14 The New York Review
thousand illustrations for books by her
husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock,
and a large body of charts and posters
for use in classrooms.^3 The 1893 edi-
tion of The Fairy-land of Science is
an eye-catcher, its cover crowded with
gold fairies hugging seashells, climbing
morning glories, and pouring luminous
goo over the book’s title. This tweeness
is misleading: the book’s author, Ara-
bella Buckley, had been secretary to
the great geologist Charles Lyell, and
the journal Nature said of Fairy-land,
“We do not know of a more interesting
nor useful gateway to science.”^4
In the political sphere, we might con-
sider Harriet Beecher Stowe (repre-
sented here by a blurb she wrote for
Sojourner Truth), who ascribed the
emotional power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
to the loss of one of her own seven
children. The book’s unprecedented
popularity transformed what had been
an abstract political and economical
debate into a visceral, “family values”
issue, and substantively shifted Ameri-
can public opinion.
Rachel Carson was born too late to
feature in “Five Hundred Years,” which
closes on the early-twentieth-century
strains of women’s suffrage and Arts
and Crafts, but it is possible to see Silent
Spring as a convergence of these scien-
tific and political streams of affective
female popular writing. Though unlike
her nineteenth-century antecedents
Carson had the benefit of a university
education, she too was forced to frame
a career by maneuvering in and around
familial responsibilities.
When working on A Room of One’s
Own in 1928, Woolf went to the Brit-
ish Museum Reading Room in search
of Elizabethan women writers. She
came up empty-handed, and devoted
a chunk of her essay to explaining why
the existence of such writers would
have been impossible. A half-century
later, however, Baskin was setting Anne
Bradstreet’s poems and Elizabeth Jane
Weston’s compendium of poetry and
other writings, Parthenicon Libri (circa
1606), on her bookshelves. The problem
was not that such writers had never ex-
isted; it was that sometime between 1700
and 1928 knowledge of them had slipped
through the cracks (perhaps tipped by
the helpful toe of a male brogue).
The allure of seventeenth-century
poets of any gender is unclear to many
modern readers, but a similar fug ob-
scured works that should have been
more broadly appealing. When Baskin
acquired Maria Sibylla Merian’s De eu-
ropische insecten (1730) around 1966,
Merian was hardly known outside an-
tiquarian circles. Today, she is as close
to a household name as is possible for
a seventeenth-century bug specialist to
be. This is in part because she presents
an attractive model for teachers, mu-
seums, and parents on the lookout for
examples of historical female scientists,
but mainly because her etched illustra-
tions are so spectacularly beautiful.
Found today in coffee-table books and
ready-to-frame prints, on notecards,
shower curtains, and needlepoint kits,
they occupy the place in upper-middle-
class décor once held by the botanical
illustrations of Pierre-Joseph Redouté.
Were people just making do with
Redouté while waiting for Merian to
be rediscovered? Or has something
shifted in the culture that makes Me-
rian more relevant? A bit of both, I sus-
pect. Both Redouté and Merian aimed
to convey visual information that would
help readers identify species, but while
Redouté’s perfect blooms hover in iso-
lation, Merian’s plants are part of a nat-
ural order of eater and eatee. The “Five
Hundred Years” catalog reproduces a
page from her book on metamorphosis,
in which moth, pupa, and caterpillarconverge on a thoroughly gnawed black
cherry sprig. Where Redouté provides
building blocks for an ancien régime
garden, Merian gives us ecosystems.
One of the stories told in “Five Hun-
dred Years” is that of the recovery of
works, like Merian’s, that have become
integral to the way we now think. It is
thanks largely to the women of Baskin’s
generation who bent themselves to the
tasks of scouring archives and flea mar-
kets, and of educating younger scholars
to the same, that a present-day seeker
of Elizabethan women poets can sim-
ply go to Wikipedia’s “List of early-
modern women poets (UK)” and be
redirected to biographies of Bradstreet
and Weston and another 130 published
authors, and that pictures of three-
hundred-year-old caterpillars chewing
cherry leaves grace hotel hallways.The generously illustrated catalog for
“Five Hundred Years” benefits from
and contributes to this bounty. In a nod
to the collection’s purpose, the bookwas written and produced by women,
down to the design of the typefaces.
It is not a weighty scholarly endeavor
in itself but, pointedly, an invitation
to scholarship. It includes Baskin’s ac-
count of how the collection took shape,
and essays by Elizabeth Campbell
Denlinger and Laura Micham survey
the acres of potential dissertation top-
ics the collection holdings might nur-
ture. The short writeups of individual
items function as teasers to send read-
ers off Web spelunking. Similarly, the
world of digital resources can act as a
welcome adjunct to exhibitions such as
this: a visitor beguiled by Martha Max-
well, for example, can go home, bootup the Internet Archive or Hathi-Trust,
and read On the Plains cover to cover.
That said, Baskin’s “things relating to
women” are, importantly, things. Their
physicality carries content that evapo-
rates in digital summary. The heft and
elegance of Eleanor Ogle’s trade card
made me stop and look, but I would
have slid past it on Instagram. The adja-
cency of objectively “important” works,
like those by Merian, made me think.
In a biography of the nineteenth-
century artist and feminist Barbara
Leigh Smith Bodichon, Pam Hirsch
noted that Bodichon “did many things,
and historians seem to find it easier to
understand and write about a man who
pursued one ‘great’ goal. Women’s lives
and women’s histories often look dif-
ferent, more diffuse, and are (perhaps)
harder to evaluate.”^5
This issue of evaluation has been a
perennial problem for those seekingto revise the historical canon. At what
point does such revision become spe-
cial pleading? In her influential 1971
essay “Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?,” Linda Nochlin threw
gauntlets at the feet, not only of the
art historical establishment, but also
of overenthusiastic boosters of female
achievement: “The fact, dear sisters, is
that there are no women equivalents for
Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix
or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse.”^6 Her
point was that the degree to which tal-
ent is brought to fruition is a reflection of
the cultural contexts, opportunities, and
social structures that enable or disable it.
The exhibition at the Grolier, to some
degree, illustrated her point. If the yard-
stick is lasting cultural impact, an un-
sympathetic observer could object that,
however remarkable Katharina Schütz
Zell was as a Reformation pamphleteer,
she was not Martin Luther. Laura Ter-
racina was not Shakespeare, and Maria
Gaetana Agnesi was not Euler. In the
category of scientific works published in
1859, Mary Ward’s Te l e s c ope Te a c h i ng s
is not On the Origin of Species.
The one domain in which cultural
history is undeniably chockablock
with female A-listers—the anglophone
novel—was, tellingly, underrepresented
at the Grolier. There was an early edi-
tion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
but nothing by Jane Austen, George
Eliot, or Edith Wharton. Charlotte
Brontë was present, not through cop-
ies of Villette or Jane Eyre, but through
a letter in which she mentions seeking
work as a governess, and through a
stitched sampler. This last—made by
the hand that penned Jane’s complaint
against a stultifying life of “playing on
the piano and embroidering bags”—is
neither masterful nor beautiful. It is,
however, redolent of what regular life
in Haworth Parsonage must have been,
even for a genius. The sampler matters,
not because it is a great work of art, but
because it makes tangible something
that Jane Eyre can only state.
Emma and Jane Eyre don’t need to
be here; their slots in the canon are
secure. But their absence, I suspect,
reflects a broader understanding on
Baskin’s part that, for the insights she
meant her collection to spark, the very
concept of “A-listers” is silly.
Ninety-odd years ago Woolf posed a
rhetorical question: “Is the charwoman
who has brought up eight children of
less value to the world than the barris-
ter who has made a hundred thousand
pounds?” She then observed, “It is use-
less to ask such questions; for nobody
can answer them. Not only do the com-
parative values of charwomen and law-
yers rise and fall decade to decade, but
we have no rods with which to measure
them even as they are at the moment.”^7
We are still missing these rods, but
in the ecumenical embrace of “work”
rather than the subjective, hierarchical
“achievement,” Baskin suggests where
we might start looking. QThe cover of the catalog for the second Exhibition of Artistic Bookbinding by Women,
held by the Guild of Women Binders, London, 1898Lisa Unger Baskin Collection /Rubenstein Library, Duke University(^3) An exhibition devoted to these draw-
ings, “Charting the Divine Plan: The
Art of Orra White Hitchcock,” was
organized by the American Folk Art
Museum in 2018.
(^4) “Our Book Shelf,” Nature, Vol. 19,
No. 265 (January 23, 1879).
(^5) Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bod-
ichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (Lon-
don: Chatto and Windus, 1998), p. ix.
(^6) Nochlin’s essay was published in two
slightly different versions in 1971: the
January issue of ArtNews under the
title “Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?” and in slightly differ-
ent form as “Why Are There No Great
Women Artists?” in Woman in Sexist
Society: Studies in Power and Power-
lessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and
Barbara K. Moran (Basic Books, 1971).
(^7) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s
Own (Mariner, 1989), p. 40.