Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes

(Paperback)

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Description

In the great age of English garden design, eighteenth-century women working in the "sister arts" of painting, poetry, and landscape gardening adapted the Linnaean system of plant classification and the tradition of the erotic garden to create art with and for other women that celebrated everything from classical friendship to erotic love. In this book, filled with lush illustrations and intriguing stories, Lisa L. Moore reveals how these women artists used flowers, gardens, and landscapes to express their love for other women.

Reviews

"As its lyrical title suggests, Sister Arts, Lisa Moore's loving account of the unusual and haunting works produced by her four subjects-elegiac friendship poems, picturesque landscape designs, leaf collages and scrapbooks, collections of flowers, shells, and butterflies-at once illuminates and charms, deepening our understanding both of femalefemale intimacy and the elegantly subversive means women in past centuries found to express such devotion." Terry Castle

"Lisa Moore recounts the fascinating stories of four eighteenth-century women whose lesbian-like relationships were instrumental in inspiring and fostering their work as artists of the landscape. Sister Arts is an indispensible contribution to the project of establishing a readable record of lesbian desire in the historical past." Lillian Faderman, author of Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

Author Bio

Lisa L. Moore is associate professor of English and womens and gender studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel.