Enfilade

From Boydell & Brewer:

Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard, eds., Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Prospect of Improvement (London: Boydell Press, 2025), 292 pages, ISBN: 978-1837650507, £85. Available as an ebook for £19. Studies in the Eighteenth Century series, Volume 16.

Situated within the broader context of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, this collection redefines the role of the Bluestocking circle in shaping Britain’s landscapes and social ideals. Against the backdrop of Whiggish notions of ‘improvement’—encompassing agricultural innovation, aesthetic refinement, and moral progress—it explores how women such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Carter navigated the intersections of polite sociability, intellectual production, and estate management. Their contributions reveal a dynamic interplay between cultural critique and practical reform, positioning them as active participants in the period’s debates on land, labour, and national identity.

Drawing on insights from the Elizabeth Montagu’s Correspondence Online (EMCO) project, these essays uncover the creative and social tensions embedded in iconic estates such as Montagu’s Sandleford and Lord Lyttelton’s Hagley Hall. They delve into the poetic and philosophical musings of James Woodhouse, the sociable artistry of Mary Delany, and the symbolic landscapes of Wrest Park. By examining correspondence, poetry, visual arts, and cartography, this volume offers an unprecedented exploration of the ways Bluestocking women engaged with and redefined the designed landscape as a site of intellectual and environmental innovation. This interdisciplinary collection reshapes the historiography of gender, environment, and cultural progress, offering fresh insights into the enduring significance of eighteenth-century landscapes and the intellectual communities that shaped them.

Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Jack Orchard is Content Editor of the Electronic Enlightenment project based at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Foreword: ‘Bringing Elizabeth Montagu to the World’ — Joanna Barker and Nicole Pohl
Introduction: ‘The Prospect of Improvement: Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ — Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard

Section One
1  Idioms of Improvement: Gender and Social Relations on the Montagu Estates, 1730–1800 — Steve Hindle
2  Religious Faith, Class Politics, and Equitable Progress: James Woodhouse and Elizabeth Montagu’s Contending Visions of Improvement — Adam Bridgen and Steve Van Hagen
3  Cultivating Wilderness — Ve-Yin Tee

Section Two
4  ‘Another Little Excursion’: On Tour with Mrs Montagu and Lord Lyttelton — Michael Cousins
5  Cultivating Land, Literature, Letters: Textualities of Improvement in Elizabeth Montagu’s Travels in Scotland — Millie Schurch
6  ‘She had no eyes nor understanding to see that it was not a common vulgar garden’: Mary Delany’s Landscapes of Improvement — Kristina Decker
7  Ladies of Landscape: The Discovery of Lady Harriett Garnier’s ferme ornée at Rookesbury, Hampshire — Rosemary Baird Andreae

Section Three
8  ‘The Genius of Rest … those Happy Groves Inspired’: Literary Composition, Coterie Sociability, and the Gardens at Wrest Park — Jemima Hubberstey
9  ‘Fate Led Me from my Lov’d Retreat’: The City and the Country in Elizabeth Harcourt’s Writings — Mary Chadwick
10  ‘Death’s Refreshing Shade’: Elizabeth Carter, ‘Church-yard Poetry’ and Contemplative Retirement in the Gardens of the Dead — James Metcalf

Afterword: Bluestocking Landscapes — Stephen Bending

Bibliography

The four central musicians are not from the eighteenth century, but the instruments are! From Simon & Schuster:

Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound (New York: Pegasus Books, 2024), 480 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1639367504, $35.

A cello has no language, yet it possesses a vocabulary wide enough to tell, bear witness, and make connections across time and continents—a feat brought to life in this brilliant new book.

In this luminous narrative, Kate Kennedy, a writer and cellist herself, weaves together the story of four cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. The stories are those of the forgotten Jewish cellist Pál Hermann, who is likely to have been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania during the Holocaust; Lise Cristiani, another forgotten performer, who is considered to be the first female professional cello soloist and who embarked on an epic concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s taking with her a Stradivarius cello that can be seen to this day in a museum in Cremona in northern Italy; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played in the orchestra at Auschwitz and survived spells in both that camp and in Bergen-Belsen; and Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste piano trio, whose ‘Mara’ Stradivarius was lost in a shipwreck in the River Plate between Buenos Aires and Uruguay but later recovered from the water and repaired.

Kate Kennedy is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music of her generation and is frequently heard on Radio 3. She is an Associate of the English Faculty at Oxford, where she lectures on twentieth-century literature and biography. She is the author of Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, co-director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers.

From Macmillan:

Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1250366382, $27

The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth-century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs.

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbank to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before.

The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: Something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it. A richly atmospheric parable of the pleasures and perils of female defiance, The Hounding considers whether in any age it might be safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl.

Xenobe Purvis was born in Tokyo in 1990. She studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and was part of the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. She is a writer and literary researcher, with essays published in the Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, and elsewhere.

From Simon & Schuster:

Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie: A Novel (New York: Atria Books, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1668083093, $28.

In 18th-century England, a widowed confectioner is drawn into a web of love, betrayal, and intrigue and a battle of wits in this masterful historical novel from the author of the “delicious puzzle-box of a novel” (The New York Times) and USA Today bestseller The Square of Sevens.

Following the murder of her husband in what looks like a violent street robbery, Hannah Cole is struggling to keep her head above water. Her confectionary shop on Piccadilly is barely turning a profit, her suppliers conspiring to put her out of business because they don’t like women in trade. Henry Fielding, the famous author-turned-magistrate, is threatening to confiscate the money in her husband’s bank account because he believes it might have been illicitly acquired. And even those who claim to be Hannah’s friends have darker intent. Only William Devereux seems different. A friend of her late husband, Devereux helps Hannah unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his death. He also tells her about an Italian delicacy called iced cream, an innovation she is convinced will transform the fortunes of her shop. But their friendship opens Hannah to speculation and gossip and draws Henry Fielding’s attention her way, locking her into a battle of wits more devastating than anything she can imagine.

Laura Shepherd-Robinson was born in Bristol in 1976. She has a BSc in politics from the University of Bristol, an MSc in political theory from the London School of Economics, and an MA in creative writing from City St. George’s, University of London. She is the author of three other novels, Blood & Sugar, Daughters of Night, and The Square of Sevens. She lives in London with her husband, Adrian.

The book first appeared from Bloomsbury in 2024 with a paperback edition released earlier this year:

Francesca de Tores, Saltblood (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 368 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1526661333, £17.

An epic historical fiction debut inspired by real life female pirates.

In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money. Mary’s dual existence as Mark will lead to a role as a footman in a grand house, serving a French mistress; to the navy, learning who to trust and how to navigate by the stars; and to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, finding love among the bloodshed and the mud. But none of this will stop Mary yearning for the sea. Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman. She will become a pirate.

Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history’s most remarkable figures.

Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of several novels, published in over 20 languages, including Saltblood, which won the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. In addition to a collection of poems, her poetry is published widely in journals and anthologies. She grew up in Lutruwita/Tasmania and, after fifteen years in England, is now living in Naarm/Melbourne.

From Giles:

Marie-Laure Buku Pongo and William Christie, BVRB’s Commodes (London: D. Giles, 2025), 72 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1917273121, $30. Frick Diptych 16.

This new volume in the Frick Diptych series features an essay by Frick curator Marie-Laure Buku Pongo paired with a contribution by world-renowned conductor and keyboardist William Christie.

These two cabinets, stamped BVRB, may well be the last pieces of furniture made by the celebrated Parisian cabinetmaker Bernard van Risenburgh II just before he retired in 1764 and sold his workshop to his son, Bernard van Risenburgh III, who finished them. The cabinets feature panels of black-and-gold Japanese lacquer of exceptionally high quality taken from a seventeenth-century Japanese cabinet, chest, or screen. Beginning in the 1730s, the older van Risenburgh worked almost exclusively with the influential marchands-merciers or merchants of luxury goods, who provided the cabinetmaker with the rare and costly Oriental lacquers and sometimes with the design for the furniture on which to mount them.

Marie-Laure Buku Pongo is assistant curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection. Conductor and harpsichordist William Christie is a specialist in the baroque and classical repertoire; he is the founder of the ensemble Les Arts Florissants.

From the press release (14 November) from The Walpole Society:

Eleonora Pistis, Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1905375974, €150.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 Berger Prize is Eleonora Pistis, for her book Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford. Dr Pistis will be awarded £5,000 through the generosity of the Berger Collection Educational Trust. and each of the shortlisted authors will be awarded £500. The winner was announced by Tim Knox, Director of the Royal Collection, at a reception at the Warburg Institute on 12 November.

Jonny Yarker, the chairman of the panel of assessors, praised the work of the judges in winnowing down the extensive list of entries to a shortlist of only six titles. He also paid tribute to Dr Julia Alexander (1967–2025), a longstanding and much valued Berger Prize assessor, in whose memory this year’s prize was awarded.

The shortlist featured The Radical Print by Esther Chadwick, “hotly anticipated, with its rich research and insights,” which the judges envisaged would “set a new agenda for writing about the eighteenth-century print.” Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity, c. 1420–1550 by Bryony Coombs was filled with “scrupulous archival work and a staggering range of material” making it “a joy from beginning to end.” Jointly edited by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman, Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women c.1700–1830 included “scintillating material” of the highest calibre throughout, making it “a launching point for whole new areas of study.” Nicholas Olsberg’s “brilliant portrait of Victorian Britain” in The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times was praised for its beautiful presentation, exhaustive illustration, and expert writing, making it “the last word on Butterfield.” Published posthumously, Gavin Stamp’s Interwar: British Architecture 1919–39, provided a “perfect guide to the period and its buildings,” with the author’s voice, and his lifetime of learning, evident on each page he “re-defines British architecture of the interwar period.”

Eleonora Pistis’ prize-winning book, Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford, was described as representing a significant contribution to architectural history, as well as a careful reconstruction of hierarchies of knowledge during Hawksmoor’s period. Informed by a ‘dizzying range of archival and architectural sources’ the judges believed that this book will become a standard text for intellectual as well as architectural historians.

Dr Pistis is Associate Professor of of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She was trained as both an architect and architectural historian at the University IUAV of Venice, Italy, where she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urban Planning. Before coming to Columbia she was, from 2011 to 2014, the Scott Opler Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, Oxford, Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, and visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Grinnell College, Iowa

If you wish to learn more about the winning book, or indeed any of the titles above, each of the shortlisted authors has been interviewed by Dr Christina Faraday for our podcast British Art Matters. All of these episodes are now live, and can be listened to on our website, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. We would like to congratulate Dr Eleonora Pistis, the prize-winning author, and all involved in bringing her book to fruition!