Jane Loudon

19 August 1800 - 13 July 1858

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Cultural formation	Catherine Crowe	CC referred to herself as a disciple of Scottish phrenologist George Combe . 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 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
Friends, Associates	Emma Roberts	ER had become a great friend Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, 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 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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. under Anna Maria Porter which had been formed, no doubt, in Durham. In...
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, No. 1, pp. 45 -6. 54 Shteir, Ann B. “Botanical Dialogues: Maria Jacson and Women’s Popular Science Writing in England”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, No. 3, 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 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 appeared in its first and only collected volume.

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.

14 March 1856

A petitionfor 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.