1990, pp. 301-17.
306n11
Residence Catherine Crowe
CC had been living in Hampstead in 1850; that summer she made an extended visit to Jane Loudon at her house, 3 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, where she talked spiritualism with the Loudons' daughter Agnes...
Textual Production Jane Marcet
The History of Africa (published in 1830 by the author of Conversations on Chronology as the third volume in Colburn and Bentley 's Juvenile Library) is ascribed to JM in the Bodleian Library catalogue...

Timeline

1827: Jane Webb published The Mummy: A Tale of...

Women writers item

1827

Jane Webb published The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a dystopia set in a technology-crazed society populated by robots, featuring steamships and a dirigible; Webb was later, as Jane Loudon an influential...

1842: Jane Loudon's Ladies' Magazine of Gardening...

Building item

1842

Jane Loudon 's Ladies' Magazine of Gardening appeared in its first and only collected volume.
Brown, Jane. The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social History of Gardens and Gardening. HarperCollins, 2000.
116-19
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

December 1855: Barbara Leigh Smith, later Bodichon, founded...

National or international item

December 1855

Barbara Leigh Smith , later Bodichon, founded the Married Women's Property Committee (sometimes called the Women's Committee) to draw up a petition for a married women's property bill.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
78-9
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 1989.
32-3
Chedzoy, Alan. A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton. Allison and Busby, 1995.
245-8

14 March 1856: A petition for Reform of the Married Women's...

National or international item

14 March 1856

A petition for Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, organized by the Married Women's Property Committee and signed by many prominent women, was presented to both Houses of Parliament.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 1989.
32, 35
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. et al. The Woman Question. Garland, 1983.
2: 14
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London, 1992.
208
Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. W.W. Norton, 1995.
214

Texts

Loudon, Jane, and John Claudius Loudon. “A Short Account of the Life and Writings of John Claudius Loudon”. Self-Instruction for Young Gardeners, Foresters, Bailiffs, Land-Stewards, and Farmers, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845.
Loudon, Jane, and John Gloag. “A Short Account of the Life and Writings of John Claudius Loudon”. Mr. Loudon’s England, Oriel Press, 1970, pp. 182-19.
Loudon, Jane. Agnes; or, the Little Girl who could Keep her Promise. Harvey and Darton, 1839.
Loudon, John Claudius. An Encycpaedia of Gardening. Editor Loudon, Jane, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850.
Loudon, Jane. Botany for Ladies. John Murray, 1842.
Loudon, Jane. Botany for Schools and Young Persons. George Bell, 1841.
Loudon, Jane. British Wild Flowers. William Smith, 1846.
Loudon, Jane. Conversations upon Comparative Chronology. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830.
Loudon, Jane. Domestic Pets. Grant and Griffith, 1851.
Loudon, Jane. Facts from the World of Nature. Grant and Griffith, 1848.
Loudon, Jane. Gardening for Ladies. 1840.
Loudon, Jane. Glimpses of Nature. Grant and Griffith, 1844.
Loudon, John Claudius, and Jane Loudon. In Search of English Gardens. Editor Boniface, Priscilla, Century, 1990.
Boniface, Priscilla et al. “Introduction”. In Search of English Gardens, Century, 1990, pp. 9-18.
Loudon, Jane. My Own Garden. Keerby and Son, 1855.
Loudon, Jane. Prose and Verse. R. Wrightson, 1824.
Loudon, Jane. Stories of a Bride. Henry Colburn, 1829.
Loudon, Jane. The Amateur Gardener’s Calendar. Longman, 1847.
Loudon, Jane. The Entertaining Naturalist. H. G. Bohn, 1843.
Loudon, Jane. The Entertaining Naturalist. 1850.
Loudon, Jane. The History of Africa. H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830.
Loudon, Jane. The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower-Garden. W. Smith, 1841.
Loudon, Jane. The Ladies’ Companion: At Home and Abroad. Bradbury and Evans.
Loudon, Jane. The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals. William Smith, 1840.
Loudon, Jane. The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants. W. Smith, 1841.