136 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
She was a most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses ... She had gone
through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she would have lost her senses if it
hadn’t been for her garden. Th e soil was very much against her – a blessing in dis-
guise; she had to be up at dawn – out in all weathers. And then there are creatures that
eat roses. But she triumphed. She always did. She was a brave soul.^19In this case the garden is associated with labour and the ongoing struggle to
maintain control over the surrounding environment. While she eventually ‘tri-
umphs’ over the pests and elements, her garden is essentially a place of confl ict.
A similar idea is expressed in another passage. In the opening moments of the
novel, as the ship moves further away from the British Isles, the narrator takes
a retrospective look at the country left behind and sees ‘thousands of small gar-
dens’ tended by ‘old ladies’:
Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun ... In thousands of small
gardens, millions of dark-red fl owers were blooming, until the old ladies who had
tended them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors snipped through
their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the village church ... Th e
people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it
appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island
in which people were imprisoned ... Finally, when the ship was out of sight of land, it
became clear that the people of England were completely mute.^20As with the description of Miss Umpleby’s garden, there is a tension between
tragedy and triumph. Th e thousands of gardens at the start of the passage pre-
sent an initially positive image, the millions of fl owers conveying fecundity and
aesthetic charm. However, the way that the fl owers are utilized conveys a simi-
lar message to the obsequious bobbing of Helen’s imaginary gardener; they are
essentially required to serve convention. ‘Snipped’ from their stalks in the pro-
cess of blooming, they are used to decorate the village church. Th e behaviour
of the old ladies in tending the fl owers ‘so carefully’ and then harvesting them
appears contradictory, and what would otherwise be an ordinary act is tinged
with undertones of brutality. Th at the fl owers are picked while still ‘blooming’
indicates that they are at their peak, and involved in an active and ongoing process
which is being cut short. Th eir dark red colour gives the impression of vibrancy,
and combined with the act of cutting it suggests bleeding, even sacrifi ce. Th is
process of cutting fl owers can also be read as a metaphor for the institution of
marriage, where women (like the fl owers) are traditionally taken in their prime
to the ‘cold stone ledge’, or altar, of a church. Th e garden in this passage feeds
into Woolf ’s appraisal of British civilization by refl ecting its larger political com-
position, and highlighting the aspects of it that preoccupy her narrative. As with
Helen’s similarly metonymic conception, they shed light on Woolf ’s view of
England as a political space preserving an ossifi ed social structure, as a ‘shrinking
island’ in which its people are ‘imprisoned’ and ‘mute’.